History of the State of Colorado Four Volume Set

This listing is the whole of Frank Hall's History of the State of Colorado in one purchase: all four volumes, in the Western Reflections reprint. Hall's work began as a commission in June 1887 and reached readers in four installments, in 1889, 1890, 1891 and 1895. Taken together they run from Spanish exploration and the cliff dwellers to Colorado in the 1890s.

Each volume plays a different part. The first covers early exploration, the gold rush and the territory to 1872. The second mixes geology with railroads, statehood and Leadville. The third turns to politics, banking and the press, plus a dozen county histories, and the fourth carries Denver, the remaining counties and a large biographical department.

Buying the set saves a reader the trouble of collecting the pieces, and it keeps the cross references intact, since Hall's errata notes in the later volumes point back to the first. We do not list a page count for the set as a whole, so look to the individual volume pages for those.

The four volume set is for libraries, historical societies, schools and serious collectors who want the complete record in one place. It also suits a family historian who is not sure which volume holds the relevant ancestor, since the county and biographical material is spread across the last two volumes. If you only need one subject, the individual volume pages let you buy a single book, but anyone planning to read Hall in order will want the whole run.

Frank Hall lived from 1836 to 1917, according to the Online Books Page, and served as Secretary of Colorado Territory from 1866 to 1874. The History Colorado library holds a collection of his letters and scrapbooks. He also wrote Gathering Gold, a 1906 treatise on mining. His author page ties the set together.

More about Frank Hall →

The full work carries the subtitle that Hall's publisher printed in 1889, which promises accounts of the prehistoric races and their remains, the earliest Spanish, French and American explorations, the first American settlements, the original discoveries of gold and the development of cities and towns, from 1858 to 1890. It was issued in Chicago by The Blakely Printing Company for the Rocky Mountain Historical Company.

Hall explains in his fourth volume that he engaged in June 1887 to prepare four volumes of 500 to 700 pages each, and that he finished them after eight years. The delay of the last volume, he says, came partly from the financial revulsion of 1892 and 1893. The set was meant to preserve the testimony of the first generation while they were still living.

Source: The Online Books Page, Frank Hall (1836-1917)