Illustrations of Historic Colorado

Illustrations of Historic Colorado collects over 250 nineteenth-century illustrations into what the description calls a stunning visual mosaic. They are drawings and engravings made before the camera took over, when an artist's hand was how a reader far away saw Colorado at all.

The subjects are the ones that defined the state's early image: indigenous people, spectacular scenery, intrepid mountain men, mineral-crazed prospectors and the frenzied boom towns. The description adds an honest warning. The artists' biases, prejudices and aspirations often appear in their creations, so these pictures are evidence of what people believed as well as of what stood there.

Our record lists 256 pages from a 2000 edition by Western Reflections, and Open Library classes it as pictorial works, history, and frontier and pioneer life. Used well, it is a visual reference and a lesson in how images shape a place.

This book suits teachers, students and writers who need period images of Colorado and want to read them critically. Historians of the West will use it to see how pictures shaped public ideas about the mountains, Native peoples and mining camps. Artists and illustrators can study nineteenth-century engraving styles, and genealogists can look for the places their families settled. It is a large, visual book at 256 pages, and it works for browsing as much as for study. Readers who want only text should choose one of the written histories in our library instead.

Christian J. Buys gathered these images and is credited as the author of four other books in our catalogue, including histories of Leadville and Telluride. The record does not carry a biography, and we have not found a source we trust, so we cannot say more about him. His author page puts all five books on one screen, and the pictorial ones pair naturally with the written histories.

More about Christian J. Buys →

The Colorado Encyclopedia ties the state's rapid growth to the Colorado Gold Rush of 1858 and 1859, when the discovery of gold near present-day Denver drew thousands of people. It lists Denver, Boulder, Black Hawk, Breckenridge and Central City among the towns founded during the rush. The encyclopedia also notes that the rush brought tremendous social and environmental changes, including the displacement and deaths of Indigenous people.

Those same years produced the pictures this book gathers. The rush made Colorado a subject for eastern readers who had never seen the Rockies, and illustrations were how they pictured it. The encyclopedia's account of rumors of gold reaching back to the sixteenth century, and of Zebulon Pike's 1807 meeting with trapper James Purcell, shows how long the region had been imagined before it was drawn.

Source: Colorado Encyclopedia, Colorado Gold Rush