The Trail of Gold and Silver: Mining in Colorado, 1859-2009 (Timberline Books)

Great book and great service!

Wanted to read a book to get some historical perspective on Colorado mining. It did a good job of explaining the story and gave me a good idea of areas of interest.

WOW!This is a subject that is a passion of mine and I could not put this down. I will be ordering more of Duane's books soon. Thank's for the great read.

Great book on the history of mining in Colorado

One cannot drive through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado without noticing evidence of mining. On my last trip, to Breckenridge over the holidays, this book caught my eye as a potential survey course on the mining that so often obtrudes upon the otherwise glorious landscape.Author Smith has been a professor at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado since 1964. THE TRAIL OF GOLD AND SILVER is his fiftieth book! His specialties have been Colorado history and the history of mining. He also has made it a point in his career to write in an entertaining, non-academic fashion. Thus, this book had much to commend it to me.Unfortunately, it did not quite meet my expectations. First, more than ninety percent of the book is devoted to the mining of gold and silver - which, granted, is what the book's title before the colon signifies, though the part of the title after the colon ("Mining in Colorado, 1859-2009") had suggested to me that I might also learn about the mining for coal, uranium, molybdenum, etc., which have left even more scars on the Colorado landscape. Second, the text - while not academic in style - often reads like it is indeed the fiftieth book of an author who is used to churning them out. I can't say that the book is poorly written; it's just not distinguished at all. For my taste, the writing is often a little too folksy, there is too much detail about such matters as dollars produced per mine and mining district per year, there is an occasional inane comment, and at least one glaring instance of repetition. (Perhaps Smith had the help of students, who stitched together excerpts from earlier books of his.)Still, Smith does a good job of setting the history of precious metal mining in Colorado within the broader context of the history of the United States, his discussions of monetary policies and politics (such as what was behind William Jennings Bryan's "cross of gold" speech) are more lucid than some others that I have read, and he covers adequately the contentious and oft-violent relationship between miners and owners. Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is its wealth of anecdotal evidence of the "lethal" attraction of gold and silver.As a lawyer myself, I was amused by Smith's report that in the early days of Colorado mining, when each mining district formulated its own regulations in an exercise of grass roots democracy and where disputes were presented to panels of disinterested miners, lawyers were frowned upon. It was thought that they would have an unfair advantage over the typically unrepresented and uneducated miner. One mining district even legislated against lawyers: "No practicing lawyer, or any other person having been admitted as such in any state or Territory, shall be permitted to appear in any case pending in the District, as attorney or agent of any person."