Mountains--so beautiful, the land dominated by the Colorado Rockies, that miners who "thought of returning to the comfort and dull security of their homes back east," in Marshall Sprague's words, "found themselves held by the appeal of their giddy environment, the spaciousness, the violence and serenity of the climate, the brightness of stars and the gorgeous sunups." The beauty itself could encourage a miner's belief that surely his luck would turn.

This reprint makes available again Frank Waters dramatic and colorful 1937 biography of Winfield Scott Stratton, the man who struck it rich at the foot of Pike s Peak and turned Cripple Creek into the greatest gold camp on earth. More than regional history, "Midas of the Rockies" is a story so fabulously impossible and yet so painfully true that it commends itself to the whole of America, the only earth, the only people who could have created it."

n 1871, General William Jackson Palmer, a Civil War cavalry hero, dreamed of a Rocky Mountain resort town where sedate, temperate, wealthy folk could enjoy life in tranquil comfort. From its inception as a tiny resort hamlet, Colorado Springs has grown into the second largest city in the Colorado Rockies, with a projected population by 1990 of 400,000. Marshall Sprague tells the remarkable and colorful story of a community that, despite its massive growth, never abandoned its original vision of comfort and gentility. His account, illustrated with rare archival photographs, has been revised...

Marshall Sprague s colorful lifetime spanned the century like a mountain rainbow. Somewhere between the time he learned the true function of the umbrella stand in the Midwest Victorian household of his youth and his first solo train ride to New York City, he surrendered to an innate talent and inquisitiveness that subsequently engaged tens of thousands of his friends and readers. He played the Tiger Rag with a Princeton band on transatlantic steamer crossings. He deftly navigated New York City during Prohibition. He interviewed Gertrude Stein and Eddie Rickenbacker for the "Paris Herald." He...