Arthur Barnes--"the 100 Somersault Man"--was the world's greatest acrobat, a legend of the circus. He toured for 23 years with the biggest companies in Britain, Europe, and the United States, performing for all the crowned heads, as well as for Abraham Lincoln. This book traces his story as a bright red thread of triumphs and tragedies running through the tapestry of the mid-Victorian era, a tapestry made rich by extraordinary events of the day and by the eccentric characters attracted to such a profession as the circus. We follow Barnes as he escapes the doom of the iron foundry by bounding...

Thomas F. Walsh tells the story of one of the West's wealthiest mining magnates - an Irish American prospector and lifelong philanthropist who struck it rich in Ouray County, Colorado.

In the first complete biography of Thomas Walsh, John Stewart recounts the tycoon's life from his birth in 1850 and his beginnings as a millwright and carpenter in Ireland to his tenacious, often fruitless mining work in the Black Hills and Colorado, which finally led to his discovery of an extremely rich vein of gold ore in the Imogene Basin. Walsh's Camp Bird Mine yielded more than $20 million...