5. A SPARKLING JEWEL ON THE BOSOM OF THE DESERT

"The most marvelous growth of modern times is the city of Denver, Colorado.... In 1858 there were only a few tents and huts on the spot where the city now stands. Less than fifty people were there through the winter of 1858-59, drawn thither by the discovery of gold. A barren waste was all that met the vision in every direction....What do we see now where these pioneers pitched their tents? The largest, richest, and most beautiful city of its age on earth—a sparkling costly jewel on the bosom of the ‘desert.’"

—William M. Thayer, Marvels of the New West (1890)

Colorado’s gold and silver rushes led to another stampede—the rush to respectability. The instant city and its overnight millionaires demanded elegance. Between the 1858 gold rush and the 1893 silver crash, Coloradans exported paydirt and imported culture, striving to show the world that the Highest State was no cultural lowland. Denver, the jewel on the bosom of the desert, wanted to sparkle.

Denver soon glittered with the riches of the earth. Not only Colorado’s gold and silver, but the state’s mining magnates gravitated to Denver. Wealth and the wealthy from Central City, Leadville, Aspen, the San Juans, and Cripple Creek flowed into Denver. In the Mile High City, the nouveau riches used cultural trappings to separate themselves from less-successful gold grubbers. Peacocks in the front yard, servants in the kitchen, and children in private schools helped the successful flaunt their new status. Inspired by a sincere interest in culture as well as the use of culture to define an aristocracy, Coloradans rushed to respectability.

The culture rush began during the golden territorial era and peaked during the silver age that followed Colorado statehood in 1876. By 1890, Denver boasted mansion-studded neighborhoods, stately churches and schools, the Tabor Grand Opera House, and private clubs such as the Denver Club and the Denver Athletic Club, where the wealthy and their offspring could mingle and frolic.

Mansions capped Capitol Hill, where mining millionaires built their multi-story masonry piles. After Fairmount Cemetery sprouted in southeast Denver and Mount Olivet northwest of town in 1890, "millionaires row" also graced those new cemetery parks, where movers and shakers built their final mansions—palatial mausoleums of granite and marble.

By 1892, Denver had a Blue Book to showcase its society types. Compiler Agnes Hill described her social register as "a list of householders having sufficient money and position to be available either as good customers for merchant, florist or caterer, or to grace a feast, adorn a dance or add to the interest of the occasion where a city gathers her beauty and her chivalry and her financial power."

Society families insisted on more elegant schools for their offspring. During the 1880s, Robert S. Roeschlaub began designing dignified educational edifices for the Denver School district. Some of his notable schools are still standing, including Emerson (1884) at East 14th Avenue and Ogden Street, Dora Moore at East 9th Avenue and Corona Street, and University Hall (1890) and Chamberlain Observatory (1889) for the University of Denver.

Roeschlaub’s contemporary, William Lang, specialized in designing stone mansions for Denver’s elite. He built castle-like Romanesque residences, bulging with turrets and towers. Lang also designed more modest, middle class, Queen Anne-style homes, such as the Molly Brown House.

Molly Brown

The often—and variously—told tale of Margaret Tobin Brown epitomized the rush to respectability. Different people see different persons in this Irish Catholic girl of modest origins and wondrous achievements.

Actress Debbie Reynolds, who portrayed Molly in the film, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, praised her as "a female ahead of her time. Today she would be called a feminist, an independent woman who believed in growth and self-expression. She was going to learn to read ’n write—to go ’n see—to be what she had to be—even to make mistakes."

Less kind critics, such as The Denver Post’s Polly Pry, derided Molly as a social climbing fraud. Polly ridiculed her dress, deriding her as Colorado’s largest fur-bearing mammal. Snubbed by Denver’s high society, Molly found acceptance on the East Coast and in Europe.

Molly started out as Maggie. Born July 18, 1867, she was raised in a one-bedroom shack in Hannibal, Missouri, along the Mississippi River bottoms. This bright, ambitious girl left school at age 13 to work in a cigar factory. She saved her money and at 19 fled Hannibal for America’s great boom town of the 1880s—Leadville, Colorado. In the two-mile-high Magic City, the red-haired, green-eyed, buxom young woman found work sewing drapes—and a wealthy, handsome husband, Leadville mine manager James Joseph Brown.

After the Silver Crash of 1893, Brown’s resourceful gold mining of the Little Jonny Mine made the Browns rich. Like the Boettchers, the Campions, the Tabors and many other mining millionaires, the Browns moved to Denver’s swanky Capitol Hill neighborhood.

Molly’s efforts to conquer Denver society were hampered by the fact that her roots were all too evident. She shared her Denver home with her aging father, John Tobin, an Irish-born day laborer, and her Irish-born mummsie, Johanna, who smoked a pipe. Perhaps to escape her humble ancestors, Molly began traveling a great deal. She joined European grand tours, and in 1912 decided to return with high society on the most fashionable of vessels, the Titanic.

Molly did not sink on the Titanic—where she heroically saved other panic-sricken passengers. After she died in 1932, her house was converted to a home for wayward girls. Then it became an even more cramped boarding house for single gentlemen. By 1969, some were talking about demolishing the house for a modern office building.

Possibly losing one of Denver’s greatest landmarks jolted the city’s historical consciousness. Ann Love, wife of Governor John Love, and others distressed about the proposed demolition incorporated a private, nonprofit organization called Historic Denver, Inc. (HDI) on December 11, 1970. HD raised $80,000 to buy the house and has poured in $500,000 and 250,000 hours of volunteer time.

Molly would be tickled pink to know that the restoration of her house helped inspire a renaissance in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. For she was Denver’s pioneer preservationist: when the cottage of poet and journalist Eugene Field faced demolition in 1927, Molly bought it and moved it to Washington Park for recycling as a branch of the Denver Public Library.

Like Field’s Cottage, Molly’s own home has been fully restored. It is a picture-perfect "house beautiful" of the aspiring 19th-century middle class, from the statue of the Nubian slave at the door to the polar bear rug in the parlor. Since the 1970s, it has also become the town’s most popular house tour, attracting some 40,000 visitors a year.

Molly Brown House Director Leigh Fletcher Grinstead reports: "We hope to introduce a new generation of Coloradans to the fascinating ups and downs of Molly Brown. She is a great role model for girls, especially. She was an early feminist, suffragist, preservationist, and philanthropist. She overcame her humble origins with lifelong learning. She studied music, opera, French, German, Italian, Spanish and literature to make herself a polished lady."

Henry C. Brown and His Palace

Although unrelated to Henry C. Brown, Molly Brown did enjoy his hotel. Like the Tabor Grand Opera House, that grand hotel signified Denver’s arrival as a city of significance. Any city hoping to make it out West aspired to build a great hotel. Elegant accommodations would help to lure the rich and the famous, to attract newcomers and investors. Denver’s grand hotel of the 1870s—the American House—and of the 1880s—the Windsor—are long gone, but the Brown Palace has been in business every day since its grand opening in 1892.

Denver’s palace began as the dream of an itinerant carpenter—Henry C. Brown. This Ohio orphan ran away at age 16 from the farmer to whom he was apprenticed. He headed west, working as a carpenter in St. Louis, as a contractor in San Francisco, and as a lumberman in Oregon. By the time he landed in Denver in 1860, Brown was a budding carpenter-contractor-developer.

He homesteaded Capitol Hill, erecting a claim cabin at 12th Avenue and Sherman Street. From there he wheel-barrowed his tools down to Denver, where he constructed various buildings, including one for the Denver Tribune, which he owned and operated after the journalists defaulted. By the mid-1880s Brown was worth $250,000.

Brown boasted that his homestead, bordered by Broadway on the west and Logan Street on the east, between East 20th and 8th Avenues, would one day be the Queen City’s elite residential neighborhood. But Brown’s Bluff housed mostly prairie dogs. To enhance his real estate, Brown donated a site for the state capitol and built the first Capitol Hill mansion at 17th Street and Broadway. Looking somewhat like a triple-decker, Mississippi River steamboat, Brown’s show home launched a building boom on the four streets he named for his favorite Civil War heroes—President Lincoln and Generals Sherman, Grant and Logan. In 1879, Brown sold his mansion to Horace Tabor, the silver magnate from Leadville, who fancied the ostentatious 20-room house perched on a prominent corner. Nowadays, the site houses the 52-story Norwest Bank complex.

Brown reckoned that a grand hotel just across Broadway from his house would pull Denver eastward towards Capitol Hill. After British investors failed to build the hotel they promised, he undertook the project himself. He engaged Denver’s finest architect, Frank E. Edbrooke, and spent $2 million to make this hotel Denver’s showplace. To erect the building’s steel skeleton, Brown and Edbrooke hired Denver’s Lane Bridge and Iron Works. Edbrooke then wrapped the steel frame in a skin of red sandstone with carved ornamentation. Some of the stone figures that once swarmed over the facade have been scraped off, probably after loose chunks of sandstone began bombarding pedestrians. A carved Colorado bestiary of wildlife in inset medallions still enlivens the seventh floor. The grand stone cornice inscribed "The H. C. Brown Hotel" has been pared off the Broadway facade, but the arched entry is still flanked by the stone monogram, HCB, and a bust of Brown.

The Brown Palace introduced visitors to the wonders of the age—steel-frame construction and indoor plumbing, elevators and electricity. A city within a city, the Brown had its own power plant and two artesian wells, various shops and services, and even a basement crematorium so guests would never have to check out. Gawking at such a palace gave Coloradans a peek at the latest gadgets and interior decor, at new fashions in food, dress and amusements.

Private Clubs

Characters such as Henry C. Brown and Horace Tabor epitomized the graduation of the nouveau riches from mining rushes to cultural rushes. Besides a grand hotel and a grand opera house, they and their colleagues established private clubs where they could socialize and talk business. First and foremost of these was the Denver Club. Founded in 1880, this private men’s club included noteworthies such as David Moffat, Walter Cheesman, James Grant, and Nathaniel Hill. This club, as historian Christine Whitacre points out, "represented an effort by the city’s economic leaders to boost Denver’s reputation within the national business community and to lure new investment capital to the West." Indeed, one of the club founders was James Duff, a Scotsman who represented the London-based Colorado Mortgage & Investment Company, which sunk millions of pounds into Colorado. The Denver Club dominated Denver’s club scene for almost a hundred years. Decline set in after the club demolished its grand old mansion at 17th and Glenarm Streets in 1953 to build a high-rise office building with the club in the top three floors.

"If only we had kept that old mansion," lamented former club president Richard H. Shaw in 1992, "we’d probably have a five-year waiting list today." Instead, the club is struggling to stay alive in a lackluster edifice overshadowed by many newer, taller towers.

Wealthy young men of the 1880s also flocked to the Denver Athletic Club, which promoted sports of all sorts. Founded in 1884, the DAC grew rapidly, claiming 1,000 members by 1892, when it completed the $250,000 red-brick and sandstone clubhouse at 1325 Glenarm Place. In 1890, the DAC introduced football to Denver as the DAC humiliated the University of Colorado, 34 to 0. The DAC team continued to whip collegians until 1906, when it dropped the game after newspapers reported that it was paying "amateurs" recruited from top college teams.

The DAC also rode the bicycle craze of the 1890s after development of the safety bicycle and pneumatic tire led to safer, more comfortable machines than the original "bonebreakers." Denver’s generally flat terrain and dry, sunny climate made it ideal for cyclists. The DAC bicycle division captain promised that an "enjoyable and health-giving run with the Bicycle Division" would do wonders for working men: "His mind will be relieved of the cares and anxieties of his business affairs, his digestive organs improved, his appetite strengthened, his nerves relaxed, his brain cleared up.... He will be in a much better humor, better condition to attend to his duties, will be enabled to accomplish more work with better results."

Society maidens and matrons followed Denver’s dashing young sports into the DAC. Womenfolk soon transformed the DAC into a haven for fine dining, dancing, and socializing. DAC athletes grumbled that the gym was often closed for banquets, balls and bridge parties. Despite recent additions that fall stylistically short of Varian and Sterner’s fine original landmark, the DAC remains energetic on its full block site between 13th and 14th Streets, Glenarm to Tremont Places.

Sporting men also founded the Denver Country Club in 1901, converting a wheat field straddling Cherry Creek between Downing Street and University Boulevard into a golf course for the upper crust. Crawford Hill took to the greens with lawyer Henry Wolcott, brother of U. S. senator Edward O. Wolcott, and James Duff of the Denver Club. As at the DAC, women followed men into the DCC and soon joined men in golf, tennis, swimming, and ice-skating.

Chamber of Commerce

Denver’s power-elite had broad ambitions. They regarded all of Colorado as their hinterland, as manifested in the Chamber of Commerce’s founding goal, "to promote general prosperity in all the varied interests of Colorado and Denver." With imperialistic aspirations, Denver boosters claimed to speak for the whole state.

The chamber manned many fronts: it proposed creation of the Denver Museum of Natural History and housed the original collection on its shelves in the old, chamber building that stood at 14th and Lawrence Streets. Looking to the future as well as the past, the chamber anticipated Denver’s emergence as an international port of entry. Overlooking the fact that Denver lay hundreds of miles from any national border, boosters persistently lobbied Washington to designate Denver an official port of entry. Washington succumbed in 1882 and awarded Denver a customs house. Ever since, Denver has aspired to be an international hub for transportation and business.

By 1890, Denver’s population had soared to 106,713, third in the West behind San Francisco and Omaha, but larger than Los Angeles or any town in Texas. After Colorado men approved full women’s suffrage in 1893, Denver became the largest city in the world where women could vote. Carolyn Churchill, editor of Denver’s Queen Bee proclaimed Denver not only politically enlightened but also a pure, curative atmosphere for asthmatics, tuberculars and other invalids. Colorado’s climate cure might turn even the proverbial 98-pound weakling into a robust mountain man—or mountain woman.

The Switzerland of America

Denver’s boosters energetically promoted a relatively recession-proof business—tourism. Railroads joined the crusade. Setting a tone for many subsequent railroad appeals, the Kansas Pacific’s 1873 booklet, Colorado: Its Resorts and Attractions for the Pleasure Seeker, Tourist and Invalid proclaimed:

"Denver, the political capital and commercial center, an aristocratic little burg, romantically situated at the foot of the ‘Shining Mountains’ is without doubt one of the most beautiful cities of the world.... Many persons on first arriving in Denver have started from their hotels to walk to the mountains before breakfast."

The Denver & Rio Grande, which had carried farm crops and gold and silver ores, adopted the slogan "The Scenic Line of the World" and began catering to sightseers. The D&RG hired photographer William Henry Jackson to produce seductive images for calendars, postcards, and booklets which were mass produced for national distribution. The D&RG’s in-house "Literary Department" cranked out poetry and fiction, as well as travel books and brochures. Other railroads also pushed tourism, generating an endless supply of publicity to lure sightseers and pleasure seekers to the highest state.

Coloradans looked to the world’s pace-setting tourist destination, Switzerland, as a model. As Colorado had comparable climate and alpine scenery, boosters decided to market the highest state as "The Switzerland of America." Samuel Bowles, in his 1869 guide to Colorado entitled The Switzerland of America, marveled: "I who have seen the Alps from Berne join in the judgement that no grand mountain view exists that surpasses this as seen from the high roll of the prairie just out of Denver."

Emma Abbott Gauge reaffirmed the theme in her 1900 book, Western Wanderings & Summer Sauntering through Picturesque Colorado: "The Alps have long since become the synonym for grandeur, but they cannot rival these grand old Rockies, with their sublime magnificence."

Winter sports, a key to Switzerland’s hardy tourist industry, inspired Coloradans to capitalize on their "white gold." Soon after 1900, the Denver Mountain Parks Department, the Colorado Mountain Club, and the Denver Chamber of Commerce began promoting skiing and erected warming huts and ski lifts. The first mass-market publication to push winter tourism in Colorado, the Union Pacific’s 1925 brochure, Colorado Mountain Playground, promoted ski areas and "tobaggoning, skiing, skating and snow shoe trips."

Winter and summer, railroads brought tourists into Denver, and street railways carried them to various attractions in and about the Mile High City. By the 1890s, sightseers could board "Seeing Denver" streetcar excursions at the Brown Palace Hotel. For 25 cents, rubberneckers were promised 25 miles of sightseeing aboard the open cars which "Seeing Denver" leased from the Denver Tramway Company.

Jollier tourists were even taught Gus Brohm’s "Seeing Denver" song:

There’s a city out west and it outshines the rest

Seeing Denver is my delight either by day or by night.

Nocturnal tourism became a thrust of the Chamber of Commerce’s "City of Lights" campaign. Although hardly an original idea—many other cities also had big, bright ideas for light bulbs—Denverites illuminated their town energetically. The Curtis Street Theater District shone most radiantly. The 1910 Chamber of Commerce Building at 1726 Champa Street, the 1910 Denver Gas and Electric Building at Fifteenth and Champa Streets and the 1908 Municipal Auditorium at 14th and Curtis Streets were all outlined in electric light bulbs. A related tradition begun about the same time was Christmas lighting of Civic Center. Denver’s nocturnal sparkle could be seen for miles around, beckoning all to the city’s shops, theaters, restaurants and nightclubs.

Boosters fancied bright lights and tourism, which not only brought in visitors and their dollars but also pumped up civic pride. By 1940, tourists constituted Colorado’s third-largest source of income, after agriculture and manufacturing.

Making the Great American Desert Bloom

The Denver Chamber of Commerce touted the South Platte Valley, the former "Great American Desert," as a Garden of Eden. Twenty-thousand people began farming in Colorado between 1910 and 1920. Cattle sales doubled, and sheep sales increased by 600 percent between 1900 and 1920. As both farm products and ranch livestock rode the rails to market, railroads readily promoted Colorado as an agricultural paradise.

Denverites embraced their country cousins, knowing that cattle and sheep, hogs and chickens, winter wheat and other grains flowed into Denver for food processing, storage and wholesaling. In the Queen City, Colorado’s farm bounty was transformed into beer and bread, into canned and bottled foods, into hamburger and steaks.

Westerners grew up on beef, as well as gold and silver. After many investors found mines to be bottomless holes that swallowed money, easterners and Englishmen began to sink their teeth—and capital—into cattle.

Europeans accustomed to plodding, Old World farmers marveled at the wild adolescents who herded American cattle. The "cow servant," sniffed Lady Rose Pender in A Lady’s Experiences in the Wild West in 1883 (London: 1888), is "a strange creature, quite unlike any of his fellow men, and all he does must be done with swagger and noise.... utterly devoid of manners or good feeling."

Kinder accounts of cowboys came from Dr. William A. Bell, Jr., the son of an English society doctor. The good doctors, father and son, persuaded their wealthy London patients to invest in their American toy—the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad—and in Colorado cattle ranching. Ultimately, young Dr. Willie Bell moved to Colorado Springs as vice president of the D&RG. When mining traffic sank, the D&RG began transporting cattle.

On his 1868 visit to Colorado with a railroad survey crew, Dr. Bell was astonished to find cattle grazing on the open prairie. Although "they had been out all winter, without shelter or hay" as Bell noted in New Tracks in North America (London: 1870), they, like buffalo, emerged in the spring, fat and juicy.

Bell and others found they could buy wild Texas longhorns for $5 or $10 and raise them free on the open range, where naturally cured gramma and buffalo grasses served as fodder year around. Fattened cattle could be sold for $30 to $50 a head at stockyards in Denver, Kansas City, or Chicago.

Promoters in the 1870s and 1880s promised 30 to 40 percent annual profits in the Western cattle industry. One of the propagandists, Baron Water von Richthofen, dabbled in cattle and wrote Cattle-Raising on the Plains of North America (N.Y.: 1885). The book proclaimed that "this former Great American Desert is the largest and richest grass and pasture region in the world, and it will probably soon become the most important beef-producing country of the globe."

Despite the baron’s claim that "profit of 25 per cent per annum is the minimum the cattle business will yield," he himself failed in the cattle industry. So did many others during the blizzards of 1885-86 and the subsequent federal crackdown on unrestrained use of public lands by cow punchers.

Baron von Richthofen’s book, however, sold well, and he built his Colorado castle as a show home for his new suburban town—Montclair. There the German adventurer constructed the Molkerei (milk house) on East 12th Avenue between Oneida and Newport Streets and promised tuberculosis victims a sure cure. They could drink fresh milk from cows stabled below, then lie out on the decks of the Molkerei in Colorado’s salubrious sunshine, breathing champagne air that only the angels had sipped before.

Best of all, the "lungers" could inhale, through grates in the milkhouse floor, the barnyard effluvium rising from the cattle stabled below. These pungent fumes were a sure cure for lung disorders, according to the Baron von Richthofen. Nowadays, the dairy cows are gone but the Molkerei and the Richthofen Castle linger as centerpieces of the Montclair Historic District in what is now a sedate East Denver neighborhood.

The cattle industry changed not only the West but all of America. Cheap Western beef transformed the U. S. diet. Before the 1880s, few Americans could afford fresh beef. But cowpokes, feed lots, stockyards, meat processing, and refrigeration changed all that. Fresh beef in refrigerated railroad cars flooded Eastern grocery stores. Americans became beef-eaters. Steak and hamburgers became the all-American meals.

Nothing, not even beef, sweetened Denver’s economy in the early 1900s like sugar beets. After the federal government placed the Dingly Tariff on sugar and other imports from foreign countries in 1897, the Denver Chamber of Commerce began preaching the glories of these big, ugly beets. The chamber distributed seeds to anyone who would try growing them, offering $50 cash prizes for the sweetest beets. Such booster campaigns helped sugar beets become the number-one crop in Colorado by the 1920s. By then, agriculture had eclipsed mining as Colorado’s premier industry. Denver started out as a mining supply and ore processing center, but its role as an agricultural hub sustained the city after 1900 as mining lost its glitter.

Denver Needed Dandelions

Despite the boasting of the Denver Chamber of Commerce and promoters such as Baron von Richthofen, Denver remained a dusty, drab-looking place. Another Capitol Hill resident, Dr. Frederick G. Bancroft, a pioneer physician, came up with a solution. Why not introduce dandelions to the Great American Desert?

Like other English romantics fond of natural gardens, he celebrated the dandelion as "a tramp with a golden crown." His granddaughter, the late Caroline Bancroft, delighted in telling the story: "When grandfather arrived, he was aghast. Colorado was so dusty, barren, and ugly. He declared that Denver needed a dandelion."

Dandelions are not the only things Dr. Bancroft gave to Denver. He helped found the Colorado Historical Society and the Denver Medical Society. He first researched Market Street’s Nymphs du Pave and called public attention to local outbreaks of sexually transmitted diseases.

A wonderful, old-fashioned kind of doctor, Bancroft was legendary for eating and drinking double portions of red meat and red wine. This was followed, presumably, by brandy and cigars. He weighed over 250 pounds, and may have told his patients that they were underweight.

Dr. Bancroft even knew the dandelion’s Latin name: Taraxacum officinale. It is a stemless herb of the composite family, with leaves in spear-shaped rosettes, and flat, solitary, bright-yellow disc flowers. In some eyes, the dandelion is just another of the scourges with which Euro-Americans cursed Native Americans in their Garden of Eden. Europeans cultivated dandelions for salad "greens," and developed special strains with very large, curly leaves. The root has medicinal uses and the flower can be used to make wine.

The dandelion has one of the world’s most exotic, delicate and perfectly shaped seed heads—a globe of silvery, lacy ecstasy. The dandelion seeds rapidly, is hardy, and will grow—like the proverbial weed—in almost any kind of soil. Despite the dandelion’s merits, The Denver Post, ever vigilant in weeding out public enemies, took an unflinching stand against them.

"It is conceded through the world that Denver lawns are the most beautiful and perfect existing anywhere on earth," explained a front-page story, April 29, 1926. "But the dandelion pest is sweeping over the city and unless immediate steps are taken our lawns will be seriously marred, so let everybody get busy now—don’t wait. There is only one way to exterminate the dandelion—human labor—just bend your backs and dig them out."

The Post offered "to furnish men and women who know how to clear lawns of this nuisance." All unemployed persons were urged "to come to our office and let us register you as willing to work on lawns, destroying the dandelions, at $3 for eight hours work. There are a number of very deserving people who are not employed at the present time who will be glad to get jobs of this kind....let no guilty dandelion escape! They mar your own property and harm your neighbor’s property. Join in this dandelion crusade for the mutual benefit of all citizens. THE DANDELION MUST GO."

Dandelions backfired as beautification in a city of avid gardeners—including many former Midwestern farmers—or their offspring. These folks relish their grassy lawns, their vegetable patches, their shrubs and border gardens, and their street trees. Indeed Denver’s avid gardeners have led some to suggest that the garden hose should be on the city seal. For such citizenry, dandelions are not to be abided. Denver, the jewel on the bosom of the desert, would have to look elsewhere for City Beautiful solutions.

SOURCES:

Bowles, Samuel. The Switzerland of America: A Summer Vacation in the Parks and Mountains of Colorado. Springfield, Mass.: Samuel Bowles & Co., 1869.

Ekstrand, Margaret E. & Thomas J. Noel. The University Club of Denver: The First Hundred Years. Denver: The University Club of Denver, 1991.

Gauge, Emma Abbott, Western Wanderings and Summer Sauntering Through Picturesque Colorado. Baltimore: The Lord Baltimore Press, 1900.

Hunt, Corinne. The Brown Palace Story. Denver: Rocky Mountain Writers Guild, 1982.

Noel, Thomas J. The Denver Athletic Club, 1884-1984. Denver: The Denver Athletic Club, 1983.

Simms, Willard E. Ten Days Every January: A History of the National Western Stock Show. Denver: The Western Stock Show Association, 1980.

Thompson, Phyllis T. The Use of Mountain Recreation Resources: A Comparison of Recreation and Tourism in the Colorado Rockies and The Swiss Alps. Boulder: University of Colorado Ph.D. Dissertation, 1970.

Whitacre, Christine. The Denver Club. Denver: University of Colorado at Denver M. A. History Thesis, 1994.

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