3-070-839 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sketches near Leadville, Colorado, 1881. 'Saguache Range; mines on Fryer Hill; placer mining in a gulch; prospector with "Burro"; on the road to Leadville; tenderfeet...[Illustrations showing] the surprising rapidity with which the mineral riches of the State of Colorado, comprising part of the Rocky Mountain range of North America, have been developed by a host of eager settlers within the past twenty years...Leadville...is the capital of Lake County, in the centre of the carbonate of lead region...This place was first explored for gold in the summer of 1860...[After] the discovery of carbonate of lead, containing a large proportion of silver, was made...smelting furnaces for the treatment of this ore were erected on the site of Leadville, where a busy town of 20,000 inhabitants has since grown up. Hundreds came [in 1877], and thousands in the year following; lines of stage-coach traffic and freight waggons, to and from Denver and South Park, were speedily established...Fryer Hill...[has] produced silver to an enormous amount...immense fortunes [were made] within a few months...we are told by Mr. Frank Fossett, whose book on Colorado has been quoted, that Leadville is not worse, for actual crime, than other American cities'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.