You calling me yellow?

The Silver World

Let’s say you are the publisher of a newspaper in a small mining town in Colorado and you run out of the regular paper you use to print your publication.  What do you do?  In the case of The Silver World published in Lake City, Colorado, you find an alternative source of paper. Recently AAS acquired ...

The Acquisitions Table: Map of Utah and Colorado

Map of Utah and Colorado

H. De Wertheren. Map of Utah and Colorado Prepared by order of Lt Gen. W.T. Sherman, St. Louis: R.P Studley & Co., 1869 This map of Utah and Colorado and the bordering states and territories was made during the tenure of William Tecumseh Sherman as the head of the Military Division of the Missouri, which covered ...

The Life and Times of a Miner’s Wife: Part III

This week concludes the story of Nancie Colburn Hartford and her husband, Miles, whom we met in Part I and Part II. Their letters can be found in the Shaw-Webb Family Papers. Although westward expansion and the ensuing spread of slavery is often cited as a leading cause of the Civil War, the experiences of those ...

The Life and Times of a Miner’s Wife: Part II

Last week, we met Nancie Colburn Hartford and her mining husband, Miles, and explored their change in attitude toward mining over the course of a couple of years. This week, we’ll look at a different kind of change: those that so often happen in the life of a woman. While Miles was navigating the difficulties of ...

The Life and Times of a Miner’s Wife: Part I

Detail from "The Miner

The nineteenth-century gold rushes continue to have a strong hold on the imagination of the American public. Perhaps it’s the promise of wealth or adventure or simply starting a new life. In any case, the gold rushes opened not only new physical and political frontiers for the United States, but also very personal ones for ...