Colorado

Colorado began with a gold rush and a slogan. When gold was found near the future site of Denver in 1858, thousands of people headed west the next year with "Pikes Peak or Bust" painted on their wagons. Pikes Peak was not where the gold was, but it was the landmark everyone back East had heard of. Many of those prospectors turned around and went home broke. Enough stayed to start a territory.

Colorado became a state in 1876, 100 years after the Declaration of Independence, which is why it is called the Centennial State. The mining did not stop with gold. Leadville boomed on silver in the late 1870s and became for a while one of the largest cities in the West. Towns like Central City, Cripple Creek, Silverton and Telluride grew up in mountain valleys at 9,000 or 10,000 feet. When the ore ran out or the price of silver fell, as it did in 1893, many of them emptied almost overnight.

The railroads that served the mines were engineering stunts. Narrow-gauge lines with tight curves were built along canyon walls and over high passes, and photographers loved them. William Henry Jackson, the most famous landscape photographer of the West, set up his studio in Denver in 1879, and his pictures of trains clinging to mountainsides were made in part to sell the railroads to tourists.

The tourists came. A cog railway to the summit of Pikes Peak opened in 1891. Katharine Lee Bates rode to the top in 1893 and wrote the poem that became "America the Beautiful." Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs grew into resorts, and Garden of the Gods, with its upright red sandstone, was photographed endlessly. Mesa Verde, with its cliff dwellings built by the Ancestral Puebloans, became a national park in 1906.

In the mining town pictures, look at the hillsides around the buildings. They are often stripped bare. The trees went into mine timbers, buildings and fuel.