Here and Gone

Colorado's Industrial Past

Duane A. Smith
with photography by Richard L. Gilbert

Early Coloradans dreamed of dominating the industrial revolution with everything fromcar factories in Denver, sugar plants on the Western slope, steel mills on the Front Range, and more. Abundant natural resources, mining, and manufacturing became the keys to a bright future – or so people thought. But where dreams once flourished, now there are abandoned factories and solitary smokestacks.

Here and Gone: Colorado’s Industrial Past examines early efforts to lead the nation in its march toward a new age, and the factors that thwarted industrialists’ ambitions.

Duane A. Smith

Duane Smith received his academic degrees from the University of Colorado and completed his Ph.D. in 1964. That year he began to teach at Fort Lewis College where he is a Professor of Southwest Studies. His areas of research and writing include Colorado history, Civil War history, mining history, urban history and baseball history. He is an extremely popular professor at Fort Lewis, and he is the author of over thirty books on a variety of subjects including Rocky Mountain Mining Camps: The Urban Frontier; A Colorado History; Horace Tabor: His Life and the Legend; Silver Saga: The Story of Caribou Colorado; Colorado Mining: A Photographic History; Fortunes Are for the Few: Letters of a Forty-niner; Rocky Mountain Boom Town: A History of Durango; A Land Alone: Colorado’s Western Slope; Song of the Hammer and Drill: The Colorado San Juans, 1860-1914; Mining America: The Industry and the Environment, 1800-1980; Mesa Verde National Park: Shadows of the Centuries; The Birth of Colorado: A Civil War Perspective; and Sacred Trust: The Birth and Development of Fort Lewis College.