Cripple Creek Bonanza

The Cripple Creek Gold Rush of 1891 turned Colorado citizens - farmers, shopkeepers, bartenders, barbers, and blacksmiths - into overnight millionaires and set off a hard rock mining operation that is still going today. Cripple Creek Bonanza is a colorful history of the rowdy boisterous days of the late 19th-century gold rush. The saga starts with the first discovery in 1878 by a reluctant cowboy, "Crazy Bob" Womack, and traces his 12-year struggle to mine the mother lode. Vintage photographs help tell the story of a sleepy rural town affected by the tremendous change - wealth, red light districts, saloons and dance halls, uncertainties, mistrust, difficulties, and risk - that follows such a "strike it rich" discovery. Cripple Creek Bonanza shows the booms and busts, the stock deals and the millionaires, the gamblers, the madams, the big labor strikes, the raucous Myers Avenue of sin, the disastrous fires, the rebuilding, and eventually the winding-down of a once-booming town. --- from book's back cover