It features 80 brewpubs with reviews of more than 500 craft beers, and also lists 29 additional Colorado craft breweries with tasting rooms.

The listings are arranged in six geographic regions of the states, and you can use the indexes to match brewpubs and your favorite beer styles and to explore and plan your travels within each part of Colorado.

The book is available on our website www.columbineink.com for $19.95. Check it out!

Waterfalls of the Colorado River Basin, by Marc Conly, features waterfalls accessed from the I-70 corridor, including those reached from Granby, Dillon, Vail, Eagle, Glenwood Springs, Rifle, Aspen and Marble. The book also includes waterfalls of the southern Flat Tops and Holy Cross Wilderness areas.

The book is the perfect hiking guide, including access information, trail miles, altitude and a ranking system. The 50 waterfalls featured in our new book are detailed on 20 maps and 23 wonderful photographs, taken by Nancy Conly Miscia.

The book is 84 pages and retails for $12.95. You can purchase it on our site at www.columbineink.com.

The book is “…a very valuable resource to researchers and genealogists as well as those who are curious about the day-to-day details of the great migration westward,” said the Journal.

A Fair Distance is the story of Lois Boblett’s journey across the continent, from Wisconsin to Iowa to Arizona to the Klondike and points in between. The memoir spans the years 1851-1922.

To read the entire review, go to our website and click on the link in Pioneer Series.

Copies are also available on our website!

A Fair Distance: Lois Boblett's Western Memoir 1855-1922

The American West was a hotbed of mining frauds and swindles, with gullible investors repeatedly falling for promoters’ tall tales of fabulous discoveries. Dan Plazak’s fascinating book looks at the colorful characters who duped and defrauded stockholders in the wild days between the Mexican War and World War I.

This was the apex of American mining, and fever for gold, silver, copper, diamonds and even tin burned hot in many people, from middle-class professionals to fabulously wealthy Eastern investors.

Plazack’s research is thorough: he uses period newspaper and journal articles to follow the scams of outrageous confidence men, including Professor Samuel Aughey and Richard Flower. Plazack speaks with insider knowledge, having explored for oil, uranium, precious metals and more in his career as a geologist and engineer. He relates that he became interested in mining scams while pursuing a degree at Colorado School of Mines.

The book is a study in the ever-credulous nature of investors. It was laughably easy for skilled promoters to separate men from their money. Salted mines, slight-of-hand, bribery and back-door deals were common tools of the trade. Plazack combines an in-depth knowledge of mining with exacting research to paint vivid pictures of swindlers in full bloom. His skepticism is apparent in the narrative, and at times he seems incredulous that these schemes worked at all.

I found the book fascinating—I had no idea that fraud was so widespread during the storied mining booms of the West. It appears that Bernie Madoff is far from unique; Plazack details a long legacy of charismatic and seemingly upstanding individuals cheating friends, acquaintances and stockholders. The ingenuity and sheer aplomb of these swindlers took my breath away.

My favorite tale was the great diamond swindle. Diamond Butte, in northwestern Colorado, was salted by a pair of dubious entrepreneurs with inferior, uncut diamonds and rubies purchased in London in 1871. Such luminaries as General George McClellan, Horace Greeley and Charles Tiffany were taken in by the scam. Wealth, influence and power apparently offered these notable men no protection from their investment follies. It took almost 18 months and several expeditions to a remote, assuredly non-diamond-bearing corner of Colorado before the deception was uncovered.

This book delivers a study in confidence men and their all-too-willing victims, set in rip-roaring 19th-century America. It was a time of limitless possibilities, fabulous discoveries and stupendous dishonesty. Like all the best histories, lessons learned then can still be applied today!

Seriously, the 60-foot-high monument was dedicated to the Ames brothers, two of the most influential men of their times. The pair, Oliver and Oakes, were instrumental in financing the great transcontinental railroad project in the late 1860s. The monument was built at Sherman in southern Wyoming at the highest point on the railroad. 

However, a later decision to abandon that portion of the track in favor of a more southerly position stranded the monument on the rather desolate summit, and Sherman became a ghost town. Apparently, for many years it was a rite of passage for Wyoming teenagers to visit the monument and crawl around inside. My neighbor, a University of Wyoming graduate, attests to the veracity of this passtime, although the passageway to the monument’s interior is now sealed.  Today the monument stands alone, and few traces of Sherman remain.

Next time you are driving on I-80 through southern Wyoming, think about stopping at the Ames Monument. It’s about 20 miles east of Laramie at the Vedauwoo exit.

Darlene says, “The show was a lot of fun. We talked nearly 45 minutes, mostly about the book and the different points of history covered: from the Civil War, Indian fighting, locusts, stagecoaches, Wyatt Earp, to women’s issues.”
Hansen showed off the book cover of A Fair Distance, Lois Boblett’s Western Memoir 1851-1922 and some of the historic photos from the inside.

Check out our website at www.columbineink.com for more details on this wonderful book!
Peg Williams

We are delighted that L. Darlene Spargo, author of A Fair Distance, Lois Boblett’s Western Memoir 1851-1922, will be appearing on the Toast & Coffee live interview program hosted by Chris Hanson at 10:00 am Friday, Jan. 15 on KWCC in Wenatchee, Washington.

The book is a fascinating first-hand description of pioneer life, from homesteading on the Great Plains to gold prospecting in the Rockies to settling in Washington. Darlene spent five years documenting the memoir, which had been passed among Lois’s family hand-to-hand through the decades.

The story brings the wild times of the Old West alive.

If you can tune into the program, please do! If you’re not able to, you can visit www.columbineink.com to find out more about this marvelous book.

Peg Williams, Publisher

Now, the new edition of My Favorite Ghosts presents the ghost towns John most cherished, both for what remains at the locations and the stories connected with their wild and fascinating boom-days pasts. We’ve also included color photographs, GPS and elevation information for the sites to enhance the reader’s enjoyment.

My Favorite Ghosts completes John’s 15-volume set. It’s been out of print for several years, and it’s the final one of the set that we have republished. Going forward, we will be reprinting each volume as it sells out.

Happy New Year to you all!

Peg Williams, Publisher