If you ever thought of the San Juans in the late 19th Century as romantic, you need to reconsider. Author Ken Reyher, in his well-researched and highly detailed book, sets the record straight. Life was hard for the San Juaners! Most miners were Civil War veterans or immigrants from Europe and dangers abounded. Reyher writes—"The problem with steam drills was that as they cut into the rock they made dust. Tiny fragments of silica rock, sharp as razors, filled the air and were breathed into the lungs of those present...within a few months or years at best, the victim would be slowly incapacitated with what came to be known as ‘miner’s consumption’ ...most were dead by the age of forty."

Reyher also gives a detailed account of women in the San Juan towns—right down to their clothing and underwear. "Public buildings were often on the chilly side, so women wore winter dresses made from heavy material. Victoria Day, wife of famed Ouray newspaper editor, David Day, owned a forty-pound dress made of black English satin. It was warm and stylish—both prerequisites for a San Juan lady." Reyher does not fail to cover the "other women" who lived in the mining towns. "By age twenty it was time for parlor house girls to move on. They had lost the sense of innocence so prized by their wealthy paramours, their faces had become too familiar and often they had become cynical and sharp-tongued. Many had developed an excessive taste for alcohol. The next step down was a brothel."

Reyher also gives a good account of both law enforcement and the outlaws that, on occasion, roamed the silver camps. The picture he presents is one far different from what most people have gleaned from movies and novels.

One unusual chapter deals with medical care during those early years—primitive in some ways, well advanced in others. Even so, few San Juaners lived past the age of fifty and nearly half the children were dead by age five. Reyher includes funeral customs and religion in the silver camps. Again, the picture presented runs contrary to that of popular tradition. Some of the most admired and respected men were the priests and parsons who willingly risked life and limb to lend aid at mining accidents and other tragedies.

Through more than forty photographs (a majority never before published) Reyher gives an easy read yet one filled with information about a time when ambition, optimism and dreams brought both fortune and tragedy to the inhabitants of the rugged mountains of southwestern Colorado.