More distinctly Coloradoan were those who for longer or shorter periods lived in the State and wrote about it—notably, Helen Hunt Jackson, with her Bits of Travel at Home (1878) and Nelly's Silver Mine (1878); and Hamlin Garland, whose ten books on Colorado include They of the High Trails (1916). Among many others, this group embraces "Father" John Lewis Dyer, a miner-postman-preacher, whose Snow-Shoe Itinerant (1890) is an engaging story of the hardships and indomitable zeal of pioneer preachers; David Cook, chief of police of Denver, later major-general of militia, who dramatically recounted his encounters with frontier desperadoes in Hands Up: A Pioneer Detective in Colorado, now a collector's item; and M. H. Foote, wife of a Leadville mining engineer, whose Led-Horse Claim was the first novel to use a Colorado boom camp as locale.

Many of the pioneers kept diaries, and in later years many more wrote or dictated reminiscences of their experiences on the frontier. Scores of interesting and significant personal histories, rich in flavor, simple and unaffected in style, have been preserved in the Colorado Magazine, published every two months by the Colorado State Historical Society, and in The Trail, which began publication as the Sons of Colorado in 1906 and suspended in 1929. Among published volumes oi reminiscences are Olden Times in Colorado (1916) by C. C. Davis, editor-owner of the Leadville Chronicle during the feverish days of the boom; The Log of a Cowboy (1903) by Andy Adams, a western classic; and Bright Yellow Gold (1935) by Horace Bennett, on whose ranch in the Cripple Creek district dramatically occurred one of the great gold strikes of history. Dealing with a later generation, Anne Ellis’s Life of an Ordinary Woman (1929) and Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth (1929), two of the finest American autobiographies, have Colorado backgrounds.

In the related field of biography stand T. F. Dawson's Life of Edward Oliver Wolcott (1911); Frank Water's Midas of the Rockies (1937), a story of Winfield Scott Stratton and the Cripple Creek gold discoveries; L. C. Candy's The Tabors (1934); and Evalyn Walsh McLean's Father Struck It Rich (1936). Here They Dug the Gold (1931) by George F. Willison, Colorado-born, is virtually a biography of the early boom camps, a factual and fascinating chronicle of the almost incredible goings-on there and the curious mores of the bonanza kings.

Helen Stuart Williams' Windy Creek (1899) is a story of the Colorado prairie country; Randall Parrish's Beth Norvell (1907) depicts Spanish-American life in southern Colorado; Second Hoeing (1923) by Hope W. Sykes, is a vivid delineation of life and labor in the beet fields. Two of Willa Gather's novels have major scenes laid in Colorado—Lost Lady (1923) and Song of the Lark (1932). Upton Sinclair's Mountain City (1930) purports to be a story of Denver, and the journalistic ethics of the local press are pointedly castigated in The Brass Check (1919). Salute to Yesterday (1937) by Gene Fowler, for many years on the staff of the Denver Post, now prominent among Hollywood scenarists, also purports to be a story of Denver; at least, the scene of this quite mad extravaganza is laid there, and many local celebrities of yesterday and today are recognizable in the composite portraits he paints. His Timberline (1933) is a sensational story of his former employers, the renowned "Bon" and "Tarn" of the Denver Post. Other graduates of the Colorado press who have won a wide public as novelists are—Courtney Ryley Cooper, with his High Country (1926) and many circus stories, and Clyde Brion Davis with The Anointed (1937) and The Great American Novel (1938), in both of which are characteristic local scenes.

Leadville appears in Will Irwin's Columbine Time (1921) and Youth Rides West (1925), and also in The Days of Her Life (1930) by his brother Wallace, both of whom were born in the town. In 1933 Easley S. Jones published Colorado: Two Generations, and Dorothy Gardiner has written of her native State in two novels, Golden Lady (1936) and Snow Water (1939). Of the many resident writers of the "Wild West" school, the most widely read have been Cy Warman, William McLeod Raine, Robert Ames Bennet, Edwin Legran Sabin, and Clem Yore, none of whom has confined himself wholly to the Colorado scene.

Colorado pioneers have not only inspired but have themselves penned reams of verse—and worse. Arthur Chapman won acclaim with his "Out Where The West Begins” first published in the Denver Republican. Of Helen Hunt Jackson's many poems inspired by her life in Colorado Springs, probably the best known is "Cheyenne Mountain," Walt Whitman's "Spirit That Formed This Scene," Nellie Budget Miller's "Drought," and Lillian White Spencer's "Wild-Cat Lodge" are authentic in atmosphere and feeling. In a lighter vein are many poems that capture the spirit of the mining camps—among others, "There's a Big Thing in The Mountains," by Lawrence N. Greenlead, known as the pioneer poet of the Rockies. Much of James Barton Adams' humorous verse was in the vein of "The Ruin of Bobtail Bend," a lament for the good old days and a complaint against the "encroaching piety" that ruined the West:

We could drink our booze in a way profuse

an' buck the faro games,

An' pound the floor till our hoofs was sore

a-swingin' the dance-hall dames . . .

If a man should scoot down the final chute

that leads to the by an' by,

After leakin' his soul through a pistoled hole,

there wasn't no hue an' cry,

But we'd plant him deep for eternal sleep

in a respectable sort o' way,

An' go on a spree to his memory

an' forgit the thing in a day.

Cy Warman, in addition to his early railroad yarns, wrote many light lyrics and achieved a national reputation when his "Sweet Marie" was set to music. Eugene Field, managing editor of the Denver Tribune from 1881 to 1883, penned numerous verses and pertinent paragraphs that appeared in his sprightly column, "Odds and Ends." In A Little Book of Verse (1889) he included a number of poems inspired by life in "Blue Horizon Camp," as he called the old mining camp of Gold Hill. Previously, in his Tribune Primer (1882), which was his first published volume, Field reprinted choice bits from his "Odds and Ends" column for the edification of young and old:

This is a Bottle. What is in the Bottle? Very Bad Whisky. It has been sent to the Local Editor. He did not buy it. If he had Bought it, the Whisky would have been Poorer than it is. Little Children, you Must never Drink Bad Whisky.

Alfred Damon Runyon's two volumes of verse, Tents of Trouble (1911) and Rhymes of the Firing Line (1912), both in the Robert Service tradition, were written while he was on the staff of the Denver Post. Very different in substance and manner are the poems of Jamie Sexton Holme (Mrs. Peter Haynes Holme), collected in The Star Gatherer (1926), and those of Thomas Hornsby Ferril, whose two volumes, Westering (1923) and High Passage (1927), are outstanding among the works of native sons. Simply and movingly they reveal the great but unrecorded tragedies in the lives and households of those immeasurably optimistic men who rushed West by the tens of thousands, leaving old friends and familiar scenes, recklessly braving hardship and death itself, their eyes and their too-often illusory hopes fixed upon the "Shining Mountains/' where sudden fortune always lay just a little farther up the draw, just a little higher up the hill, just a little deeper down the shaft:

The men would measure in chords the gold they hoped

To find, but the women reckoned by calendars

Of double chins and crows-feet at the corners

Of their eyes-