Colorado Rascals, Scoundrels, and No Goods of Breckenridge, Frisco, Dillon, Keystone and Silverthorne

Humorous yet fact-filled. Rick Hague, President, Summit Historical Society

Want to laugh? Enjoy the high-spirited antics of the shysters, shady ladies, swindlers and rogues of 1800s Colorado mountain mine camps in Rascals, Scoundrels and No Goods. This amusing romp through the gold rush era is also factual history by award-winning Colorado author Mary Ellen Gilliland.

Winner of a prestigious Legacy Award from the Colorado Independent Book Publishers Association, the book's colorful prose highlights the rowdy side of regional history. In its pages, readers meet the colorful miscreants of Colorado mine camp history, usually long on charm and short on moral fortitude.

Rascals offers intriguing look at the brazen seizure of 1860s claim jumpers who not only took possession of prospectors' claims but jumped whole towns; the creative thievery of high graders, mine workers who pilfered valuable ore from under the watchful eyes of management; and the escapades of 1920s bootleggers and moonshiners to name a few.

Gilliland is no stranger to writing gold and silver rush history. Her historical writing began with SUMMIT, A Gold Rush History of Summit County, Colorado, in its shorter first edition, in 1980. Gilliland doubled the size of this book in a 25th Anniversary Edition of SUMMIT in 2006. She has also published histories titled Breckenridge, 150 Years of Golden History, and Frisco, A Colorful Colorado Community, plus several others. Her trail guides, The New Summit Hiker and The Vail Hiker are companion guidebooks that detail the history of each trail described.

The publisher, Alpenrose Press, has produced more than 20 books on Colorado history, hiking and the outdoors.

Rascals, Scoundrels and No-Goods is Gilliland's twelfth published book. While its mining escapades are universal to Colorado mineral history, many of its characters come from Summit County mine camps, where the first gold discovery on Colorado's Western Slope took place in spring of 1859.