Here is the story of Colorado's old hotels—some lavish, some lascivious, a few just long forgotten. Before the turn of the century, when travel was arduous, not to mention downright dangerous, voyagers to the Rocky Mountains wanted to lower their travel-weary limbs into plush chairs, nibble oysters, and sip champagne. No luxury was denied them when they arrived at most Colorado hotels. At the Hotel de Paris in Georgetown, for example, an unexpected guest might dine on wild game, tiny French peas, crusty French bread, and properly chilled wine after only a few minutes' wait. At the Sheridan in Telluride a heartier traveler could sit down to a plank steak, named after the piece of wood whose size it resembled. At the Teller House in Central City one could order buffalo tongue in aspic. At Gold Hill, where the miners knew good food if not good French, one could select from Casey's "Tabble Dote" a cup of coffee "demy tass" and "floatin' Ireland." To the eastern visitors' happy surprise, the hotels for the most part were opulently Victorian, as proper as they were in Boston or Saratoga, with ladies' entrances, ordinaries, and endless private parlors. Yet there was still enough of the raw frontier in hotels where a miner might sleep an eight-hour shift on someone else's sheets for a mere fifty cents. He would sleep in the cold, clawed by a bedmate's spurs and chewed by bedbugs, but he did have one guarantee of relative comfort—the landlord's posted promise of "No More Than Five in a Bed."
Author
Award-winning author SANDRA DALLAS was dubbed “a quintessential American voice” by Jane Smiley, in Vogue Magazine. Sandra’s novels with their themes of loyalty, friendship, and human dignity have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and have been optioned for films. A journalism graduate of the University of Denver, Sandra began her writing career as a reporter with Business Week. A staff member for twenty-five years (and the magazine’s first female bureau chief,) she covered the Rocky Mountain region, writing about everything from penny-stock scandals to hard-rock mining, western energy development to contemporary polygamy. Many of her experiences have been incorporated into her novels. While a reporter, she began writing the first of ten nonfiction books. They include Sacred Paint, which won the National Cowboy Hall of Fame Western Heritage Wrangler Award, and The Quilt That Walked to Golden, recipient of the Independent Publishers Assn. Benjamin Franklin Award. Turning to fiction in 1990, Sandra has published eight novels, including Prayers For Sale. Sandra is the recipient of the Women Writing the West Willa Award for New Mercies, and two-time winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award, for The Chili Queen and Tallgrass. In addition, she was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, the Mountain and Plains Booksellers Assn. Award, and a four-time finalist for the Women Writing the West Willa Award. The mother of two daughters—Dana is an attorney in New Orleans and Povy is a photographer in Golden, Colorado—Sandra lives in Denver with her husband, Bob. http://us.macmillan.com/author/sandra...
