A Tale of Two Towns: A Mining and a Farming Community in the 1890s

by Duane A. Smith

The 1890s were a tumultuous decade in American history, with economic depression, war, heated politics, and labor conflicts surrounding AmericaÂ’s emergence as a world power. Against this chaotic background, life in the rowdy western mining town of Durango, Colorado, and the quiet agricultural hamlet of Sandwich, Illinois, seemed to be worlds apart.

In A Tale of Two Towns , historian Duane Smith takes a comparative look at Durango and Sandwich in an effort to determine what life was like in these two small communities.

His fascinating study, based on a close examination of papers, municipal records, and personal correspondence, offers a unique portrait of everyday life in these two towns. A Tale of Two Towns shows how small town life a century ago in these communities was quite similar, and hauntingly familiar to life in each town today.

261 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Duane Smith received his academic degrees from the University of Colorado and completed his Ph.D. in 1964. That year he began to teach at Fort Lewis College where he is a Professor of Southwest Studies. His areas of research and writing include Colorado history, Civil War history, mining history, urban history and baseball history. He is an extremely popular professor at Fort Lewis, and he is the author of over thirty books on a variety of subjects including Rocky Mountain Mining Camps: The Urban Frontier; A Colorado History; Horace Tabor: His Life and the Legend; Silver Saga: The Story of Caribou Colorado; Colorado Mining: A Photographic History; Fortunes Are for the Few: Letters of a Forty-niner; Rocky Mountain Boom Town: A History of Durango; A Land Alone: Colorado’s Western Slope; Song of the Hammer and Drill: The Colorado San Juans, 1860-1914; Mining America: The Industry and the Environment, 1800-1980; Mesa Verde National Park: Shadows of the Centuries; The Birth of Colorado: A Civil War Perspective; and Sacred Trust: The Birth and Development of Fort Lewis College.