 am not a historian nor a writer but an artist gone slightly berserk," wrote Muriel Sibell Wolle in her book, Stampede to Timberline. Wolle, who was head of the University of Colorado's Fine Arts Department for some time, had a special passion for sketching Colorado's mining towns. She created a pictorial record of their often decaying buildings before the structures disappeared. The artist arrived in Boulder from New York in 1926 to teach art at the university. After a trip to Central City, she wrote, "The place was full of echoes, and memories, and history, and I felt strangely stirred by it . . . . it challenged me." Wolle spent every summer sketching remote mining towns, finishing her drawings later with black crayon or watercolors. Her first book, Ghost Cities of Colorado, cost a dollar a copy and took years to sell. Today it is a collectors' item. The University of Colorado honored Wolle posthumously as one of three "Alumni of the Century." |
