"John Stokes Holley’s The Invisible People of the Pikes Peak Region: An Afro-American Chronicle, published in 1990, presented the first comprehensive history dedicated to the local African American community. Co-published by the Friends of the Pikes Peak Library District and the Friends of the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, the book brought to light a history of accomplishments and struggles often ignored by popular local history books. This reprint presents the original publication in its entirety with an expanded index and new images, as well as new content not available in the original. It is our hope that this reprint will further illuminate the stories of the Invisible People of the Pikes Peak region and enlighten readers with a more complete and representative history of our community." -- Back Cover.

Thousands of years before Zebulon Pike's name became attached to this famous mountain, Pikes Peak was home to indigenous people. These First Nations left no written record of their sojourn here, but what they did leave were stone circles, carefully crafted arrowheads and stone tools, enigmatic petroglyphs, and culturally scarred trees. In the 1500s, Spanish explorers documented their locations, language, and numbers. In the 1800s, mountain men and official explorers such as Pike, Fremont, and Long also wrote about these First Nations. Comanche, Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Lakota made incursions into the region. These nations contested Ute land possession, harvested the abundant wildlife, and paid homage to the powerful spirits at Garden of the Gods and Manitou Springs. Today Ute Indians return to Garden of the Gods and to Pikes Peak each year to perform their sacred Sundance Ceremony.

In A Pikes Peak Partnership, historians Tom Noel and Cathleen Norman tell the incredible tale of the two families who transformed Colorado Springs and its environs into a tourist haven. By building the Broadmoor Hotel and other important facilities to attract travelers, Spencer Penrose, who once proclaimed that "any man who works after lunch is a fool," made the Pikes Peak region a pleasure seeker's paradise.

In Profiting from the Peak, geographer John Harner surveys the events and socioeconomic conditions that formed the city, analyzing the built landscape to offer insight into the origins of its urban forms and spatial layout, focusing particularly on historic downtown architecture and public spaces.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press This is the story of the other side of Colorado's best-known mountain- the region west of Pikes Peak. It includes stories of the first settlers and the founders of towns. It also tells of the bust years between world wars when the railroad tracks were pulled up and many communities vanished.

Native American tribes once traversed the east-west anomaly of the Rocky Mountains known as the Palmer Divide as a passage between the high ranges and the Great Plains. Lying between Denver and Colorado Springs, and named for William Jackson Palmer, founder of Colorado Springs, the offshoot range divides the great Platte and Arkansas River systems. Settlers homesteaded, farmed, and ranched the area. Railroad construction in the 1870s led to towns supporting commerce and tourism, particularly in the western section of the Palmer Divide, in what eventually became known as the Tri-Lakes Area. The area drew tourists who enjoyed hiking, wildflowers, and the outdoors, and facilitated such local industries as ice harvesting, lumber milling, ranching, and potato farming. A vast area north of Colorado Springs, the Palmer Divide retains a picturesque rural nature and cohesive small-town feeling--creating such social events as the Rocky Mountain Chautauqua and the Yule Log Festival, as well as the enduring Palmer Lake Star on Sundance Mountain.