William Wyckoff has produced a detailed and finely crafted tribute to his long love affair with Colorado's people and landscape. Creating Colorado is an unabashedly geographical treatment of times past, organized by places, regions, and themes rather than by historical eras. In the tradition of sweeping syntheses produced by Donald W. Meinig (1972, 1998), this is a human geography of Colorado and how it changed as a result of nature and the impress of national cultural, economic, and political systems. A brief introduction to “pre-1860 geographies,” such as the physical environment and Native Americans, precedes five regional chapters covering the years from 1860 to 1920 that are central to establishing the bedrock of Colorado's human geography. Reflecting the state's mostly inside-out settlement pattern, the organization of the five regional chapters sequentially proceeds through the mountains, Piedmont, eastern plains, southern periphery, and western slope, with the most material appropriately devoted to the mountains and Piedmont. The concluding chapter explores the years between 1920 and 1940 by placing the state within larger national and regional contexts.

Building upon the ideas of cultural geographers, environmental historians, and physical geographers, Wyckoff uses the concepts of location, place, and landscape to aptly demonstrate the breadth, depth, and vibrancy of his historical geography. The tone is stridently geographical; the summary of mining, for example, focuses on the spatial systems of roads, rails, and capital flows. The reader is subjected to a myriad of geographies, including investment geography, railroad geography, population geography, settlement geography, mountain geography, and even the geography of “conquerable curiosities.” Overall, though, a great deal is said with little wasted ink in the author's evocative and clean style. Leadville, for example, “suffered mightily amid the carnage of silver's lost glitter,” and “once a locale yielded its best color, population drained faster than spring runoff from an alpine snowfield.” Over 100 illustrations add to the interpretive skill and appeal of the volume, mostly in the form of well-chosen archival photographs, drawings, and maps, interspersed with other maps drafted for this volume and a few contemporary photographs by the author. The role of historic photos as “visual parables” is rivaled by the bird's-eye views of several towns. Thirty-four pages of footnotes round out the scholarly tone of the lengthy tome.

Five themes guide the reader's understanding of settlement patterns, ethnic geographies, and cultural landscapes: the doctrine of first effective settlement and the self-attraction of growth, the meeting of many cultures, the ideological dominance of capitalism and liberal individualism, the indelible stamp of political institutions, and the immediacy of nature and environmental resource issues in everyday life. The author has previously employed a five-theme scheme to good effect in writing about the Mountainous West (Wyckoff and Dilsaver 1995). Resource extraction, sustainable and nonsustainable developments, federal government largesse, and the marrying of urban areas to mountain environments are just a few of the topics employed to illuminate the growth and change over time in the five Colorado regions.

Wyckoff achieves an accurate feel for each region. Nature and the land are never far from the forefront of this tale, most obviously in the dramatic humans–environment interactions in the mountain zone involving metals mining, forestry, and tourism but also in the other regions that delve into coal mining, irrigated agriculture, water management, mountain parks, grazing, and the Dust Bowl. The thorough treatment of the five regions is also achieved through Wyckoff's frequent and helpful tendency to summarize phenomena into a few categories. For example, the Piedmont Heartland region is broken into four distinctive subregions (Denver–Golden–Boulder, Fort Collins–Greeley, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo), and within Denver, four fundamental changes in urban geography are identified. Denver's rise to power is fascinating reading, as the author is on familiar ground, revisiting an urban landscape he has elsewhere explored (Wyckoff 1992).

This is a tightly edited book, free from typographical errors and gross misstatements, and shortcomings in any form are rare. The major fault is in the tiny reproduction of the maps drafted for the book. A great deal of work clearly went into making these maps to illustrate the author's points, but many garner less than a half page of space. Grab your magnifying glass; this reduction results in 18 maps displaying a font size between 4 and 7 points. Other quibbles include Figure 9, a 1:62,500-scale topographic map that illustrates glacial landforms less well than would a 1:24,000-scale map. The significance of including trapper Ezekiel Williams on Figure 15, a map of early Colorado expeditions, is unclear, as is the reason for the omission of Juan Bautista de Anza's 1779 Comanche campaign. Although the footnoting is extensive, no leads are provided to explain the exodus of the Anasazi (p. 25), the name change of the Grand River to Colorado River (p. 226) and Snowy Range (on Figure 18) to Front Range, or why the proposal to establish Mount Evans National Park failed (p. 85). Additionally, it is implied on p. 21 that the Green River and Yampa River join in Utah rather than Colorado, and the Sand Creek Massacre is referred to as “east of Denver” (p. 109) when southeast is a better choice.

While examining the origins of a Colorado landscape that is still in the making, Wyckoff strives to remind the reader of how the state is representative of the West, but the connections between Colorado and national forces are highlighted much more than those between Colorado and the region. Mountain scholars would likely prefer more discussion on the human geographies of significant mountain landmarks, such as Mount of the Holy Cross, Grays Peak, or Longs Peak, but in this synthesis of changing Colorado landscapes, case studies are not used. The focus is on how places contribute to the bigger picture rather than on how broad forces play out in small ways. This book is not a comprehensive resource for the history of each significant Colorado town or landform. Cripple Creek, for example, receives light treatment. But the book excels at providing a broad synthesis of Colorado geographic interpretations backed up with innumerable details. Creating Colorado has vaulted to the forefront of scholarship on Colorado's land and people.

Illuminating how the modern scene is tied to the past is a hallmark of good historical geography, and Wyckoff keeps the focus on what has led to what we see today. His penchant for capturing the essence of pertinent details provokes a hunger for what he would say about the recent Colorado scene. Colorado is one of the places I know best, but like Wyckoff, I have had the outsider perspective. This apparent paradox—intimate familiarity without longtime residence—is testament to the value of repeated journeys to a place and the joy of new discoveries of mountain delights.