Beyond the Land of Gold

Perry A. Burgess was many things: diarist, pioneer, prospector, banker, investor, inventor - the list is long and varied. His name appears in numerous historical works published since the 1950s, yet much of his story has never been told. In 1866 he traveled to Montana with his uncles and 300 head of cattle up the Bloody Bozeman Trail during Sioux Chief Red Cloud's war. A pioneer of Colorado and one of the earliest settlers of Steamboat Springs, Burgess was a longtime friend and partner of some of the wealthiest businessmen in the nineteenth-century American West. Using Perry's diaries, family photographs, and newly discovered personal essays published in the Steamboat Pilot as their focus, Valentine and Thompson piece together the life of a remarkable man and his family, whose adventurous spirit was matched only by their willingness to risk all for the unknown.