Portrait & Biographical Record

Mardos Collection
Portrait and Biographical Record of Denver and Vicinity, Colorado - 1898

DENVER AND VICINITY

COLORADO

INTRODUCTORY

IOGRAPHY alone can justly represent the progress of local history and portray with accuracy the relation of men to events. It is the only means of perpetuating the lives and deeds of those men to whom the advancement of a city or county and the enlightenment of its people are due. The compilers of this work have striven to honor, not only men of present prominence, but also, as far as possible, those who in years gone by labored to promote the welfare of their community. The following sketches have been prepared from the standpoint of no man's prejudice, but with an impartial aim to render justice to progressive and public-spirited citizens and to collect personal records that will be of value to generations yet to come.
   To be forgotten has been the great dread of mankind from remotest ages. All will be forgotten soon enough, in spite of their best works and the most earnest efforts of their friends to preserve the memory of their lives. The means employed to prevent oblivion and to perpetuate their memory have been in proportion to the amount of intelligence they possessed. The pyramids of Egypt were built to perpetuate the names and deeds of their great rulers. The exhumations made by the archæologists of Egypt from buried Memphis indicate a desire of those people to perpetuate the memory of their achievements. The erection of the great obelisks was for the same purpose. Coming down to a later period, we find the Greeks and Romans erecting mausoleums and monuments, and carving out statues to chronicle their great achievements and carry them down the ages. It is also evident that the Mound-builders, in piling up their great mounds of earth, had but this idea--to leave something to show that they had lived. All these works, though many of them costly in the extreme, give but a faint idea of the lives and character of those whose memory they were intended to perpetuate, and scarcely anything of the masses of the people that then lived. The great pyramids and some of the obelisks remain objects only of curiosity; the mausoleums, monuments and statues are crumbling into dust.
   It was left to modern ages to establish an intelligent, undecaying, immutable method of perpetuating a full history--immutable in that it is almost unlimited in extent and perpetual in its action; and this is through the art of printing.
   To the present generation, however, we are indebted for the introduction of the admirable system of local biography. By this system every man, though he has not achieved what the world calls greatness, has the means to perpetuate his life, his history, through the coming ages.
   The scythe of time cuts down all; nothing of the physical man is left. The monument which his children or friends may erect to his memory in the cemetery will crumble into dust and pass away; but his life, his achievements, the work he has accomplished, which otherwise would be forgotten, is perpetuated by a record of this kind.
   To preserve the lineaments of our companions we engrave their portraits; for the same reason we collect the attainable facts of their history. Nor do we think it necessary, as we speak only truth of them, to wait until they are dead, or until those who know them are gone; to do this we are ashamed only to publish to the world the history of those whose lives are unworthy of public record.