1886 Colorado Brand Book Now Digitized – Colorado Virtual Library

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PDF of 1886 Colorado State Brand Book stored on the cloud. No download necessary.

Thanks to the helpful folks over at Denver Public Library, we were able to borrow the original 1886 Colorado Brands book and made scans using the State Library’s scanner. This produced a facsimile of the original book in all its full color and high definition glory. We may try to expand this in future, but for now, we are happy to present the original 1886 brand book. For those who may wish to research a brand’s possible recorded history prior to 1885, it will be necessary to consult with individual counties. Recording brands with county clerks became commonplace starting in 1872-73.

The files are available for viewing and downloading through Google Drive. There you will find PDFs for quick and easy viewing, as well as the original TIFs (archival quality scanned images). If you would prefer not to download, you can view and search the cloud version of the highest quality PDF using only your browser. Once you open the link, let it load (takes a few seconds, but could be longer) and click the button that looks like a magnifying glass, then a search box will open (you can also press the CTRL and F keys to open the box). As the document has been automatically recognized for text, any term that you search that matches in the document will be highlighted, and you will be able to click through the mentions by pressing the Enter key or clicking the arrows in the search box.