By Jennifer Brown | The Colorado Sun
The leather-bound ledger smells of tobacco and dust, each page listing the names of people booked into the Jefferson County Jail more than 100 years ago.
The men in the ledger, identified in old-timey cursive as immigrants, Native Americans and miners, were mostly booked for crimes typical in Golden’s mining heyday — drunkenness, bootlegging, fighting and murder.
The most common charge for women, however, was lunacy.
Of the 280 charges against women listed in the book, 74 are for “lunacy” or “insanity.” And of those women, at least 31 were sent from jail via train to what was then called the Insane Asylum at Pueblo. That’s 26% of all charges against women.