Of Colorado's gold-mining millionaires, Thomas Francis Walsh is one of the most obscure yet the most admirable. Fellow tycoons Horace Tabor and Winfield Scott Stratton are better-known, perhaps because of Tabor's affair with Baby Doe and Stratton's notorious carousing.

Walsh was a faithful family man who doted on his wife and children. He also paid his miners well and spent his millions helping out poor animals and people, including struggling relatives back in County Tipperary.

He presided over the Colorado Humane Society, supported passage of the federal income tax and preached to astonished fellow tycoons: "Treat your men with humanity and justice. Provide them with clean, comfortable quarters, wholesome food and medicine. Money spent for their comfort is well-spent. . . . You will be prospecting in human hearts and may discover beauties of character little suspected."

Unlike many mining moguls, Walsh didn't unload exhausted holes in the ground on gullible investors, fleece stockholders or squander his assets. Indeed, he remained a wealthy philanthropist until his death in 1910.

Walsh's full story is told for the first time by John C. Stewart, a Denver attorney, civic activist and trained historian. Stewart's grasp of mining law and technology make Thomas F. Walsh: Progressive Businessman and Colorado Mining Tycoon (University Press of Colorado, 230 pages, photos, $34.95) a lucid, exemplary book. It belongs on the shelf with Colorado mining-history classics by Harriet Fish Backus, Anne Ellis, James E. Fell, Andrew Gulliford, Duane A. Smith, Marshall Sprague, Wallace Stegner and Frank Waters.

Stewart's book is reader-friendly, with its clear, crisp writing and helpful appendix, "Glossary of Mining Terms." To fully tell this heartening story, Stewart scoured Ireland for family and tombstones to document Walsh's obscure origins. His formal education ended at age 12 when he became an apprentice carpenter. He joined Father Matthew's Abstinence Society and avoided the drinking problems that plagued some of his countrymen. Walsh came to America at age 19 in 1869 and knocked around Colorado bonanza towns - Central City, Nevadaville and Leadville - before striking pay dirt in the San Juans.

Where others had looked for silver, Walsh found gold in the Camp Bird Mine, six miles southwest of Ouray. Set in spectacular alpine scenery, the 12,000-foot-high mine named for a food- snatching Camp Robber (gray jay) ultimately produced more than $20 million. The complex operated from 1896 to 1995.

Walsh shared his good luck. He gave Ouray its still-useful Walsh Library and anonymously set up town poor funds with the sheriff and various ministers. He endowed the Sisters of Mercy's fine stone hospital (now the Ouray County History Museum). After selling the Camp Bird in 1902 for $6 million, Walsh built one of Washington, D.C.'s most extravagant mansions. His four-story, 60-room show home at 2020 Massachusetts Ave. is now the Indonesian Embassy. There, Walsh and his wife hosted lavish parties decorated with presidents, congressmen and visiting royalty.

They rented the Vanderbilts' Newport Cottage in summer and bought Littleton's famed Wolhurst estate. Walsh led a charmed life that turned dark for his two children. He spoiled Evalyn with the Hope Diamond and a new Mercedes. Younger brother Vinson took her for a joy ride that killed him and badly injured Evalyn, who became addicted to painkilling alcohol and morphine.

Walsh's Camp Bird Mine proved to be the richest and most efficient and long-lived of all Colorado gold mines. Its famous three- story boardinghouse offered workers steam heat, electric light, hot and cold running water, superb meals, and smoking, reading and pool rooms at a time when most miners lived in squalid conditions. Walsh's humane treatment of workers paid off. His men never struck during the labor wars that crippled most Colorado mines.

This handsome, 6-foot-tall, dapper dresser with steel-blue eyes and a rich, walrus mustache had a heart, as well as a mine, of gold. Stewart convincingly shows in this first-rate, evenhanded biography that Tom Walsh does deserve a pedestal. Coloradans should enjoy this book, and for exploitive, overpaid executives it should be required reading.