Dead Man's Hand by Victoria Wilcox

Author:Victoria Wilcox [Wilcox, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493044740
Publisher: TwoDot
Published: 2019-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

LEADVILLE, 1883

THEY CALLED IT THE CLOUD CITY, TEN-THOUSAND FEET HIGH WITH air so rarified it left a man dizzy and out of breath for days after arriving. The nights were no better, the altitude making for restless sleep and morning nausea and a tiredness that was almost painful. If it hadn’t been for the silver-lining in that city in the clouds, Leadville wouldn’t be worth much more than a stop on a mountain stagecoach road. But ever since shopkeeper Horace Tabor grubstaked a couple of German immigrants out prospecting the nearby hills, Leadville had become a boom-town. The prospectors hit pay dirt in carbonate ore that assayed at two-hundred ounces of silver to the ton, and Tabor, with a one-third interest in the claim as repayment for his $100 stake, became a rich man almost overnight. The Germans’ good fortune, and Tabor’s lucky grubstake, inspired other fortune-hunters, and soon the Leadville mining district was warrened with mine shafts, cluttered with stamp mills, and overhung with the haze of the smelters that never stopped burning. The Germans’ claim, named the Little Pittsburg, was just a start, and was quickly joined by the Little Chief, the Chrysolite, the Matchless Mine, and a hundred others, all making fortunes for their owners.

By the time John Henry arrived, Horace Tabor was a millionaire many times over and Leadville had become a city of nearly 40,000 people with talk of taking over Denver’s place as the state capital. Its two-mile long main street was crowded day and night with coaches and carriages, ore wagons and delivery drays, foot-traffic and fine horses and trains of burros bound for the mines, and over it all the shouting of newsboys announcing the morning paper and bootblacks singing “twenty-five cents a shine!” There were brick and stone sidewalks fronting tall business buildings, stores filled with every description of merchandise, and enough law offices to handle all the legal entanglements of claims and claim jumpers, mine deeds and multiple-owner partnerships. There were, in fact, nearly as many lawyers in Leadville as there were saloons—and there were nearly a hundred of those, making saloonkeeping the biggest business in town. And where there were saloons, there were the lesser establishments that went along with them: gambling houses, dance halls, bordellos, opium dens. Anything a man could want was available in Leadville—for a price, of course. But there were also the more priceless pastimes, like Sunday services at the five Protestant churches in town, or daily mass at the Catholic Church of the Annunciation, its spire towering righteously over the populace. Godlessness may have reigned in Lead-ville, but God wasn’t giving up on the town just yet.

While John Henry admired the churches and appreciated the numbers of saloons, it was the mining that had drawn him to Leadville. For having caught the silver fever in Tombstone and then having lost his silver mine soon after, he was hoping to be luckier in Leadville and maybe even make a fortune, as Horace Tabor had.

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