“I love it. It is wild with adventure.”
Henry Starr describing the bandit life in the Old West before he was shot to death in a gunfight in Arkansas.
Leadville. You can find it yonder nearly 11,000 feet above sea level, known in the late 1800s and early 1900s as the best route for Easterners to head West. And while you experienced the most surreal scenery surrounding it all, you were lucky if you traversed there to survive the elements—both human and natural.
I offer this little preamble because Pete and I just visited this strange Colorado town caught in the web of the past and present woven by ghosts of gun shooters and prostitutes and gamblers and sheriffs and pioneer families and miners and millionaires and jilted lovers and some of the most famous and infamous characters in America’s history—including, John “Doc” Holiday, Carrie Nation, Baby Doe Tabor, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and even Oscar Wilde!
Their bodies might have long exited this god-forsaken city but, trust me, their phantasms are very much alive. In the midst of today’s Leadville coffee shops and hotels and restaurants and antique shops and pubs and theatres and historic sites with packs of tourists everywhere, those Wild West spirits ain’t dead yet.