Second Lives

Denver, Colorado, as wildly spectacular a place as the Gilded Age West ever produced, is the setting for Second Lives by master storyteller Richard S. Wheeler.

Into this Rocky Mountain crossroads own in the 1880s streamed all manner of men and women seeking their fortunes in Colorado's gold and silver mines--or at least a chance to make a new life. One such emigrant is Lorenzo Carthage, a likeable adventurer whose dazzling mine ventures fail more often than they succeed. Another newcomer is Dixie Ball, an amazon of a woman who plummets from queen of Telluride to chambermaid in a Denver hotel--and whose fortunes, or lack of them, are tied to the man who she calls "Magnificent" Carthage. Others who seek second lives in Denver include a tubercular poet, and Irish saloonwoman who has known Doc Holliday and Bat Masterson, a failed lawyer, and wealthy woman enslaved by her marriage.