Leadville

At 10,152 feet, Leadville is the highest incorporated city in America — and for a few years in the late 1870s, it was the richest. Two miners named Stevens and Wood figured out that the heavy black mud clogging the gold sluices in California Gulch was lead carbonate loaded with silver, kept the secret for two years while they staked claims, and then told the world. By 1880 there were forty thousand people on the mountain.

Leadville concentrated the entire Gilded Age into one gulch. Horace Tabor — a stonecutter who became the Silver King — built his opera house in a hundred days and bought the Matchless Mine, which produced two billion dollars in modern money. Molly Brown was here before she was unsinkable. Doc Holliday shot Billy Allen in Hyman's Saloon in 1884 and was acquitted because the town didn't care for Billy Allen. The Guggenheims made their first fortune in Leadville smelters. Charles Dow worked the mining beat before he founded the Wall Street Journal.

The crash came in 1893 with the silver panic; Tabor died broke, and his widow Augusta spent thirty years guarding the Matchless Mine, dying frozen in her cabin at its headframe in 1935. The Climax molybdenum mine kept the town alive through most of the twentieth century, and when it closed in the 1980s Leadville nearly died a second time. It survives now on the thing it always had: altitude, Victorian bones, and the legend of the boom.