Ann Parker

"The great questions of the time are not decided by speeches and majority decisions... but by iron and blood." (Otto von Bismarck, 1862) Summer 1880. The railroad is coming west, all the way to Leadville, Colorado, and its rich Rocky Mountain mines - and millionaires. Coming to celebrate the...

In the summer of 1880, many people are traveling to the booming health resort of Manitou Springs, Colorado, at the foot of Pike’s Peak, to “chase the cure” for tuberculosis. But Inez Stannert, partowner of the Silver Queen Saloon in Leadville, travels for a different reason to this town...

In the summer of 1880, the mining boomtown of Leadville, Colorado, is being toured by Ulysses S. Grant, former president and Civil War general, probably with a view to investment in the town's silver mines. But there are those in town, and in his own retinue, who are tempted by visions of a...

The crooked, the greedy, and those with a checkered past - they all came to Leadville with the same purpose: Get in, get rich, get out. As 1879 draws to a close, silver fever burns hot in the Rocky Mountain boomtown of Leadville, Colorado. Unfortunately for Joe Rose, an assayer of precious...

It's autumn of 1881, and Inez Stannert, still the co-owner of Leadville, Colorado's Silver Queen saloon, is settled in San Francisco with her young ward, Antonia Gizzi. Inez has turned her business talents to managing a music store, hoping to eventually become an equal partner in the enterprise...

Inez Stannert has reinvented herself—again. Fleeing the comfort and wealth of her East Coast upbringing, she became a saloon owner and card sharp in the rough silver boomtown of Leadville, Colorado, always favoring the unconventional path—a difficult road for a woman in the late 1800s. Then...