By 1880 Leadville, with 14,820 inhabitants, was the second-biggest city in Colorado behind Denver, with 35,000, which said as much about the comparative lack of Coloradans as about the size of Leadville. One-third of the residents were immigrants: Irish, Cornish, Canadians, and Germans. Leadville was, as a traveler noted in Colorado, part of an “organized system of capitalists or corporations … The poor man, instead of working for himself is a day laborer for hire.” Mining meant industrial labor, and in the West, as in the East, industrial labor attracted a disproportionate number of
...more
