To him, Meagher was already past tense. “He is dead beyond all hope of resurrection,” Sanders wrote to a friend. The Irishman shrugged it off. In a life of inexhaustible political pugilism, he’d fought the British Empire, the Know-Nothings and the Confederate States of America. A handful of self-appointed moral wardens in the vastness of the Rocky Mountain West did not make him cower. Who was Wilbur Sanders, anyway?
