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Though maybe for a couple of years off and on with the railroad Webb might’ve seen some ray of daylight, he always ended up back down some hole in some mountain, mucking, timbering, whatever he could get. Leadville, thinking itself God’s own beneficiary when the old lode was rediscovered in ‘92, got pretty much done in by Repeal, and Creede the same, sucker-punched right after the big week-long wingding on the occasion of Bob Ford’s funeral. The railroad towns, Durango, Grand Junction, Montrose, and them, were pretty stodgy by comparison, what Webb mostly remembered being the sunlight. Telluride was in the nature of an outing to a depraved amusement resort, whose electric lighting at night in its extreme and unmerciful whiteness produced a dream-silvered rogues’ district of nonstop poker games, erotic practices in back-lot shanties, Chinese opium dens most of the Chinese in town had the sense to stay away from, mad foreigners screaming in tongues apt to come skiing down the slopes in the dark with demolition in mind.
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