The Butcher on Colfax

Denver, 1890. Four young Irish immigrants step off the train at Union Depot into a city booming with promise—and hungry for cheap labor. Alice Butler arrives with her sister Nora, determined to build a life bigger than the one they left behind. Thomas Quinn, a skilled carpenter, brings his craft and a fierce belief in dignity for working people. Emmett Kelly, a butcher with sharp ambition, sees opportunity everywhere—and plans to take his share.

Over the next decade, their lives braid together through romance, rivalry, and hard-won survival as Denver transforms from rough frontier town to cosmopolitan hub.

Then a petty argument over a cut of beef turns brutal: a knife fight, one man dead, the other convicted of manslaughter. Two families are shattered.

But Denver keeps rising. And in the aftermath, the two widows—bound by loss and unexpectedly drawn to each other—forge a friendship that becomes a partnership, building a future neither the city nor their past ever offered them.

A meticulously researched story about what women build when the men are gone.