The Butcher on Colfax

Denver, 1890. Alice Butler and her sister Nora step off the train at Union Depot into a city booming with promise and hungry for cheap labor. They're determined to build a life bigger than the one they left behind in Ireland.

Two other Irish immigrants are on the same train: Thomas Quinn, a skilled carpenter, who brings his craft and a fierce belief in dignity for working people; and Emmett Kelly, a sharply ambitious butcher, who 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 into a brutal knife fight. Two families are shattered. But the women persevere, 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.