Since I really hate social media influencers, particularly of the physical fitness kind, I wanted to play with twenty-nine-year-old Maeve Mooney, who’s decided she wants to marry somebody rich and never have to work again because being an influencer is so exhausting. I enjoyed tracking Maeve’s transformation after she tumbles down an abandoned mine shaft into 1901 Cripple Creek. And coming as I do from a blue-collar union family, it was an honor to write about the Colorado Labor Wars. Here’s an excerpt from THE GOLDEN PROMISE OF CRIPPLE CREEK: Maeve had loved Nana Grace’s stories of ghosts and leprechauns and holy wells until she grew old enough to wonder whether her grandmother might not be crazy superstitious but simply crazy. In Maeve’s opinion her entire family had way too many fanciful or deluded ideas, not the least of which was their embrace of their peasant roots, as if there was something noble about living in bogs and starving from potato blight and railing against the fates. Maeve preferred focusing on the part of the Mooney heritage tracing their lineage back to Gaelic kings. Certainly not the Mooney heritage as it pertained to Cripple Creek. Maeve hadn’t always felt this way. As a child she’d been enchanted by its history--Bennett Avenue with its trolleys and elegant National Hotel; Myers Avenue, one block south, teeming with brothels, opium dens, dance halls and cribs for miners too poor to afford the high class whores at the Old Homestead House on the opposite end of the avenue. She too had been familiar with ghosts, though not the kind Nana Grace peddled. They peeked out from fading photographs in the Mooney library and local museums; flitted about Mt. Pisgah cemetery; watched and waited like shy children until Cripple was quiet save for the occasional ding-ding-ding of slot machines, signalling it was safe to come out and play. What had it been like when ragtime music wafted from saloons, when miners trooped in and out of assay offices, hardware, and department stores, when workers and their wives dressed in their best to enjoy Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt at the Cripple Creek Opera House? When mine explosions shook the earth and whistles shrieked shift changes or warned of danger in the tunnels; when miners burrowed like voles thousands of feet down, extracting tons of ore in order to produce one ounce of gold? When newsboys shouted the day’s headlines and swaggering mine owners displayed gold pocket watches adorned with jewels? When her great-great grandfather, Saint Paddy, as her family referred to him, had been responsible for turning the Western Federation of Miners into Colorado’s most powerful union? Even now, their presence lingered like steam rising from a winter pond, though Cripple Creek had been reduced to T-shirt clad tourists and dead-eyed seniors with portable oxygen tanks mechanically yanking the arm of a slot machine. I’m destined for a much wider world, Maeve thought, glancing at her cellphone for the time. And nothing will stop me.