August 19, 1884. At 10,000 feet in Leadville, Colorado, the air was thin enough to make even the strongest man dizzy. On Harrison Avenue, the muddy main artery of the silver boomtown, a pistol shot shattered the afternoon. John Henry “Doc” Holliday lowered his smoking gun. Across the dirt, a man named Billy Allen writhed, clutching a bleeding arm. Holliday, already infamous for the O.K. Corral, would stand trial the following year and walk away a free man.
But the backdrop to this classic Western tableau wasn’t a saloon. It was a thriving clothing store owned by David May, a Bavarian Jewish immigrant.
May was already one of Leadville’s most successful merchants, selling everything from canvas work pants to imported silk dresses. His storefront would eventually give rise to the May Department Stores Company, one of America’s largest retail empires. But on that violent August afternoon, it simply stood on a street where gunfighters, prospectors, overnight millionaires, and Jewish merchants crossed paths on the wooden boardwalks.
And May was hardly the only Jew who had found his way to the roof of the world.
Leadville’s winters are brutal and long. But when rich silver veins were discovered in the late 1870s, the freezing mountain town exploded. Mines operated around the clock, belching smoke into the crisp air as the population surged to nearly 30,000.
Men arrived hoping to rip enough silver from the frozen mud to get rich. Others realized supplying those desperate men was a far more reliable way to make a fortune. The town needed boots, tools, whiskey, and lodging. Jewish immigrants were ready to sell it.
Fleeing economic restrictions in German-speaking Europe, many families sought new lives out West. By 1880, Leadville had roughly 400 Jewish residents operating jewelry shops, pawnshops, wholesale liquor companies, and saloons. A failed claim might ruin a prospector, leaving him penniless in the snow, but the merchant holding his IOUs for winter boots survived.
David May had known scarcity. Arriving in America at fifteen with empty pockets and no English, he spent years grinding away in a Cincinnati clothing factory. Poor health pushed him toward the dry climate of the West. He tried prospecting but quickly realized his hands were better suited to folding canvas than to swinging a pick.
He opened the Great Western Auction House and Clothing Store, turning it into a sanctuary from the biting wind. Miners gathered around his potbellied stove to thaw their hands and trade rumors while buying boots and the tough, riveted pants made by another Jewish immigrant, Levi Strauss.
May possessed a savant-like intuition for the newly rich. Knowing Leadville was minting millionaires who had no idea how to spend their money, he bought a collection of lavish dresses that had failed to sell in Chicago. He priced them exorbitantly—up to $400—and within a week, the silver barons’ wives had bought every single one.
May soon partnered with Moses Shoenberg, another Bavarian merchant. The alliance became blood in 1880 when David married Moses’s sister, Rosa. On a frontier known for dirt and denim, Rosa walked down the aisle in velvet and diamonds.
Related articles:
