“There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

In a middle-of-nowhere place that does exist, on some maps, there is a saloon called the Silver Dollar. It is the last of more than sixty that used to line State Street, when this sleepy little place was a thriving mining city.

More than a hundred years ago, Leadville, Colorado, was a hub of silver extraction, larger than Denver. It was the richest city in the world. Today, it is dirt roads, antique shops and homemade fudge, but on the wall, in the saloon, a plaque:

“Here, Oscar Wilde spent a night.”

A strange, specific lie, if so. It is not; Wilde did stop by Leadville on a tour of America. In 1882, the rising Irish wit, aesthete, novelist, poet, delivered a speech to 888 miners on… the joy of colour and its beauty!

A dandy among dungarees. In black silk stockings and a purple smoking jacket, he spoke to men with guns, most of whom were illiterate, about house decoration, Renaissance silversmiths, art as “a necessity of human life,” the importance of wide-brimmed hats…

They did not shoot him.

They crossed the street and had a drink—drinks, bottles of whiskey, a fiery party. Wilde wrote about that night. They put his name on a plaque.

The word “map” comes from the Latin mappa mundi, which means:a representation of the world. At the time, the oldest map of the U.S. was less than fifteen years old. The “New World” was—imagine—just a collection of forests, mountains, rivers. A boundless and unfragmented expanse; that must be how children see:

Here I scraped a knee.
Here, scarlet poppies.
Here, an apple tree. A stream.

Here, a group of very different people saw the world as children see.

Wilde’s peak of fame and fall from it were still to come; The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, the charges of sodomy, trials, imprisonment, exile, death, disgraced and destitute … As for the miners, the price of silver would not crash for ten more years.  That night, they were just people at a bar. “There was a time,” it seems, when maps were stories, and people were people…

who had a hell of a good time, here.