The stories Russ told always ended with a big chunk
of uranium ore being dumped on the table, its yellow dust
collecting as a thin film on top of my coffee. And they always
began with the phrase: “There used to be 10,000 men with boots on
in this town.”
It was Silverton, Colo., 1996. I was a
rookie reporter for the Silverton Standard & the
Miner. And Russ was a fixture at the Drive-In, which
carried with it a smell of well-used grease and cheesy burgers – a
divine aroma on a cold winter’s night when nothing else was open
for dinner. Mining, and the men with the boots on, had left
Silverton just five years earlier. But there were still plenty of
folks like Russ around who liked to reminisce about the days when
the industry was strong.
The late Dolores LaChapelle,
powder-skiing guru and leader of the Deep Ecology movement,
lamented the loss of the mining culture. Lorenzo, the Italian who
owned the liquor store, sadly told me that the tight-knit community
built over a century and a half by mining had been replaced by a
town that resembled a Third World flea market, where everyone
competed viciously for a handful of tourist dollars.
A
decade and change later, Russ, Lorenzo and Dolores are gone. People
have cleaned up their yards and fixed their old houses. Places you
could pick up for tens of thousands of dollars in the early ’90s
now sell for hundreds of thousands more. The more distant the
memory of mining becomes, the more the town seems to appeal to
tourists, second-home owners and a steady stream of self-proclaimed
town saviors.
And as the town “evolved” from extractive
economy to amenity economy, my point of view evolved as well. I
began to yearn for the good ol’ days, not only out of nostalgia for
the culture, but also because I saw mining as a way to slow the
town’s gentrification. A bunch of miners roaming the streets, I
figured, would keep it real. My feelings were complex, because, by
starting a tiny artisan bakery and a groovy literary newspaper, I
also contributed to and benefited from the gentrification.
Superior, Ariz., the subject of this issue’s cover story, is going
through a similarly complex range of emotions. It’s an old mining
town that’s trying to develop an amenity economy, with mixed
success. Now, a mining company wants to return, and the community’s
torn on whether to welcome it, or try to run it off – over the hill
into one of the towns where mining never really left.
Even in Silverton, there’s a possibility that hardrock mining will
rise again, as a small company gears up to reopen a mill and some
of the county’s empty portals. The situation, like Superior’s, is
likely to be complex. Silverton could use the jobs, and maybe some
of that old-time blue-collar culture. But most of the skilled
miners have left, and it’s probably too late to slow
gentrification: Housing prices are far out of reach of the average
miner these days.
Silverton may still wear the moniker of
the Mining Town that Wouldn’t Die. But I suspect the only “men with
boots on” it’s likely to welcome anytime soon will be ski bums and
well-off tourists.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Men with boots.
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