After The Boom In Tombstone And Jerome, Arizona: Decline In Western Resource Towns

Introduction

GunWre crackled in the hills above Tombstone, Arizona, in the early morning darkness of 9 August 1884. The gun battle involved perhaps Wfty men behind a woodpile, shooting at seven men holed up in a building. But this was not a Wght between lawmen and desperadoes, the sort of thing from which modern Tombstone claims its fame and makes its living. This time labor battled management, for the men behind the woodpile were striking miners, the men in the building were guards protecting the hoisting works of the Grand Central Mine, and the contest resulted from a wage reduction in a mining boomtown gone bust.1 No books have been written or movies made about this battle, and one is hard put today to Wnd much information about this longforgotten skirmish. Thus, it may serve as an analogy for bust itself. Bust is the gunWght that everyone forgets. Hundreds of books have been written about mining boomtowns and regions, but mining bust, which claims all of them sooner or later, has received very little notice. Standard practice when writing the history of a particular mining camp is to mention its bust as an epilogue. It is the termination of the story, but not a story in itself.2 Introduction It turns out that there is an excellent reason for this practice. Bust is diYcult to research. One is frustrated time and again by sources that go as dry as an Arizona arroyo during a town’s declining years. People move away and take their diaries with them. Interest turns to other subjects as a once busy camp wastes away. Yesterday’s news. Even the sources that survive can betray the researcher. One purpose of a nineteenth-century newspaper was to boost its community, and editors had no qualms about ignoring negative facts that got in the way of a positive story. “On the contrary,” as a Tucson editor remarked of journalism in Tombstone, “there was woe in store for the man or newspaper who dared to question the ramiWcation, extent or permanency of the . . . [town’s] mines, the beauties of its climate or ladies, or the gallantry and rapidity of its men and horses.”3 One expects that sort of rampant boosterism in a nineteenthcentury bonanza camp, but even the mid-twentieth-century industrial town of Jerome advertised itself on highway signs and postcards as “The Most Unique Little Town in America,” and proclaimed itself “The Billion Dollar Copper Camp,” although its actual production never justiWed such a boast. Thus in Jerome as well, one has to blast through solid boosterism to get at the truth beneath. Given these problems with sources, one must sometimes live by inference and intuition when dealing with bust. The reader can therefore understand why some of what follows can be only speculation, written without the assurance one could have about the same subject and location during its boom days.4 DiYculties notwithstanding, this is an important subject. Economic decline and urban abandonment are certainly not unique to the American West, as the history of the Rust Belt demonstrates. One urban historian tallied 2,205 abandoned settlements in Iowa alone. Nor is the ghost town solely a product of the mining industry. Colorado has more than three hundred mining ghost towns—and over two hundred agricultural ghost towns. But the resource-extractive West has been 2 After the Boom in Tombstone and Jerome renowned for the habituality of its boom-and-bust cycles, and it is theminingghosttownthatfascinatespeople.PatriciaLimerick,historian of the American West, notes that one would have trouble Wnding a popular guide to the ghost towns of Massachusetts or Ohio. She might have added that it is almost as diYcult to purchase a guide to the agricultural or lumbering ghost towns of the Old West.5 A list of busts that have caused economic damage to towns, cities, and even whole regions of the North American West would be long and varied. The West is, of course, almost as famous for its gold and silver busts as it is for its gold and silver booms. One travels a deeply rutted road when observing that for every Leadville or Virginia City or Lead, Fig. 0.1. This view of modern Jerome, “the Billion Dollar Copper Camp,” shows the main part of the town, with the United Verde Hospital above the town on the left, Cleopatra Hill in the center, and United Verde’s...