Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Mining
POISONED, RUINED, AND self-cannibalized, this city is still the grandest of all boomtowns
It’s spooky up here on the top floor of the Metals Bank & Trust Building. Shards of glass and crumbled plaster crunch underfoot, obscuring the elegant tile pattern of the corridor floor. Heavy oak doors with pebbled windows and missing knobs stand open to the hallway. Read more >>
The author leads a search for hidden treasure in the amazingly complete documentary history of a California ghost town
The road to Bodie, California, turns to gravel as it meanders upward from U.S. 395 on a thirteen-mile climb through sagebrush to an elevation of almost eighty-five hundred feet. Read more >>
When copper-country miners went on strike, the owners brought thugs from the slums of New York to northern Michigan. The struggle led to an event that killed a city.
On the surface, there was hardly a more unlikely spot for turn-of-the-century prosperity than the isolated community of Calumet. Read more >>
U-Boom on the Colorado Plateau
Gold is where you find it, goes the old prospectors’ saw. Read more >>
BLOOD FLOWED IN THE PERENNIALLY TROUBLESOME COALFIELDS IN 1921, WHEN THOUSANDS OF MINERS DECIDED THEIR RIGHT TO ORGANIZE WAS WORTH FIGHTING FOR
On the morning of August 1, 1921, the Gazette of Charleston, West Virginia, carried under an eight-column banner on its front page the following dispatch from the city of Bluefield: Read more >>
Ernest Hemingway and His World
by Anthony Burgess Charles Scribner’s Sons, 144 pages, photographs, $10.95 Read more >>
Man, Land, and History in the Deepest Gorge on Earth
Hells Canyon is awesome. There is no other single word that can adequately describe it. Incredibly deep, austerely magnificent, it slashes between the states of Oregon and Idaho like a raw and gaping wound. Read more >>
Western miners, the hard-rock stiffs, were as tough and horny-handed a breed of men as any in the world.
The man and the face are anonymous-and familiar. Read more >>
On Christmas Day of 1849 a party of twenty-seven wagons heading through Nevada toward the California gold fields lumbered over a barren ridge and downhill into a desolate place. Read more >>
Every town is a ghost town in a sense—haunted by the shades of people who were born there, and lived there, and now are sone. Read more >>
The Idaho mine war broke into flame in 1892 and cast a glare with very long shadows
The road running up Burke Canyon from the little town of Wallace in northern Idaho is not too heavily travelled these days. Read more >>
They had no chair lifts, and they called their skis snowshoes, but they were the fastest men alive
What may come as a surprise is that this swell swoop has been going on for over a century. Read more >>
Underschooled and ill-equipped, the men who attended the pioneers practiced a rugged brand of medicine—but they made some major advances all the same
At every step in the trek westward, America’s pioneers found an enemy more ubiquitous, more stealthy, and more deadly than the Indians, yet in our histories we tend to forget this dread opponent. It was, quite simply, disease. Read more >>
Granddaddy of all desert mining discoveries was the Comstock Lode, which sent the Far West on a silver stampede to Nevada’s Washoe country a century ago.