Column by George Sibley
Small-Town Economies – August 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
ED WILL BE GLAD TO HEAR that the community of Crested Butte in the Upper Gunnison River Basin – a community which he has tended to place just outside of “Central Colorado” along with Vail and Aspen – is attempting to confront its past and possible future. Later this week, on July 8 — a few weeks before you’ll get this magazine – the Upper Gunnison’s environmental organization, the High Country Citizens Alliance (HCCA), is sponsoring a forum: “Is there room for mining in a historic mining district?”
This is a good question that could be asked throughout Central Colorado, an “urban frontier” that came into being on a mining boom 120-140 years ago. But our region now survives primarily as an exurban baby-boomer frontier grounded in the four-S amenities: scenery, snow and supersized construction, along with other services to wealthy people who bring a little of their money here rather than following the former tradition of taking most of it out of here. The Four S amenities are perceived to be seriously incompatible with modern mining, but with molybdenum prices going through the roof recently, the possibility of a mining future becomes less surreal for places like Leadville (which would theoretically welcome it) and Crested Butte (which will discuss it this coming Friday).
But anyone who read Steve Voynick’s thoughtful analysis in last month’s Colorado Central, “$30 Moly and the Future of Climax” (Leadville’s once and future big mine), understands why any mountain community would want to be very careful about hanging a lot of hopes on mining today – or really, ever.
Crested Butte was founded in 1880 when prospectors from the earlier Leadville boom spilled over into the next basin in the Colorado Mineral Belt looking for gold and silver. Some nice little strikes were found, but “little” was the operational word; they were all in a frustratingly fractured geology in which veins ended abruptly at block faults, and what Crested Butte soon came to depend on instead was some thick veins of really good bituminous coal and some agonizingly thin veins of anthracite coal – both within a few miles of each other, which is unusual.
This is why historic Crested Butte looks different from historic Telluride or Aspen or Lake City. No gold and silver money infused its development with brick and stone monuments to a handful of prospectors who got rich; it was just a coal town from which no local ever got rich. So it is easier to be skeptical of “our mining heritage” in a place like Crested Butte than in a place like Leadville, which once had its handful of noveau riche vulgarians building elaborate homes and business buildings before they too went broke.
The Butte didn’t inherit an historical district that was nearly so classy, but the basic history was the same as it always is in the American mining industry. Outside capital came in, bought up the good properties, developed the big stable mines, and started hauling the money out, leaving as little behind in “labor costs” as they could get away with.
DURING THE POST-WORLD WAR II interval – a 40-year period which we may come to look back on as the apex in the rise and fall of American civilization – labor costs went very high. Legendary $30-an-hour jobs in places like Leadville, where it wasn’t that easy to get workers to go at all (certainly not for the wages that companies would rather have paid) are still remembered. With America the undisputed leader of the industrial world for that interval, the market supported those legendary wages, but that interval expired (it probably basically ended when the OPEC nations stood up on their hind legs in the 1970s and told America the fat times were ending).
However, the stability of even the biggest mines, like Leadville’s Climax Moly Mine where a whole mountain was being reduced to a big cirque, was always kind of relative. The success of such mines is dependent on very volatile global markets, and new mines in Third World countries are all too willing to trade their raw natural and human resources dirt cheap for a leg up on the bottom rung of the industrial ladder. Voynick’s CC article details very clearly how even the recent surge in molybdenum prices to over $30 a pound does not mean Climax or Crested Butte can count on becoming competitive players with a lot of $30-an-hour jobs.
Comparisons are frequently made between mining and Four-S resortism as basic industries. Mining jobs in the mountain communities like Paonia pay twice or more what the resort jobs in mountain communities like Crested Butte pay. But one has to ask how much of that is just left over from that 40-year “golden interval” of American industrialism, when a highly organized labor force, supported briefly by the government and the will of the people, forced the owning class to turn loose a little more of the wealth of the nation.
Today, by contrast, the working class is increasingly unorganized, and the owning class increasingly organized. Drive through Somerset, above Paonia, in the coal-rich North Fork of the Gunnison, and you can still see a couple of fading United Mine Workers billboards, but none of the mines in the valley are union any more, and John L. Lewis is spinning in his grave.
So one has to ask: If a mine were to open today in a resort community, with its low-wage, thoroughly unorganized work force, why do we think they would automatically start hiring at $20 an hour or so? Out of the generous spirit we’ve come to expect from America’s global corporations? They would have to pay something more than the resort jobs pay, but my guess is that they would try to shave that line as thin as possible, and the trend for wages in mining, as it is for industry everywhere, will be downward.
Another comparison has to do with the comparative damage the two industries do to the landscape. At the Fourth of July parade a Crested Butte native pointed to the hillsides dotted with menopause manors and noted that “mining never left a mess here like that.” And that’s true in Crested Butte, where there are a couple of small Superfund sites corrupting the streams. In Crested Butte it is all but impossible to even tell where most of the old coal mines were, and the old, small-scale hardrock mines are even kind of scenic in a rusty rustic way.
But there are plenty of places where mining left bigger messes with as much sprawl as today’s supersized construction – the hills around Victor and Cripple Creek on the backside of Pike’s Peak, the monumental tailings from the Climax Mine near Fremont Pass, and the old Leadville-area mines that occasionally caused the Arkansas river to run orange until the taxpayers cleaned them up, to name a few.
WHEN IT COMES DOWN TO IT, big-time resorts and big-time mining seem to be about six of one, half a dozen of the other. Although it would be nice to figure out how to live intelligently in Central Colorado without having a near-total dependence on one or the other, it is all but unimaginable.
Scale is probably the real problem – the theology of the bottom line says only big operations can maximize profitability. And why would anyone invest in mining or resortism for any reason other than making money? So we get big mines, big resorts, and transient damaged communities in damaged landscapes with the lowest wages the companies can get away with paying. Like the old Stones song laments: the choice between cancer and polio.
Oh well. Fortunately, the sun continues to shine most mornings; most of our mountains are still where they’ve always been; and it’s still a good place to get up – especially on a Saturday or Sunday. That’s the heritage I want to preserve.
George Sibley writes from Gunnison, where he professes at Western State College.
