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A friend of Otto Mears described him this way: "Mr. Mears is a man who always said 'I can;' and he did." His accomplishments are mind boggling. Mears' trading business led directly to his building toll roads. His newspapers touted Saguache, Ouray, and other new towns to bring more business across his toll roads for his hardware stores. His political contacts enhanced his friendship and ability to work with the Utes, but at the same time he was a supporter of the forces that pushed the Utes out of Colorado. His railroads helped move his goods to distribution points, haul out ore from the mines and deliver it to his own and others' mills. He used dirty politics to fight hard and sometimes viciously to prevent unionization of his railroad workers, but he was one of the first businessmen in the West to institute profit sharing with his employees in the mines. A visionary, yes, enigmatic, no doubt, but also a man of his times. Otto Mears was an adventurous, poor, uneducated and underprivileged immigrant from Russia who dreamed big dreams and made many of them come true.
Colorado Mining Stories is a collection of tales depicting the hazards, heroics and humor of hardrock mining in Colorado. While collecting the stories for her book, Caroline Arlen would hear the same type of contradictions. Most men and the few women who worked the mines would talk about how they loved mining and in their next breath would tell about horrific accidents that happened daily. These miners put their lives on the line, hoping they would not be the next one to die or be maimed in a cave-in, premature explosion or by a falling slab. But mining was a way of life that paid well and created a close community where folks found it necessary and important to look after each other.
The History of "Ouray -- Gem of the Rockies" is a fascinating tale of the typical boom and bust cycles of all of Colorado's major mining towns. Silver brought the first prospectors to the beautiful valley, but gold kept Ouray from becoming a ghost town after the Silver Crash of 1893. The town rebounded because of the demand for metals during World War I and II but slipped into an economic depression after each war. Although tourism was always important, in the 1970s it became more vital to the economy, and the town has continued to grow and prosper since that time. The abandoned ghost towns and mining relics that litter the local hillsides can be seen by anyone traveling the jeep trails interlacing the local mountains.
"Few Americans at the end of the Mexican War in 1848 dreamed of the vast mineral potential of the country they had wrested from their southern neighbor," writes Duane A. Smith, author of Rocky Mountain Mining Camps. "Few would have believed that within a generation this land would be criss-crossed by prospectors in search of gold and silver, that valuable deposits would be found, and that permanent settlement would rapidly follow." Yet, from the first gold rush into the Rockies in 1859 to the "playing out" of most of the area's gold fields in the 1890s, a previously unsettled wilderness experienced urbanization and some crude, Western mining camps were transformed into burgeoning cities overnight. In this absorbing history of a number of Rocky Mountain mining settlements, Smith traces the cycle of this frontier phenomenon as camps pop up, experience the uncontrolled booms associated with gold and silver discoveries, and either die with the depletion of resources or survive as permanent agricultural and mining communities.
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