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Sometime around 1872, a Los Angeles newspaper published a line that reads, in retrospect, like an epitaph drafted before the funeral.
Describing Cerro Gordo, the booming silver mining camp perched in California’s Inyo Mountains, the paper called it “the silver cord that binds our present existence. Should it be unfortunately severed, we would inevitably collapse.”
Within a generation, the furnaces had gone cold, the water had run dry, and the prospectors had scattered. Cerro Gordo became exactly what its boosters feared: a ruin.
This is the oldest American story, stained in ore and timber and railroad grease. First, a new resource captures our attention. Then, a town erupts around it, frantic and hopeful, certain that this deposit, this junction, this mill is different from all the others, that it will hold. Finally, the deposit thins, or the junction gets bypassed, or worse… the town does not disappear so much as lose the thread of its own reason for existing.
