Silver City has been told many times, and not every telling agrees with the record. This chapter takes a narrower path. Every fact below comes from a source that was checked line by line for the Grant County Atlas, and each paragraph ends with links to the sources it rests on. Where the sources disagree, the disagreement stays in the story. Where they are silent, the story says so.
The sources are of several kinds, and it helps to know which is speaking. National Register nominations, county histories and government reports were written by people who went looking, though sometimes long after the events. Newspapers of the time reported news as it reached them, often second-hand, and they are quoted here as what the paper reported, not as settled fact. And some of the most vivid passages come from people who lived there, in memoirs and in interviews recorded by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. Their memories are given as memories.
The six parts below run in order, from the springs before 1870 to the town today. Each part is also an Atlas page, where every sentence is tied to its checked fact.
Before 1870: the springs at San Vicente
The springs of San Vicente
Every town stands on ground that has an earlier story. This page gathers what the written records and remembered accounts say about the years before Silver City, who was there and how we know. Where the sources disagree, they are set side by side.
The 1976 National Register nomination for the Silver City Historic District says the springs where the town now stands had been known since the Spanish period as La Ciénega de San Vicente, the springs of San Vicente. The same nomination calls the spot a favorite campsite of the Apaches, who, in its words, bitterly fought any intrusions. George B. Anderson’s 1907 history of New Mexico describes the town as founded on a favorite camping ground and watering place of both the Navajos and the Apaches. To Anderson, that was the reason Silver City became the focus of their hostilities. (Sources: Silver City Historic District, Item 8; George B. Anderson, p. 727.)
An Apache homeland
What did this country mean to the people who lived in it? Geronimo answered in 1906, when he told his life story to S. M. Barrett through the interpreter Asa Daklugie. He said he was reared in the country around the headwaters of the Gila River. He called that range his people’s fatherland, where their homes were hidden among the mountains and their fields lay in the scattered valleys. His own Bedonkohe people, he said, lived in the mountain country west of the east line of Arizona and south of the Gila’s headwaters. East of them lived the Chi-hen-ne, the Ojo Caliente or Hot Springs Apaches, and Geronimo called their chief, Victorio (he spelled it Victoria), always a friend. (Sources: Geronimo’s Story of His Life, Chapter III, Chapter II.)
Robert Golden remembered another use for the region’s springs. Golden, interviewed by Frances Totty in 1938, said that in the early days the Indians went to the springs at Hudson Hot Springs, the present Faywood, to bathe when they were ill. It was said, he added, that once a year the whole tribe camped there and took sweat baths. For this, it was said, they built an adobe house heated with hot rocks and covered with blankets. (Sources: (Early Days In Grant County).)
The 1860s brought a loss that Apache people still name. The Fort Sill Apache Tribe, descendants of the Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apaches, says Mangas Coloradas was killed in 1863 when he came in to try to negotiate with the United States, and was instead taken captive and killed. Geronimo told Barrett the same story: about 1863 the chief, whom he called Mangus-Colorado, went to make a treaty of peace with the white settlement and soldiers at Apache Tejo, New Mexico, and was treacherously captured and slain. Geronimo called it perhaps the greatest wrong ever done to the Indians. The Fort Sill Apache Tribe also remembers Victorio as a man who fought to make the United States honor its agreements to let his people stay in their homeland. (Sources: Fort Sill Apache Tribe; Geronimo’s Story of His Life, Chapter XIV.)
Hispanic families at the ciénega
Hispanic settlers were at the springs before the silver town, though the dates vary with the teller. The 1982 National Register nomination for the Chihuahua Hill Historic District, prepared by Drusilla Glaridge of the Silver City Museum, cites two accounts of a settlement called San Vicente at the site. Hank Smith, a founder of Pinos Altos, wrote in his memoirs of Mexicans at San Vicente in 1861, herding goats and sheep as meat for the miners. A 1937 interview for the WPA writers’ project dated San Vicente to 1858, when a “Ponseno family and followers” settled there to build a place of worship. The nomination warns that the oral histories in that project were not always accurate. Even so, it concludes that activity at the site had gone on for at least twelve years before the town of Silver City was founded in 1870. (Sources: Chihuahua Hill Historic District nomination, Item 8.)
Not every remembered account found settlers in the district. A 1937 WPA write-up, whose narrator is not named, recalled passing through the Santa Rita copper country in 1849. There were no Mexicans at Santa Rita then, the narrator said, because they had long since been driven out of the country by the Apaches. The same narrator remembered that the Kneeling Nun stood fully as high as the main cliff. (Sources: (Grant Co. in 1849).)
Gold, a fort and a new county
Two places set the scene before the town. The 1976 historic district nomination says that before Silver City was settled, the scene was set by Pinos Altos, where gold was discovered in 1859, and by Fort Bayard, established in 1866. Two years after the fort, the nomination says, Grant County was formed, and Pinos Altos soon became the county seat, the town that holds the county government. Anderson’s 1907 history gives a more exact date and names another seat: it says the county was created by the legislature on January 30, 1868, and that Central City was named its seat of government. A 1981 nomination by Susan M. Berry of the Silver City Museum adds that John A. Miller, who had come to Pinos Altos in 1866, was elected the first treasurer when Grant County was formed out of Doña Ana County in 1868. (Sources: Silver City Historic District, Item 8; George B. Anderson, p. 721; Silver City North Addition Historic District…, Item 8.)
The Bullards come to farm
Two nominations describe John Bullard and his companions settling at the springs. The 1976 historic district nomination says that early in the year after Grant County was formed, a group of prospectors including John Bullard, his brother James, John Swisshelm and William Milby decided to defy the Apaches and farm the land beside La Ciénega de San Vicente. A silver discovery, it says, turned that farmland into the site of Silver City. The 1975 nomination for the H. B. Ailman House puts it slightly differently: sometime in late 1868 or early 1869, several men, including John and James Bullard and A. J. Hurlbut, settled along the springs. (Sources: Silver City Historic District, Item 8; H. B. Ailman House, National Register nomination, Item 8.)
One writer puts the silver itself in this earlier period. John H. Schilling’s 1959 state geology guide says the Bullard brothers were on their way back from a failed search for a lost mine on the Frisco River in the spring of 1868. About 2 miles west of present Silver City, he writes, they found a rich silver deposit, later known as Chloride Flat. The page on the founding compares the dates different writers give. (Sources: Scenic Trips to the Geologic Past No. 5, p. 3.)
Conflict over the land
Two histories describe the conflict that followed. Schilling’s 1959 guide calls the Apaches “a constant menace well into the 1880’s.” Soldiers from Fort Bayard, near Silver City, were frequently called out to guard travelers, to offer protection during raids, or to avenge some act of violence, he writes. Anderson reports a mass meeting in Silver City, chaired by Richard Yeomans with William H. Eckles as secretary. It resolved that by spending $30,000 among volunteers, the Indians could be gathered onto reservations “where they will stay forever.” (Sources: Scenic Trips to the Geologic Past No. 5, p. 5; George B. Anderson, p. 729.)
Memories recorded in the 1930s show how harsh that conflict could be. Robert Golden told Frances Totty in 1938 of a standing reward of ten dollars to anyone who brought in evidence of having killed an Apache. He also recalled that the town’s stock was penned at night in a corral where the Masonic hall later stood. Raiders cut through its wall and drove the stock off, and a party set out at once after them. In Golden’s telling, John Bullard was killed in that pursuit, at what is now Bullard Peak. (Sources: (Early Days In Grant County).)
Other recollections from the same years are more mixed. Louis S. Goforth (the name is uncertain in the record) said in 1938 that the Indians were “never as bad as they were pictured.” As a rule, he said, the uprising started over some mistreatment the Indians had received. (Sources: (Early Days In Silver City and Grant Co.).)
Mrs. Tom Johnson remembered an Apache man who came to her door on the Washburn Ranch asking for food. She gave him all her bread, a pound of coffee, sugar and milk, and let him take all the jerky from her line. When he held out his hand and said “Shake,” she told him to go away; he bowed his head to the ground, got up, crossed himself and left. Tracks at the spring, she said, suggested that twelve or fifteen others had waited there. Another time, during a Geronimo scare, she fled up a canyon with her baby, only to learn that the “Indians” were a stray donkey. (Sources: (Early Days Around Silver City).)
The checked facts for this part, with their quotes and locators, are on the Atlas page Before 1870: the springs at San Vicente.
The silver strike and the founding, 1870 to 1872
A camp beside a spring
How a town begins depends on who tells the story. The accounts below come from memoirs, newspapers, official records and later histories, and they do not always agree. Where they differ, the Atlas sets them side by side.
Enos Culver, writing his memoir between about 1915 and 1926, remembered the start plainly. In 1870, he wrote, a prospecting party from Fort Bayard, back from the Ralston silver rush, went west only ten miles and camped under a large cedar tree near a large spring. “This was the very first beginning of a settlement on the ground where Silver City NM now stands,” he wrote. The 1976 National Register nomination for the Silver City Historic District dates the first Anglo-American settlement at the site a little earlier, to the late 1860s. (Sources: Enos and Jennie Culver Memoir, p. 24; Silver City Historic District, Item 8.)
The newcomers were not alone at the springs. Robert Golden, interviewed by Frances Totty in 1938, recalled that when his family came to the Ciénega, the present Silver City, a few Mexican people were living scattered around. A large spring stood where the Big Ditch is today, he said, where Main Street ran in the 1870s. John H. Schilling’s 1959 state geology guide says that by 1870 the mushrooming town had swallowed up an older Spanish village called San Vicente de la Ciénega, St. Vincent of the Marsh. That village, he writes, stood on a campsite of Gila and Mimbres Apaches, who held that the region was theirs. (Sources: (Early Days In Grant County); Scenic Trips to the Geologic Past No. 5, p. 3.)
Who found the silver?
The silver deposit at Chloride Flat made Silver City, but the sources name different finders and different years. The 1975 nomination for the H. B. Ailman House says the rich Chloride Flat strike was made in 1870 by James S. Campbell, and that within a few weeks a new town sprang up slightly to the north. Schilling’s road log credits John Bullard, in the spring of 1870, and says the find led to Silver City’s founding and early growth. Fayette A. Jones’s 1904 survey of New Mexico mines names Jim and John Bullard, J. R. Johnson, John Swishelm and others as the discoverers, in the spring of 1871. Ramon S. DeMark, writing in 2012, also lists Chloride Flat as located in 1871, and notes that most New Mexico silver mines closed after silver was demonetized, or dropped as a standard for money, in 1893. George B. Anderson’s 1907 history credits yet another group, “Judge Corbin and associates,” with discovering the chloride mines of Grant County, one of which, he says, produced silver worth over a million dollars. (Sources: H. B. Ailman House, National Register nomination, Item 8; Scenic Trips to the Geologic Past No. 5, p. 12; New Mexico Mines and Minerals, p. 53; New Mexico silver, para. 2; George B. Anderson, p. 739.)
What made the flat so rich? Schilling says the chief mineral was cerargyrite, a soft, waxlike silver chloride commonly called horn silver, found just below the surface. The flat took its name from that chloride mineral, and the ore was largely smelted, or melted down for its metal, in crude local adobe furnaces. Jones names argentite and cerargyrite as the two principal silver ores. He estimates that about $3,250,000 in silver came from this small area in a comparatively short time. Schilling gives a total of over $3,300,000, adding that most of the rich ore was mined in the first few years, though some mining went on until the 1930s. (Sources: Scenic Trips to the Geologic Past No. 5, p. 12; New Mexico Mines and Minerals, p. 53.)
Laying out a new town
Culver recalled that once assays, the tests of the ore’s metal content, showed rich silver, the party laid out a town. The Bullard brothers, John and James, and Joe Yankie claimed the prior right to a large share of the townsite and hired a surveyor. “I remember we met at midnight so the surveyor could adjust his instrument by the north star,” Culver wrote. Schilling adds that when the town was first laid out, someone suggested placing it away from the valley bottom for protection from flash floods, but the town grew in the bottom anyway. A 1981 nomination by Susan M. Berry says the area north of the first town was added as a northern extension of Kidder’s original townsite survey in the early 1870s. That North Addition was little built on until the early 1880s, and two of its blocks were first used as the town cemetery. (Sources: Enos and Jennie Culver Memoir, p. 24; Scenic Trips to the Geologic Past No. 5, p. 6; Silver City North Addition Historic District…, Item 7.)
The name came out of a crowded cabin, by Culver’s account. One of the Bullards moved to call the place “Silver Flat,” another amended it to “Silver City,” and Culver himself proposed “Silver Cliff.” When the vote was taken, Silver City had the majority, and the town was christened “without further argument.” Jones gives the reason plainly: Silver City took its name from the “phenomenal” silver finds about one and a half miles from town. (Sources: Enos and Jennie Culver Memoir, p. 24; New Mexico Mines and Minerals, p. 53.)
Building materials were hard won. Culver recalled trading a gold watch he had worn for thirteen years for 2,000 feet of pine lumber from a sawmill eight or ten miles away. He paid twenty dollars more for poor shingles, enough to roof a house 12 by 22 feet that he planned to build several blocks up the valley from the spring. The Ailman House nomination says even the brick was made locally, in a large kiln north of town. The 1976 district nomination adds that the well-to-do Anglo businessmen who established Silver City regarded adobe as an inferior material, so adobe buildings are rare in the historic district. (Sources: Enos and Jennie Culver Memoir, p. 24; H. B. Ailman House, National Register nomination, Item 8; Silver City Historic District, Item 7.)
The town grew fast, though the counts differ. Anderson says Silver City went from half a dozen permanent settlers in 1870 to some eighty buildings by February 1871. The Ailman House nomination says that within a year of its founding the town had one hundred permanent buildings. They fronted streets laid out in a gridiron, a grid of straight streets, which that nomination calls “totally foreign to New Mexico at that period.” The 1870 federal census already listed a “Town of Silver City” on two schedule pages, alongside Central City, Pinos Altos, Ralston City, Los Mimbres, San Lorenzo and the Fort Bayard garrison. Seven years later, in July 1877, the Las Vegas Gazette wrote that the site had been a wilderness seven years before, and called it now “the most enterprising wealthy and go-ahead town in the whole Territory.” (Sources: George B. Anderson, p. 727; H. B. Ailman House, National Register nomination, Item 8; 1870 Federal Census, Grant County, New Mexico; Las Vegas Gazette, July 21, 1877, page 1, p. 1.)
Life in the new camp
Everyday life meant long trips and constant guard, as Culver remembered it. At first the nearest store and post office were at Fort Bayard, so an armed party went there weekly for supplies while the rest stayed to guard the town. Sometimes a man was hired to fetch the mail, at 25 cents a letter. Everyone went armed, Culver wrote, and he worked his Twin Lode No. 2 shaft with a rifle against the wall and revolvers strapped on. (Sources: Enos and Jennie Culver Memoir, p. 25, p. 26.)
Carrying the mail could be risky work. An informant recorded as Louie Taren (the name is uncertain in the record) told Frances Totty in 1938 that he had run away from home at the age of eight with some cattle thieves and come to Silver City, where he had lived off and on for sixty years. He was once the courier for the district. More than once, he said, he was paid twenty dollars to ride at night on a company horse with letters from Silver City to the Black mill, eighteen miles away. He rode at night, he explained, because the Indians did not bother riders then, being “rather superstitious about fighting after sundown”; that was his belief, recorded as he gave it. (Sources: (Louie Taren).)
Culver also served as Justice of the Peace, and in that role, about 1870, he married the first couple ever married in the town; he admitted he had forgotten their names. He wrote more bluntly about another side of frontier life. Many Anglo men in the early Territory, he recalled, lived with Hispanic women without marrying them and turned them out when they married Anglo wives. He described one official’s long-time Mexican housekeeper being sent away in this way, and said such cases “were so common as to occasion very little comment.” (Sources: Enos and Jennie Culver Memoir, p. 25.)
People also remembered the town’s pleasures. Henry Brock, interviewed by Lou Blachly for the Pioneers Foundation in the 1950s, called early Silver City “the drinkingest town in the whole West,” where the judges, the lawyers and the businessmen all drank, as Stephen Fox quoted him in 2022. J. R. Kinyon, talking with Frances Totty in 1937, remembered slipping out a horse and saddle to ride fifteen or twenty miles to a dance. At other times the whole family went in the wagon or coach, and the entire countryside started gathering early in the day for a good dance. (Sources: Legacy of murder (Desert Exposure); (The Early Days In Silver City).)
Furnaces, mills and a slump
Getting silver out of the ore took work and skill. Culver recalled that the first silver was reduced in serpentine furnaces built of adobe by Mexicans, where the ore was mixed with plenty of galena, or lead ore, and melted. Horse-drawn arrastras, simple grinding mills, were also used. Anderson names L. B. Maxwell as the man who started the first ore mill, among founders who also included Harvey H. Whitehill, James Corbin, S. M. Ashenfelter and Col. Richard Hudson. Whitehill, by Anderson’s account, had come to New Mexico about 1866 or 1867 and worked placer mines, which wash loose metal from gravel, at Elizabethtown before moving to Silver City in 1870. Jones lists the mills and smelter at work in the district’s active days: the Wisconsin company, M. W. Bremen, the Tennessee Mining and Milling Company, the Cibola Milling Company and the Carrasco smelter. (Sources: Enos and Jennie Culver Memoir, pp. 26-27; George B. Anderson, pp. 727-728, p. 733; New Mexico Mines and Minerals, p. 53.)
Culver remembered a bad turn soon after. Lucien Maxwell had a stamp mill, a machine that crushes ore, on the road to Silver City. But his agent, frightened by stories of Indians, reported that the ore assayed only twelve dollars a ton, and Maxwell stopped the mill at the Mimbres, about thirty miles away, where it sat in empty buildings for some years. Property values collapsed. “At this time I could have bought half of Silver City for a song,” Culver wrote; a strip of land beside the hotel he was building, once priced way up, was now offered to him for an old revolver. Ralston, he said, was left to “owls and coyotes.” (Sources: Enos and Jennie Culver Memoir, p. 27, p. 28.)
The town fought back with a prize, in Culver’s telling. It promised mining shares to whoever first ran a stamp mill. A German company built one, but a Mr. Breman moved his steam sawmill into town, converted it, and won the bonus first. Maxwell’s mill was later bought and brought in, and Anchetta, a Mexican, enlarged his furnace. Prospecting went on, too: in October 1872 the Las Cruces Borderer, reprinted in the Las Vegas Gazette, reported that a miner prospecting in the Chloride district at Silver City had found an old filled-up shaft and tunnel with silver ore. (Sources: Enos and Jennie Culver Memoir, p. 28; Las Vegas Gazette, October 5, 1872, page 2, p. 2.)
Bullard’s death and a hard war
John Bullard, named in several accounts as a founder, died in the fighting with the Apaches, but the sources tell his death in different ways. The Ailman House nomination says he was killed by Apaches near Clifton, Arizona, in 1871. Jones says it happened the winter after the silver discovery: an Apache man, mortally wounded in the back and lying on his belly, leveled a pistol in both hands and shot Bullard through the heart. Anderson writes that Bullard died at the hands of an Apache while leading a Silver City expedition against the tribe near the San Francisco River, after which a public meeting passed resolutions. Schilling dates it to July 11, 1871: after a raid on Silver City, he writes, Bullard got together a company that chased and defeated the Apache war party; as Bullard bent over an Apache thought to be dead, the man grabbed his gun and shot him through the heart. Schilling places the shooting on the peak that now bears Bullard’s name, and Jones says Bullard’s Peak, west of Silver City, was named for him. (Sources: H. B. Ailman House, National Register nomination, Item 8; New Mexico Mines and Minerals, p. 53; George B. Anderson, p. 728; Scenic Trips to the Geologic Past No. 5, pp. 5-6.)
Newspapers reported the violence as it happened. In November 1872 the Las Vegas Gazette reprinted, in Spanish, a report from El Fronterizo of Las Cruces. It said three men had just been killed by Apaches a few miles from Pinos Altos, near Fort Bayard and Silver City, at the place where Mr. Bremen once had his machine. The same report noted that some men around Silver City were looking toward Sonora with warlike intent, and its editors told them they had enemies enough close to home. The page on the years before 1870 gives accounts from Apache sources. (Sources: Las Vegas Gazette, November 23, 1872, page 3, p. 3.)
County seat and a failed charter
Within a few years Silver City also became the county seat, the town that holds the county government. Culver recalled that in the first election after the town became a voting precinct, he was elected Justice of the Peace without even knowing he was a candidate, and Dick Hudson was elected probate judge. Silver City became the home of all the county officers, he wrote, and it was not long before the county seat moved there from Pinos Altos. The year of that move depends on the source. Hubert Howe Bancroft’s 1888 history says the seat was first at Central City, moved to Pinos Altos in 1869 and to Silver City in 1872. A 2017 memorial of the New Mexico Senate says Silver City was designated the county seat in 1871. (Sources: Enos and Jennie Culver Memoir, p. 25; History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530-1888, ch. 31; Senate Memorial 30.)
Town leaders also wanted Silver City incorporated, that is, made a legally organized town with its own government. The 2017 memorial says that in 1872 they proposed a bill to the territorial legislature to allow it, but the bill failed to pass. The memorial also says the territory’s Republican administration had reduced the number of legislative representatives to the territorial government from four to two, without giving a year, and that Silver City’s leaders felt disenfranchised. The same memorial calls Silver City the oldest continuously incorporated municipality in New Mexico. (Sources: Senate Memorial 30.)
A trading town and its neighborhoods
The 1976 district nomination says Silver City soon became the commercial center for nearby mining camps in southwestern New Mexico and eastern Arizona, including Georgetown, Shakespeare and Clifton. Merchants came early. Isaac N. Cohen, born in Jerusalem, had clerked for Henry Lesinsky in Las Cruces; by 1872 he had moved to Silver City and opened his own store, and in 1884 he joined the Lesinskys and Freudenthals in forming the Silver City Bank. Anderson says Owen L. Scott founded Mining Life in 1872, the first newspaper in Grant County, with its first issue in May. Anderson also says the builder Robert Black came to Silver City on March 2, 1872, and went on to erect nearly all of the important buildings in the city and county. (Sources: Silver City Historic District, Item 8; George B. Anderson, p. 741, p. 736.)
Newcomers from Mexico built their own neighborhood. The 1982 Chihuahua Hill nomination says an immigration of people from Mexico into Silver City, starting in the 1870s, formed the small Spanish-speaking community of Chihuahua Hill, which it describes as the original Mexican village of Silver City. On the earliest surveys the area was called “South Addition.” The rocky, north-facing hillside was not considered a prime building site by the Americans, but it suited the Mexican newcomers, being near the mills and the commercial center. There they found work as builders, freighters, wood haulers, farmers, miners and ranchers. The 1982 nomination describes the historic district as about 30 acres, bounded by Cooper, Spring, Bullard and Chihuahua streets. (Sources: Chihuahua Hill Historic District nomination, Item 8, Item 7.)
Old photographs show how the hill grew. The nomination says 1870s photos of Chihuahua Hill show one-room stone and adobe houses, some partly dug into the hillside, while 1880s photos show flat-roofed stone and adobe compounds. Some houses stood before the streets were cut, so Texas, Sonora, Bremen and Bullard streets are all blocked by houses that were there first. The memory of the place lives on in families. Curator Javier Marrufo, writing in 2023, recalled how Rosa V. Castillo, his maternal grandmother’s adopted tía, would say in bittersweet reminiscence, “Aye, como pasan los años,” how the years go by, as younger generations grew up around her. (Sources: Chihuahua Hill Historic District nomination, Item 7; Nuestra Voz: The Chihuahua Hill Story and….)
Rails, freight and builders
Later on, rails connected the town to the wider country. Bancroft’s 1888 history notes that the Southern Pacific Railroad crossed the county from west to east, while the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe came to Deming and had a branch to Silver City. J. R. Kinyon and Pat Deene, interviewed in 1937, recalled the early railroad station in the west part of town and a flood that washed the tracks away. Afterward the railroad placed its station at the edge of town, which one of them called “a wise thing.” (Sources: History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530-1888, ch. 31; (The Early Days In Silver City).)
Wagons still carried freight to the mountain mines. Frank Ramsey Jr. told Frances Totty in 1938 that his father, Frank Ramsey Sr., freighted from Alma to Cooney Canyon with twelve head of horses, hauling all the machinery and supplies to the Enterprise mine. In 1903 the family moved to Silver City so the children could go to school, and his father then freighted from Silver City to Mogollon, over hills and canyons the freighters had named, such as Hells Hill and Drunk Mans Canyon. The freighters tried to load a thousand pounds per animal and allowed about fifteen days for the round trip, Ramsey said, but high water could stretch it to forty-five days. When the first two trucks tried the road from Silver City to Mogollon, he recalled, it took six weeks to cover fifty-four miles, and the loads had to go onto freight wagons. (Sources: (Freighting In Silver City).)
Builders kept shaping the streets. The 1976 district nomination says Elizabeth Warren not only continued her husband’s business after his death in 1885 but enlarged it, and started a contracting business that laid most of the concrete sidewalks in Silver City. In a 1937 interview, Mrs. O. S. Warren described how such work could begin: she discovered clean sand on her own property, laid her own sidewalks, then built her neighbors’ walks, and so went into contracting, building dwellings and remodeling business houses. The same district nomination describes a two-story brick building put up by John S. Swift in the late 19th century, on Bullard between Yankie and Market. It was long occupied by O. C. Hinman, who kept a furniture store, undertaking parlors and a photography shop under one roof. (Sources: Silver City Historic District, Item 8; (Mrs. O. S. Warren) ’Early Days Around…; Silver City Historic District nomination, Item 7.)
What did the early town look like from above? No bird’s-eye, or panoramic, view of Silver City turned up in the Library of Congress online map collections when they were checked on November 9, 2026. A search there for “silver city new mexico” returned eleven hits, and the only Silver City items were seven Sanborn fire insurance maps, dated 1883 to 1917. (Sources: Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Silver City.)
Silver City’s beginnings are a story with many tellers and more than one start date. The sources on this page leave their disagreements in place, and so does the Atlas. Each paragraph names its sources, so every statement can be followed back to where it came from.
The checked facts for this part, with their quotes and locators, are on the Atlas page The silver strike and the founding, 1870 to 1872.
The mining town, 1873 to 1889
A town built on silver
This page follows Silver City through its years as a young mining town. It looks at the mines and mills, the courts and the town charter, the newspapers, the families who built on its hillsides, the wars that came close to its edges, and the railroad. Most of what follows comes from newspapers of the time, later recollections, and the careful histories written for National Register nominations, and each is named as it appears.
Much of the story begins at Chloride Flat. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Mineral Resources Data System record for the Chloride Flat mines gives their major production as running from 1873 to 1893, and gives the discovery variously as 1871, 1872 or the early 1870s. In 1879 the Silver City Herald, reprinted in the Las Vegas Daily Gazette, described the Chloride district, about a mile and a half west of town, as the place that had furnished the bulk of the ore that kept the mills running in the past few years. The ore there did not lie in tidy lines. H. C. Hodge, writing from Silver City in April 1875 to the Arizona Citizen in Tucson, said the formation was limestone and that the mineral was found in pockets and deposits, not in true fissure veins, which are bands of ore filling long cracks in the rock. (Sources: Chloride Flat Mines; Daily Gazette, p. 1; Arizona Citizen, p. 1.)
Ore is only rock until a mill frees the metal from it, and the newspapers of 1875 followed the mills closely. In April the Las Vegas Gazette, condensing the Grant County Herald, reported that the Wisconsin mill was running on ore from Chloride Flat and paying “big”, and that J. F. Bennett & Co. had shipped $24,235 in silver bullion since February 5. Bullion is refined metal in bulk, ready to ship. Hodge’s letter that spring said the roasting furnaces at Bennett’s mill had been doing big work, turning out large amounts of rich silver bullion, and that Bremen & Co. were running the Wisconsin works and doing well. The same Gazette carried word from Frank Manzanares, back from a tour of the southern country, that the Silver City and Mimbres mining districts were picking up and that the production of copper and silver bullion was constantly increasing. (Sources: Las Vegas Gazette, p. 2; Arizona Citizen, p. 1.)
One mine owner’s name keeps returning. In December 1875 the Herald, as reprinted in the Arizona Citizen, described a thirty-pound piece of silver ore dug at a depth of 120 feet from J. W. W. Bremen’s mine, the ’76, in Chloride Flat, and meant for the Centennial mineral cabinet. The paper gave its assay value, the result of a test for its metal content, as $12,890.04, without saying what unit that figure measured. The same column reported that J. F. Bennett & Co.’s new brick warehouse was nearing completion. Four years later the Herald described Bremen’s Chloride Flat mine as having an engine shaft 220 feet deep, and said he had worked there continuously for eight or nine years and taken out nearly a million dollars in silver. (Sources: Arizona Citizen, p. 3; Daily Gazette, p. 1.)
Gold turned up as well, sometimes in unexpected places. In October 1875 the Las Vegas Gazette, citing the Grant County Herald, reported that during the late floods the citizens of Silver City took the chance to wash gold in the streets, gold that the water had carried down from the gulches north of town. Prospectors also looked farther out. A National Register nomination for his house says Henry B. Ailman arrived in Silver City as a prospector in 1871, and that in November 1874 he and H. M. Meredith found the Naiad Queen silver mine at Georgetown, which they sold in 1880 for $160,000. (Sources: Las Vegas Gazette, October 2, 1875, page 1, p. 1; H. B. Ailman House, National Register nomination, Item 8.)
By the summer of 1877 an outside paper could sum up the whole district. A Las Vegas Gazette survey of New Mexico cities and towns that July called Silver City the county seat of Grant County and listed it as one of only two incorporated cities in New Mexico. It said millions of pounds of copper ore were exported from the district every year for refining in the East, and that the furnaces, reduction works, stamp mills and arrastras nearby produced one of the principal items of export in gold and silver. A stamp mill crushes ore under heavy falling weights; an arrastra is a simpler mill in which a dragged stone grinds the ore. New mines, the Gazette said, were discovered almost daily. It also called Silver City American in every respect except for “the costly machine of city government”, in which its citizens did not believe, and it said that even strong opposition could not create a livelier and spicier paper than the Silver City Herald, then the town’s only newspaper. (Sources: Las Vegas Gazette, July 21, 1877, page 1, p. 1.)
Young Henry Antrim
The boy later known as Billy the Kid spent part of his youth in this mining town, and the sources here give only a few documented points. PBS’s American Experience timeline gives March 1, 1873 as the date Catherine McCarty married William Antrim in Santa Fe, and says that before long the family settled in Silver City. A 2023 HistoryNet article by Melody Groves gives the same wedding date and places it at Santa Fe’s First Presbyterian Church. Both sources give September 16, 1874 as the date of Catherine Antrim’s death, PBS placing it in Silver City and HistoryNet giving her age as 45. (Sources: Billy the Kid timeline (American Experience); Catherine Antrim, Billy the Kid’s mother.)
A year later the boy was in trouble with the law. PBS says Henry was arrested on September 23, 1875 for his role in a theft with George Schaefer, who lived in the same boardinghouse, and was charged with larceny, the legal term for theft. The story often told about that theft is, in PBS’s own words, legend: that Henry kept lookout while Schaefer robbed a Chinese laundry operator of clothing and two pistols. PBS dates Henry’s escape from the county jail to September 25, 1875, when he climbed up through the chimney, and says the Silver City Herald reported the escape the next day. According to PBS, he probably headed out to Chloride Flats, where his stepfather was mining. (Sources: Billy the Kid timeline (American Experience).)
County seat and town charter
Silver City also became the seat of county government in these years, though the sources tell the story in different ways. The 1975 National Register nomination for the H. B. Ailman House says Grant County was formed from Doña Ana County on January 30, 1868, and that Silver City replaced Pinos Altos as county seat in 1874. George B. Anderson’s 1907 History of New Mexico adds detail. He says an act approved January 8, 1869 made Pinos Altos the official custodian of the county records. He then quotes S. M. Ashenfelter, writing in the Silver City Independent in 1902, that a term of court was held at Pinos Altos in 1871, after which “the next legislature changed the county seat to Silver City.” Anderson himself states that Silver City had been the county seat continuously since 1874. (Sources: H. B. Ailman House, National Register nomination, Item 8; George B. Anderson, pp. 721-722.)
When Silver City became a town in law is even less settled, and the Atlas sets the accounts side by side. In September 1874 the Las Vegas Gazette already described it as an incorporated city, in a place where, the paper said, Apaches had held undisputed control only five years before. The 1976 National Register nomination for the Silver City Historic District says the town superseded Pinos Altos as county seat in 1874 and was incorporated by act of the territorial legislature two years later. A 2017 memorial of the New Mexico Senate says Grant County waited until 1876, the hundredth anniversary of the United States, to propose legislation that would let it secede from New Mexico and join Arizona. (Sources: Las Vegas Gazette, p. 2; Silver City Historic District, Item 8; Senate Memorial 30.)
Other sources point to 1878. The same 2017 Senate memorial says a bill for a territorial charter for Silver City was introduced on January 31, 1878 and passed unanimously, and that Governor Samuel Axtell signed the charter on February 15, 1878. Anderson’s history also gives February 15, 1878, describing incorporation by special act. Yet Anderson’s biography of Robert Black says the town was incorporated in May 1878, and that Black was elected its first mayor in April of that year and served two terms. Anderson’s list of town officers begins in 1878, with Robert Black as mayor and J. Porter as clerk, and names Martin W. Bremen as mayor in 1879. (Sources: Senate Memorial 30; George B. Anderson, p. 729, p. 737, p. 730.)
Brick, stone and a bucket brigade
Outside papers noticed the new buildings early. In September 1874 the Las Vegas Gazette praised Silver City as “the pride and honor of New Mexico”, describing costly and elegant business houses and private dwellings with stone fronts and brick walls, new mills, and a public school it said was well sustained. The 1976 nomination says Silver City set up a public school system in 1874, which it calls the first in New Mexico, and built a large two-story school building in 1882. The same nomination dates the pink stuccoed adobe St. Vincent de Paul Catholic church, at the northwest corner of Market and Bayard, to 1874. Adobe is building brick made of sun-dried earth. (Sources: Las Vegas Gazette, p. 2; Silver City Historic District, Item 8, Item 7.)
The town also had to fight fire, and its equipment did not always help. In January 1878 the Mesilla Valley Independent, reprinting the Grant County Herald, reported that the Silver City fire company was to be reorganized and its engine put in thorough repair, and that the grading of Main Street above Spring was nearly done. The same issue told what had happened when fire broke out in an outbuilding next to a brick building: the fire engine “about which we have heretofore boasted so much” was in no condition to be of service, but strong arms, plenty of water and wooden buckets saved the main building. According to the 1976 nomination, an 1880 town fire ordinance required any building in the downtown area to be built of stone, brick, iron or concrete, with a roof of slate, tile or metal. The National Register nomination for the H. B. Ailman House, built in 1881 of locally fired brick, names Robert Black as its builder. (Sources: Mesilla Valley Independent, p. 5; Silver City Historic District, Item 7; H. B. Ailman House, National Register nomination, Item 7.)
The town kept growing through the 1880s. Hubert Howe Bancroft’s history gives Grant County’s population as 4,539 in 1880, and puts Silver City, the county seat and mining centre, at about 3,000 people in the mid-1880s. A National Register nomination for the North Addition quotes the Silver City Enterprise of October 13, 1883 on “Mr. Potten’s new brick cottages on Ninth Street”, and notes that tax records from before 1884 do not survive to date such houses exactly. The same nomination says George H. Utter came to Silver City in 1886 and built the town waterworks, running the Silver City Water Co. from 1886 to 1891. (Sources: History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530-1888, ch. 31; Silver City North Addition Historic District…, Item 7, Item 8.)
Growth also changed where the dead could lie. The North Addition nomination says an 1876 territorial law barred cemeteries inside any city or town. It says the old burials on two town blocks were apparently not moved until after 1881, when John A. Miller agreed with the town council to move them outside the limits at his own expense in exchange for the land. (Sources: Silver City North Addition Historic District…, Item 7.)
Newspapers recorded much of this, and they also boosted the town. The Gazette’s 1874 piece gave part of the credit for the town’s flourishing to C. L. Scott, “the ever plucky and enterprising publisher of Mining Life.” Library of Congress records show that The Herald, published in Silver City from 1875 to 1877, was followed by The Grant County Herald, a weekly published by James Mullen that ran from July 28, 1877 to April 16, 1881, and then by The New Southwest and Grant County Herald from 1881 to 1882. The 1877 to 1881 run has not been digitized. Advertisements tell their own story: in 1885 the Silver City Enterprise carried one for George Bell’s Centennial Saloon. (Sources: Las Vegas Gazette, p. 2; Library of Congress catalog records: The Herald; Silver City Historic District, Item 8.)
Mexican families and Chihuahua Hill
Who lived in the young town? Hodge’s April 1875 letter to the Arizona Citizen put the population at about 1,000, about half of them Mexicans. The 1982 National Register nomination for the Chihuahua Hill Historic District says the rocky, north-facing hillside was not considered a prime building site by the Americans settling in Silver City. Mexican newcomers built there, and found work as builders, freighters (haulers of goods by wagon), woodhaulers, farmers, miners and ranchers. The nomination quotes the New Southwest of May 1882: “Much building is going on in the Chihuahua portion of town.” (Sources: Arizona Citizen, p. 1; Chihuahua Hill Historic District nomination, Item 7, Item 8.)
Faith gave the hill its other name. The nomination reports a claim by a Mr. Morales about an early place of worship, and says an 1874 map seems to bear it out, since it shows a stone altar inside a stone enclosure on a hill just south of Silver City. In 1885 a small chapel called La Capilla, paid for by two Mexican women, was built on the summit of Chihuahua Hill. The nomination says it was a prominent landmark for thirty years and that for many years the neighborhood itself was known as “La Capilla.” The Catholic parish declined to take the chapel over, and it was torn down in 1915. (Sources: Chihuahua Hill Historic District nomination, Item 8, Item 7.)
Trade with Mexico ran through the town as well. The 1976 nomination says Edward E. Stine came to Silver City from El Paso in 1875 and opened a saloon and billiard parlor, and that by 1880 he was deputy U.S. Collector of Customs, a post the nomination ties to the large Mexican trade passing through Silver City. Louis S. Goforth, as recorded in a 1938 Federal Writers’ Project interview, recalled leaving Tennessee in 1880 and arriving in Grant County in 1881 at “Old Town”, where Señor Peña was running the store, before he settled on the Mimbres. (Sources: Silver City Historic District, Item 8; (Early Days In Silver City and Grant Co.).)
The Apache wars come close
The National Park Service, in its account for Fort Davis National Historic Site, says the Warm Springs, or Chihenne, Apaches frequented southwestern New Mexico, southeastern Arizona and Chihuahua in Mexico, and that in May 1877 they were relocated to the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona. The army was a presence too. In December 1875 the Herald, reprinted in the Arizona Citizen, said Fort Bayard was to be garrisoned by six companies. In January 1878 the Mesilla Valley Independent, reprinting the Grant County Herald, reported that Lieutenant Wright had been ordered to patrol the mail route between Silver City and Camp Bowie with his Navajo scouts. (Sources: Warm Springs Apache; Arizona Citizen, p. 3; Mesilla Valley Independent, p. 5.)
The town itself figured in one event of 1879. According to the Park Service, a rumor that the leader Victorio would be taken prisoner and tried for a murder in Silver City caused the Warm Springs people to leave the Mescalero reservation in 1879, and Victorio never returned to a reservation. The newspaper reports of these months came from the settlers’ side. In October 1879 a wire dispatch citing a Silver City special to the Tucson Daily Star reported that Indians had been committing terrible depredations in the Rio Grande valley and southwest of Fort Cummings, with about forty people known to have been killed in four or five days. (Sources: Warm Springs Apache, paragraph 3; The Weekly Miner, p. 3.)
The dispatches of May 1880 carried the same alarm. A San Francisco dispatch quoted O. R. Smyth, a stage-line superintendent arriving from Silver City, as saying the whole country around Silver City was in a state of terror and demoralization, and that citizens had equipped, mounted and fed a volunteer company of fifty men to aid the military. A special from Shakespeare, New Mexico, passed on two reports from Silver City that Indians had killed a buckboard driver just west of Fort Cummings, captured and destroyed the mail, and killed a station keeper, and that mail service was suspended. Elizabeth Warren, interviewed in 1937, recalled that when she came to Silver City in 1882 the stagecoach had to be guarded because the Indians were “on the war path.” She also recalled that every woman carried a pistol, not to kill Indians but to kill herself if she were attacked, “as they were greatly mistreated.” (Sources: Helena Weekly Herald, June 3, 1880, page 3, p. 3; (Mrs. O. S. Warren) ’Early Days Around…, para. 2.)
One attack in 1883 fell on a Silver City judge’s family. Wire dispatches of March 29, 1883 reported that Apaches had killed Judge H. C. McComas of Silver City in Thompson’s canyon, about eighteen miles from Lordsburg, and had captured his wife and young son; a later dispatch reported both adults found dead and the child missing. A Silver City special to the Denver Republican said all the soldiers at Fort Bayard were in the field and that the country west of town was reported full of Indians. The story was retold years later in Geronimo’s Story of His Life, in a section that its editor, S. M. Barrett, said was given “as told by our own citizens and from the white man’s point of view.” Barrett wrote of a “Judge McCormick” ambushed in 1884 on the road from Silver City to Lordsburg, but both the name and the year are wrong: the event he describes is the killing of Judge McComas and his wife. (Sources: Helena Weekly Herald, April 5, 1883, page 6, p. 6; Geronimo’s Story of His Life, Chapter X.)
The violence fell on farmers, travelers and families. A man interviewed by the Federal Writers’ Project in 1938 recalled that in the summer of 1884 his father and eleven other farmers from the valley set out to sell fruit and vegetables in Silver City, where grapes brought 25 cents a pound, and were killed in an attack near Cookes Peak. During Geronimo’s outbreak in May 1885, a Silver City dispatch said families from the surrounding country had flocked into town panic-stricken. A dispatch printed in the Wichita Daily Eagle passed on a report that a small detachment of the Tenth Cavalry had fought Geronimo’s band in Cook’s canyon, and a separate Silver City dispatch on the same page reported that the bodies of a Mexican man, his wife and three children had been found five miles from town. Years later, in April 1888, the Silver City Enterprise printed a returning former resident’s memory of Geronimo and his people riding past his cabin door and firing as they went, and of his partner being killed nearby. (Sources: (Louie Taren); Wichita Daily Eagle, May 29, 1885, page 1, p. 1; This is Silver City, New Mexico, 1888-1890.)
Different sources describe the end of the wars from different sides. The 1976 National Register nomination says the region did not become safe from Apache attack until after Geronimo’s final surrender to Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, in 1886. The Fort Sill Apache Tribe tells the end from its own side. Its account says Chief Chihuahua led the first group shipped off as prisoners of war in March 1886, and that people were given false assurances before being sent to Florida. (Sources: Silver City Historic District, Item 8; Fort Sill Apache Tribe.)
The railroad comes from Deming
Before the railroad, goods reached Silver City by road. In October 1875 the Las Vegas Gazette reported that the road from Silver City to Socorro would be open for travel in about thirty days. The 1976 nomination says that before the railroad, all merchandise and machinery had to be freighted 100 miles west from Las Cruces or La Mesilla on the Rio Grande, at a cost of $1.25 per hundredweight, that is, per hundred pounds. That changed in 1883, when the 47-mile Silver City, Deming and Pacific Railroad was built from Deming to Silver City. (Sources: Las Vegas Gazette, October 2, 1875, page 1, p. 1; Silver City Historic District, Item 8.)
The line drew praise. The North Addition nomination says civil engineer Edmund G. Shields was chief engineer of the Silver City, Deming and Pacific project and oversaw the bringing of the Santa Fe branch into Silver City in 1883, and that a photograph of the day the silver spike was driven shows his name on the engine. In May 1883 the Las Vegas Daily Gazette called the railroad “a model enterprise” and said the work of its chief engineer, whom it named as E. O. Shields, had been highly complimented by men in his profession. The same paper reported that the fare would be six cents a mile. (Sources: Silver City North Addition Historic District…, Item 8; Las Vegas Daily Gazette, May 4, 1883, page 2, p. 2.)
Anderson’s biography of Robert Black says the railroad was completed to Silver City on May 1, 1883, and that Black, as mayor, had the honor of driving the silver spike. Later that month The Black Range, a newspaper from Robinson in Socorro County, reported that the Deming and Silver City railroad was open for travel with two trains a day. Both towns, it said, were enjoying a boom, with new buildings going up in all quarters. (Sources: George B. Anderson, p. 737; The Black Range, p. 2.)
Rough justice and town life
Law in the 1880s could be swift and harsh, at least as one resident remembered it. Elizabeth Warren recalled that one of the first things she saw in Silver City was the hanging of two men in the courthouse yard, next to the Southern Hotel where she first stayed. She also described a jailbreak in which four prisoners escaped and were surrounded by a posse at the old cemetery. In her telling, one got away and was later caught on the Mimbres, two were hanged at the cemetery, and the third was brought back because he had not fired a shot, and a prominent citizen was killed in the capture. “In 1884,” she said, “when a prisoner escaped and any one was killed the law dealt in a hurry not by trial, but by a noose and a nice large limb.” These are one woman’s memories, recorded more than fifty years later. (Sources: (Mrs. O. S. Warren) ’Early Days Around….)
The town had a Chinese community, recorded in the sources here in a building and in newspaper items. The 1976 nomination says Sheridan Row, a plastered, brick-faced adobe building of about 1880 at the northeast corner of Texas and Yankie streets, originally housed both homes and businesses of Silver City’s Chinese community. In February 1889 the Enterprise referred to the Chinese residents’ restaurants, laundries and junk shops. That April it reported that officials had raided Chinatown that week, arresting several people on charges of keeping opium joints, three of whom were convicted in Justice Lucas’ court. In a separate notice that month, the paper printed a proclamation by Sheriff H. H. Whitehill, dated April 24, 1889, that all persons in Silver City without visible means of support must immediately leave or find work. (Sources: Silver City Historic District, Item 7; Silver City Historic District nomination, Item 7; This is Silver City, New Mexico, 1888-1890.)
One woman’s recollection shows another side of town life. Elizabeth Warren recalled that her husband was an insurance agent with “one of the largest Co’s in the Southwest”, and that after he died in 1885 she took the company over and at the same time took to “collecting real estates.” The town also invited people seeking better health. An 1887 pamphlet from the Silver City Bureau of Immigration told invalids they could find well-furnished, bright, sunny hotel rooms and good board at reasonable rates, or private board with families, or pitch a tent wherever they pleased. Travel still had its risks: J. R. Kinyon, in a 1937 interview, recalled riding the train that was held up near Steins Pass in 1887 while he was coming home to Silver City for Thanksgiving. (Sources: (Mrs. O. S. Warren) ’Early Days Around…; Chasing the Cure in New Mexico, p. 41; (The Early Days In Silver City).)
By the end of the decade the Enterprise’s pages show a town looking outward. A transcription of its issue of January 27, 1888 reports that Denver capitalists had asked through Frank J. Wright about the condition of what the paper called the famous Santa Rita copper mines, 17 miles northeast of Silver City. An item that February mentioned two young daughters of a Georgetown man attending school at the Academy of Our Lady of Lourdes in Silver City. In November 1889 the paper reported that seven wagons had been loaded in Silver City in a single day the week before, bound for the Mogollon country. (Sources: This is Silver City, New Mexico, 1888-1890.)
The voices on this page, from editors and correspondents to neighbors, travelers and Apache people, did not always agree. Where they differ, the Atlas sets them side by side and leaves readers to weigh them in their own words.
The checked facts for this part, with their quotes and locators, are on the Atlas page The mining town, 1873 to 1889.
Floods, health seekers and the Normal School, 1890 to 1929
Silver City around 1890
This page is about money, water, sickness and schooling in Silver City around the turn of the century. It draws on newspaper columns, official reports and memories, and it follows them step by step, letting each source speak in its own words and saying plainly where the sources disagree.
A small town’s worries show up clearly in its newspaper. In January 1890 the Silver City Enterprise reported ‘considerable excitement’ in town when a man with a well-defined case of smallpox arrived on the train. The same issue said that on the Monday morning the acting mayor made arrangements with Howard H. Betts to use a power house about a quarter of a mile north of the water works. The patient was taken there, away from other people, and, in the paper’s words, ‘made comfortable.’ (Sources: This is Silver City, New Mexico, 1888-1890.)
The same paper could also be playful. A February 1890 item joked about ‘twenty-five babies in Silver City in four months.’ It passed along Charley Davenport’s claim that ten babies had been born in the last thirty days and that fifteen more were expected within three months. The Enterprise admitted that this ‘may sound extravagant.’ (Sources: This is Silver City, New Mexico, 1888-1890.)
Schooling drew comment too. Many years later, a March 1952 New Mexico Magazine article, reprinted in a compilation of Enterprise items, looked back at the town’s early public school. It said that when M. R. Koehler became superintendent, the Silver City school had only four rooms, with a fifth added soon after. Even so, the article claimed that, apart from Raton, Silver City alone in the Territory had a public school of any importance. (Sources: This is Silver City, New Mexico, 1888-1890.)
When silver fell
Then came 1893. The National Register nomination for the Silver City Historic District, prepared by Sylvia Cook and John O. Baxter, says the town suffered from the fall in silver prices that followed the repeal of the Sherman Act that year, as all western mining towns did. Yet the nomination adds that by then Silver City’s economy was hardy enough to withstand the blow. In its account, several other enterprises cushioned the shock: iron deposits at Fierro, gold at Mogollon, copper at Hanover and Santa Rita, an expanding livestock industry, and the Normal School. (Sources: Silver City Historic District, Item 8.)
The silver mines of Chloride Flat show the pattern in a single district. L. Michael Kaas, in a historical tour guide written for the Mining History Association, dates their most important production years to 1873 through 1893. After that, he writes, mining there continued only sporadically until 1923. Interest revived briefly in 1934-1937, when the government set an artificially high silver price. (Sources: L. Michael Kaas.)
Gold and other work kept the town busy. In November 1895 The Eagle reported that the Pacific Gold Company’s mill at Silver City was running day and night on ore from the company’s mine at Pinos Altos. On the same page the paper sounded a warning. Fuel, it said, was going to be a serious question around Silver City, because the price of wood had gone up twenty-five percent in a single month. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 3.)
Founding the Normal School
One of the cushions the nomination named was a school. A normal school was a school for training teachers, and Silver City’s was created by the territorial Laws of 1893, chapter 19, the same act that created a second school at Las Vegas. The statute still calls the Silver City institution the ‘New Mexico normal school,’ and its compiler notes that it is now Western New Mexico University. Writing two years after the act, in February 1895, The Eagle explained how the schools were paid for. The legislature made no direct appropriation; instead the schools were to be funded by a tax on all taxable property. (Sources: NMSA 1978 Section 21-3-1; The Eagle, p. 1.)
The town gave the school its ground. According to The Eagle, the Silver City town council donated a tract of land within the city limits as the site, twenty acres by the paper’s count. The school opened on Monday morning, 3 September 1894, with exercises at the Presbyterian church, which The Eagle said had lent its building rent free so the school could begin. About forty pupils attended, and Mayor Fleming presided. Regent W. G. Ritch spoke about the site, the building contract and the choice of teachers, and on 12 September The Eagle printed in full the address of Prof. Miles, who spoke for the board of regents. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 1; The Eagle, p. 1; The Eagle, p. 6.)
Building began almost at once. The Eagle reported that the cornerstone was laid on 14 September 1894 with Masonic ceremonies, before a crowd the paper put at fully two thousand people, and that a special train chartered by the McGrorty commandery of Deming brought many visitors. Classes, meanwhile, met in a temporary building provided by the board, with Prof. George Selby as principal. A contract for $10,800 covered putting up the new building and finishing its lower story. By November 1894 The Eagle said the school had been in session two months, that attendance had grown from 36 to 60, and that it would be crowded until the new building was done. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 1; The Eagle, p. 3.)
Running a new school took money and attention. In February 1895 The Eagle listed the five-member board of regents: J. W. Fleming, president; George W. Miles, secretary; Horace J. Loomis, W. G. Ritch and W. C. Hadley. The paper said the inside of the building was still unfinished. That October, under a headline saying the school would get over nine hundred dollars that had been tied up, The Eagle reported that Ritch and Loomis had asked the Solicitor General to correct a March 1895 transfer of money from the normal school fund to the court expense fund. He gave the opinion that the transfer should have been made pro rata, that is, in proportion, and advised the auditor to follow the regents’ suggestions. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 1; The Eagle, p. 6.)
By June 1896 the school was holding closing exercises. The Eagle described the closing exercises in June 1896, held at the church that was being used as a school house, before a crowded audience; Prof. Selby addressed the pupils, and the junior class gave a reception for the graduating class. In March 1898 The Eagle reprinted an article signed O. L. R. from the Santa Fe New Mexican that called the Territorial Normal School ‘the pride of southwestern New Mexico’ and said it had been established by an act of the legislature in 1893. The writer said the school had begun work in the Presbyterian church and a rented room downtown, and that the present building was partly completed late in the fall of 1896. Enrollment stood at 69, a kindergarten had been added, and Professor C. M. Light, the article said, would gladly answer any questions about the Normal. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 3; The Eagle, p. 1.)
A busy town in the 1890s
Between the headlines, the newspapers recorded ordinary town life. In November 1894 The Eagle announced that the first meeting of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific circle of Silver City would be held at a private home on Thursday, 8 November. In June 1896 it noted that a man had taken a five-year lease on the Mogollon telephone line and that the Silver City Water Works Co. had a new bookkeeper. The same issue promised a grand Fourth of July celebration, with all kinds of races, games, a bicycle parade and a ball, and reported on the Democratic county convention held at the Morrill opera house. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 3; The Eagle, p. 3.)
New buildings went up downtown. The historic district nomination says local businessman George Bell built the Bell Block at Arizona and Broadway in two phases, in 1897 and 1906, with shops downstairs and a large ballroom on the second floor. Entertainment was plentiful: in January 1898 The Eagle counted five entertainments at the opera house in a single week and remarked that it ‘looks as though Silver City amounted to something.’ The same paper was less pleased about the streets at night. It asked what had become of the electric light scheme and complained that, except when the moon shone, Silver City was ‘as dark as the ace of spades.’ (Sources: Silver City Historic District, Item 7; The Eagle, p. 1.)
Disease was never far from mind. In January 1898 The Eagle reported that smallpox was spreading along the Rio Grande valley for a hundred miles above Val Verde, with many deaths among Mexican residents, and it noted that for weeks early reports of the disease had been denied in the papers. A week later the paper told readers there was no danger at present from smallpox in Silver City. ‘The smallpox scare has subsided,’ it wrote, and the vaccinated were ‘fast becoming well again.’ (Sources: The Eagle, p. 7; The Eagle, p. 3.)
News from the wider region also reached the town. In November 1894 The Eagle reprinted a Deming Headlight report that a man working on the Gray ranch in the Animas Valley had been shot from ambush by Indians. The report said Indians ‘supposed to be the Kid and his band’ had been seen in the valley for some weeks, and then called the shooting ‘undoubtedly their work.’ Geronimo described the land in very different terms. In his life story, taken down and edited by S. M. Barrett and published in 1906, Geronimo asked that his people be allowed to return to their homeland in Arizona, the land ‘which the Almighty created for the Apaches,’ calling it ‘my land, my home, my fathers’ land.’ He said that if they were placed ‘in that mountainous region lying around the headwaters of the Gila River’ they would live in peace. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 3; Geronimo’s Story of His Life, Chapter XXIII.)
The flood of July 1895
On the night of Sunday, 21 July 1895, the weather turned. The Eagle’s report ran under the headline ‘An Awful Flood. Buildings Swept Away By Angry Waters.’ It said that soon after 8 o’clock it began to rain, and that before 9 the rain was coming down in torrents. A press dispatch sent from Silver City at noon on the Tuesday after the flood, printed by Associated Press papers and reprinted by The Eagle, said five inches of rain fell in the city between 9 o’clock and midnight. Within minutes, that dispatch said, the business streets were filled with a flood from four to eight feet deep. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 3; The Eagle, p. 1.)
The water came in more than one wave. The Eagle reported that a later surge from the Bear Mountain region raised the water in Bullard, Main and Hudson streets until it ran into nearly every house and place of business on those streets in the lower part of town. At the Tremont House hotel, the paper said, the rise came almost without warning, and in a few minutes the whole first floor was covered to a depth of more than three feet. Water stood about three feet deep in O. C. Hinman’s furniture store. Measured at the Tremont House office, The Eagle said, this flood was more than three feet higher than the flood of late July 1886, which had been the biggest Silver City had seen in many years; old inhabitants agreed that only one flood had ever been higher than that of 1886. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 3; The Eagle, page 4; The Eagle, p. 4.)
Daylight showed the damage. According to The Eagle, the big post office safe, which weighed more than a ton, was carried off and found on Monday morning in the arroyo, the dry stream channel, several hundred feet below the post office. Part of the Broadway Hotel’s west wall fell and everything on its first floor was ruined; the post office lost its east wall; Morrill Hall was badly damaged; and the furniture in Mayor Fleming’s office was ruined and many documents spoiled. The Southwest-Sentinel went further, calling the Broadway Hotel almost a complete wreck in danger of collapse and Morrill Hall a complete loss. Adobe buildings, made of sun-dried mud brick, suffered too: The Eagle said a small one just south of the hide house was completely washed away, and others were swept off entirely. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 3; Southwest-Sentinel, p. 3; The Eagle, p. 4.)
Some residents had narrow escapes. The Eagle told of a woman living near the corner of Yankie and Texas streets who climbed on top of her furniture when the water broke through the wall of the Broadway corral. She was rescued by H. H. Whitehill, the paper said, but her home was a complete wreck and her furniture was washed away. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 3.)
How bad was it? The first reports did not agree, and the Atlas gives them side by side. Early dispatches reprinted by The Eagle included a report from Deming that the waters had dashed down the Timmer House and drowned twenty people. A Whitewater telegram on the same page said no human lives had been lost, and the later dispatch from Silver City itself also said no lives were lost. That Silver City dispatch said nine buildings were washed away and many others damaged, and that some put the loss as high as $100,000, ‘but this is probably excessive.’ The Southwest-Sentinel, by contrast, said the loss to residents and business men was variously estimated at $100,000 to $200,000, and reasoned that only a waterspout or cloudburst could explain so much water, which turned the streets into waterways with ‘mad torrents’ rushing through them. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 1; Southwest-Sentinel, p. 3.)
The flood also cut the town off. The Eagle reported that the railroad bridges between Silver City and Whitewater were gone, that more than three miles of track had been washed away, and that more than a hundred feet of embankment near the smelter was taken out; it put the railroad’s loss at probably more than $20,000. Telegraph communication was completely cut on the Monday after the flood. The next morning, the paper said, the line was restored and an office opened in a building below the bridge. The cleanup fell to working people too: The Eagle reported that Mexican workers spent all day Monday getting the water out of the basements under the stores of Max Schulz and Gillett & Son. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 4; The Eagle, page 4.)
From Main Street to the Big Ditch
At first the town decided to rely on itself. The Southwest-Sentinel reported that a citizens’ meeting at Newcomb hall on 26 July 1895 decided not to send out a circular asking for outside aid. Opposition to asking for help was ‘quite pronounced,’ the paper said, and $950 was pledged on the spot, with the mayor to appoint a committee to collect more. The city water works had been disabled and would take several days to repair, and the Sentinel added that wells and cisterns had been flooded and filled with filth and debris. A month after the flood, The Eagle reported that the water company had repaired the damage and that Silver City again had an abundant supply of water. (Sources: Southwest-Sentinel, p. 3; The Eagle, p. 6.)
Rebuilding went street by street. The Sentinel reported that the Broadway Hotel would be rebuilt at once, with some old walls taken down and the roof rebuilt. It also noted that a resident returning from the north found his office at the corner of Main and Yankie streets in bad condition, and that a merchant had strengthened his breakwater, a wall to turn the water, on Yankie Street. In August The Eagle reported that the Van smelter would be blown in again, that is, fired up, after being shut down since the flood by water damage to the works. The paper said one resident was having his property reshaped so that future floods from Chloride Flat would not sweep through his yard, and complained that the Lesinzhy building still stood in an unsightly and dangerous state on Main Street. In November 1895, The Eagle reported, the town marshal had an old adobe building at Main and Yankie streets torn down, because the July flood had left it unsafe. (Sources: Southwest-Sentinel, p. 3; The Eagle, p. 6; The Eagle, page 5.)
The flood left a permanent mark on the town’s shape. The historic district nomination describes a series of devastating floods that culminated in the 1895 inundation, which turned Main Street into a ‘yawning canyon’ and demolished the business houses on each side. Afterward, it says, Mrs. Elizabeth Warren took the contract to shore up the sides of the chasm, a project the WPA finished in the 1930s. The great gash was stabilized with concrete to stop further damage and came to be called San Vicente Arroyo, or more familiarly, ‘The Big Ditch.’ (Sources: Silver City Historic District, Item 7, Item 8.)
Mrs. Warren told her own version in a 1937 interview. She recalled that the flood ruined many buildings on Main Street and set the street sinking, and that she started the rock wall that the W.P.A. later finished. The flood, she said, isolated the hotel so badly that there was nothing to do but tear it down, ‘thus losing $40,000. and the best hotel in Silver City with the tearing down of San Vicente.’ (Sources: (Mrs. O. S. Warren) ’Early Days Around….)
A few buildings came through. The nomination says the red brick O. S. Warren house, completed in 1885, is the only remaining structure on original Main Street to have come through the 1895 flood. Isaac N. Cohen’s two-story store, built in 1881, was damaged in one of Silver City’s recurring floods when the buildings beside it were swept away, but its cast iron front, the nomination says, remains intact. (Sources: Silver City Historic District, Item 7.)
The water came back. Silver City correspondence dated 29 July 1902, printed in the Albuquerque Daily Citizen, said rains had been very light so far that month, yet it also reported that a woman long resident in the county had drowned in a flood on the Mangus. The same letter mentioned several mining deals pending and said the Normal School regents would let a contract for a gymnasium in September. The next summer brought another flood. The Santa Fe New Mexican printed a letter from a Silver City woman to her husband in Santa Fe describing a cloudburst on Tuesday afternoon, 11 August 1903. ‘The most of Silver City is now in ruins,’ she wrote, calling it the worst flood that had ever visited the town; every bit of the new $16,000 dam was washed away, she said, and the flood went clear through the Broadway Hotel. (Sources: Albuquerque Daily Citizen, July 30, 1902, page 1, p. 1; Santa Fe New Mexican, August 13, 1903, page 8, p. 8.)
A neighboring paper gave a different picture of the same flood. The Deming Graphic reported that the August 1903 floods undermined a section of the new dam in Main Street, which it valued at $15,000, and that repairs would cost about $2,500. It called it most fortunate that no lives were lost. The Graphic also said the rushing water carried away the breakwater behind the Silver City Mercantile company, sending part of the current through the store and causing a loss of about $1,000 to stock. The two accounts differ on the dam’s cost and on how much of it was lost, and the Atlas leaves both in place. (Sources: Deming Graphic, p. 1.)
Chasing the cure
Silver City also promoted its climate. In February 1898 The Eagle claimed that for years the town had ‘borne the name of being the sanitarium of the west’ and had long been a retreat for health seekers. The same editorial complained that there were not enough places to stay for everyone hoping to benefit from the climate, and called ‘the yearly crop of tourists’ one of the town’s chief products. Nancy Owen Lewis, writing in El Palacio, notes that boosters promoted Silver City as the city ‘with the Golden Climate,’ claiming the most healthful climate in New Mexico. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 1; Chasing the Cure in New Mexico, p. 41.)
Buildings for the sick went up as well. In August 1895 The Eagle reported that the big sanitarium at Hudson Hot Springs was going up rapidly, and that visitors said everything was being done ‘in the most thorough manner.’ In February 1898 the paper said that the charitable ladies connected with the local hospital could now meet its expenses without using the fund the territory had appropriated. In the same column it passed on word from people recently arrived from Arizona that miners there were finding it hard to get work, and that some were expected to come to the Santa Rita, Gold Hill and Pinos Altos camps. (Sources: The Eagle, p. 6; The Eagle, p. 1.)
Writers offered advice to the sick. In a June 8, 1900 article in the Silver City Enterprise, Charles Almy recommended ranch life for consumptives, people with tuberculosis: ‘He will be outdoors in the life-giving sunshine all day long, and that is what his condition demands.’ He warned, though, that it could be hard to get onto a ranch. One Army doctor, himself ill with tuberculosis, stayed on. According to the Fort Bayard nomination, Army surgeon Earl S. Bullock, himself a tuberculosis patient who had worked at Fort Bayard, remained in Silver City after leaving the Army, converted St. Joseph’s Hospital to a sanatorium in 1902 and opened the New Mexico Cottage Sanatorium in 1905. Lewis lists St. Joseph’s Sanatorium in Silver City among New Mexico’s church-run sanatoriums and also dates Bullock’s founding of ‘Cottage San’ to 1905. (Sources: Chasing the Cure in New Mexico, p. 41-42, p. 42; Fort Bayard Historic District, Section 8, page 31.)
Sanatoriums could also change hands. The Las Vegas Optic reported in 1909 that the Sunnyside Sanatorium for tubercular patients, a mile north of Silver City, had been sold by its owner and founder, B. Woodhull, to a newcomer from Kentucky. The Optic said Sunnyside had eighteen cottages besides its main building, along with a corral and seventy-one acres, and that Dr. L. B. Peters would stay on as medical director. In 1914 the Cottage sanatorium even appeared on film: the Deming Graphic, reprinting the Enterprise, said a moving-picture operator working with New Mexico’s San Diego exposition commission filmed Broadway and Bullard streets and the residence section, and took panoramic views of the whole city and of the Cottage sanatorium north of town. Across the state, Lewis writes, health seekers made up an estimated 10 percent of New Mexico’s population by 1920. (Sources: Las Vegas Optic, p. 3; Deming Graphic, October 23, 1914, page 4, p. 4; Chasing the Cure in New Mexico, p. 41.)
The Army hospital at Fort Bayard
Not far from town stood Fort Bayard. The Fort Bayard Historic District nomination says Fort Bayard, about six miles east of Silver City, became the U.S. Army’s first tuberculosis sanatorium, from 1899 to 1920. The Public Health Service ran it from 1920 to 1922, and the Veterans Bureau, later the Veterans Administration, ran it from 1922 to 1965. Its promoters stressed the setting: at 6,100 feet and with a dry, sunny climate, the fort lay within what believers in climate treatment called the ‘zone of immunity.’ (Sources: Fort Bayard Historic District, Section 7, page 5, Section 8, page 30.)
Patients and staff reached the fort by rail. They came by train to Bayard station, on a 14-mile line begun in 1891 as the Silver City and Northern and taken over by the Santa Fe railway in 1898. The local railroad already turns up in the papers in 1895, when The Eagle mentioned a stenographer working for the Silver City and Northern railroad company at Hanover. According to Major D. M. Appel’s 1900 report, as cited in the nomination, the sanatorium admitted 165 patients in its first eight months; of those, 14 died and 49 were discharged. (Sources: Fort Bayard Historic District, Section 8, Section 8, page 31; The Eagle, p. 3.)
By 1917 the hospital was a big operation. A Silver City dispatch of 11 July 1917 in the Albuquerque Morning Journal, citing ‘an authoritative though unofficial source,’ said the Fort Bayard army sanatorium was then caring for between 500 and 1,000 patients on a reservation of over 8,000 acres, and that it was to be enlarged to care for 5,000 patients or more. That dispatch placed the fort nine miles east of Silver City. (Or keep the sentence and add cl_sc1_mo017 to this paragraph’s claims.) It also claimed that Fort Bayard had shown the local climate to be ‘the very best.’ The same dispatch noted that Grant County had sent four more young men to the U.S. Navy that week. (Sources: Albuquerque Morning Journal, p. 5.)
In 1919 the town worked to keep the hospital. A Silver City Enterprise item reprinted in the New Mexico State Record of 2 May 1919 was headed ‘Crisis Probably Averted.’ It said replies to the Silver City Chamber of Commerce’s telegrams and letters showed that any effort to move the Army sanatorium to Denver would meet the strongest opposition, probably enough to keep it at Fort Bayard. Life inside the hospital reflected the times: citing the Silver City Independent of 8 July 1919, the nomination says a large tent was converted into a club for African-American patients, which it calls ‘indicative of the policy of segregation common to era.’ The local optimism did not hold. In late May 1920 the War Department closed the Army sanatorium and sent most of its patients to other facilities, many to the Army hospital in Denver. (Sources: New Mexico State Record, p. 5; Fort Bayard Historic District, Section 8, page 34, Section 8, page 35.)
The fort’s story did not end there. In February 1922, the nomination says, Treasury Department and Veterans Bureau officials announced plans for a modern new hospital at Fort Bayard. The Silver City Independent reported that it would make the sanatorium ‘the largest institution of its kind in the world,’ serving more than 1,000 patients plus 250 bed patients. (Sources: Fort Bayard Historic District, Section 8, page 36.)
Copper, schools and influenza
Meanwhile, copper drew new attention. Kaas writes that in the early 1900s two copper and lead smelters were operating at Silver City. The turning point for Santa Rita, he says, came in 1904, when John M. Scully saw that its ores resembled those of the Bingham Canyon Mine; the Chino Copper Company was formed in 1908, and open-pit mining, digging from the surface with steam shovels rather than through tunnels, began in 1910. Chino’s first concentrator, a plant to separate the valuable minerals from the rock, was built at Hurley in 1911, flotation circuits were added in 1914, and the Hurley smelter began production in 1939. At Tyrone, Phelps Dodge consolidated the properties in 1909 and built a planned community for its workers, but underground mining stopped in 1921 and the town was abandoned. (Sources: L. Michael Kaas.)
Writers kept counting the region’s wealth and people. George B. Anderson’s 1907 history gave Grant County a population of 12,883, with about 3,000 people in Silver City. In October 1914 the Deming Graphic, citing the Enterprise, reported that the exposition commissioner was gathering mineral specimens from every camp in the Silver City area and already had enough to claim it would be the finest mineral exhibit ever sent from New Mexico. Copper had its bad years too. A Silver City dispatch of 11 May 1921 in the Albuquerque Morning Journal admitted that the Chino Copper Company had recently shut down completely at Santa Rita and Hurley, but said the company’s 1920 annual report should remove any doubt that it would reopen. The item said an ore calculation begun in 1920 found in January 1921 that Chino had added over 11,000,000 tons of ore to its reserves, and its headline put total reserves above 105,000,000 tons. (Sources: George B. Anderson, p. 721; Deming Graphic, October 23, 1914, page 4, p. 4; Albuquerque Morning Journal, p. 7.)
Schooling in town was not the same for everyone. The Chihuahua Hill Historic District nomination says Lincoln School on South Cooper Street was built in 1915 as a new ward school for Chihuahua Hill. Mrs. O. S. Warren, secretary of the school board, wrote an editorial in the Enterprise of 29 June 1915 defending its construction, a defense that suggests there had been objections. In 1916, the nomination notes, the Enterprise said one Chihuahua Hill resident had lived in Silver City for fifty years, ‘since before Silver City was Silver City.’ Writing for the New Mexico Humanities Council, Javier Marrufo tells of an oral-history participant born in 1917 who recalled the semi-segregated schools of Silver City, where Spanish was suppressed in favor of English. In October 1918 the New Mexico State Record reported that Silver City had recruited a class of young women employed in household work for evening lessons, and that a part-time home-making class for Spanish-speaking housewives had been set up at the grammar school, taught through an interpreter. (Sources: Chihuahua Hill Historic District nomination, Item 7, Item 8; Nuestra Voz: The Chihuahua Hill Story and…; New Mexico State Record, p. 8.)
The town’s buildings grew more ambitious. Fleming Hall, the Normal School’s gymnasium, was built for $25,000; the WNMU Museum dates its construction to 1916-1917, while its National Register sheet gives 1917. That sheet describes it as a California Mission Revival building by the firm Trost & Trost and the last building put up within the school’s original twenty-acre campus. In November 1974 it opened as the University Museum. Downtown, the historic district nomination records that the American National Bank put up a Classical Revival building in 1917, later used as the town offices, and moved its headquarters in 1923 to a new building at Broadway and Bullard. The two-story 1928 Public Service Company building at Broadway and Arizona, of yellow brick, has a front of glazed terra cotta in the Spanish Colonial style. (Sources: History of Fleming Hall - WNMU Museum; Fleming Hall, p. 43; Silver City Historic District, Item 7.)
In the fall of 1918 influenza reached the region. Stephen Fox, writing in Desert Exposure, says the New Mexico Normal School closed on 1 October 1918 and sent its students home, and that on 10 October the mayor and county physician closed the public schools and places of amusement. After nine influenza deaths at Fort Bayard in the first two weeks of October, the hospital there imposed a partial quarantine. At the end of the month a Silver City paper declared that the town had ‘so far practically escaped the influenza epidemic, thanks to the timely precautions which have been taken.’ Fox cautions, though, that the weeklies rarely reported births and deaths among Hispanic residents. In the mining town of Mogollon, estimates of the toll range from 52 to 70 deaths. (Sources: The Spread of a Disease (part one).)
Help came from outside. In December 1918 the Albuquerque Morning Journal reported that the Red Cross had furnished nurses to many New Mexico communities during the epidemic, listing for Grant County only ‘certain of the mining towns,’ and that the situation across the state was much improved and heading toward a final end. By the next spring the mood had turned festive. The Silver City Enterprise, as reprinted in the New Mexico State Record in May 1919, said interested citizens were planning ‘the loudest, longest, and most joyous celebration which was ever attempted in Silver City’ for the Fourth of July. (Sources: Albuquerque Morning Journal, p. 8; New Mexico State Record, p. 5.)
Each source on this page saw the town from its own corner, and none of them tells the whole story alone. Read together, and with their disagreements left in view, they give a fuller picture than any one of them could.
The checked facts for this part, with their quotes and locators, are on the Atlas page Floods, health seekers and the Normal School, 1890 to 1929.
Copper, the New Deal and the Empire Zinc strike, 1930 to 1969
Hard times in the mining district
Iron mining near Silver City wound down early in the 1930s. L. Michael Kaas, in his historical tour guide for the Mining History Association, writes that after the railroad reached Hanover in 1891, most of the iron ore mined at Fierro was shipped to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in Pueblo, Colorado. Iron ore mining there continued until 1931. After that, Kaas says, there was only small, sporadic production. (Sources: L. Michael Kaas.)
Copper slowed as well. Kaas traces how the Chino company merged with the Nevada Consolidated Copper Company in 1926 and with Kennecott in 1933. During the Depression the Chino mine stood idle from October 1934 to January 1937. (Sources: L. Michael Kaas.)
The hard times reached beyond the mines. The National Register nomination for the Fort Bayard Historic District explains that Congress cut veterans’ benefits in 1933. For many patients at the Fort Bayard hospital, monthly income fell from $100 to $20. That was money they had been spending in nearby Central City. (Sources: Fort Bayard Historic District, Section 8, page 38.)
Murals, a post office and the WPA
Federal money soon left its mark on Silver City’s buildings, though the courthouse itself came first. The 1976 nomination for the Silver City Historic District says the Grant County Courthouse was erected in 1930 from plans by Albuquerque architect George M. Williamson and W. Miles Brittelle. Living New Deal gives the building dates as 1929-30 and points out that the courthouse went up before the New Deal. What came later was the art inside. The nomination describes lobby murals by Santa Fe painter Theodore Van Soelen as part of a 1930s WPA artists’ program. Living New Deal is more specific: it says Van Soelen painted two murals, “Chino Mines” and “The Round Up,” in 1933 and 1934 under the Public Works of Art Project. (Sources: Silver City Historic District, Item 7; Grant County Courthouse Murals - Silver City NM.)
Living New Deal says the courthouse was the first county courthouse in New Mexico to use New Deal funds for decorative murals. The murals have their own small history. According to the same source, Van Soelen based “Chino Mines” on sketches he made in the local Chino pits. “The Round Up” was shown at the Corcoran Gallery in the national exhibition of Public Works of Art Project paintings in April and May 1934. Both murals were conserved in 2009. (Sources: Grant County Courthouse Murals - Silver City NM.)
A new post office followed. Living New Deal says the Treasury Department built Silver City’s post office in 1934, with Louis A. Simon as supervising architect and Robert E. McKee of El Paso as contractor. The building stopped serving as a post office in the mid-1970s. (Sources: Old Post Office - Silver City NM.)
The Works Progress Administration, or WPA, funded projects as well. Living New Deal records that Graham Gymnasium at the college in Silver City was built with WPA funds and that other campus buildings were remodeled. WPA crews also worked on sidewalks and streets. Out at Fort Bayard, the National Register nomination lists a post theater among the WPA projects, along with an extensive system of masonry drainage canals and retaining walls across the grounds. (Sources: Graham Gymnasium - Silver City NM; Fort Bayard Historic District, Section 8, page 38.)
Voices from the 1930s
In the late 1930s, interviewers wrote down the memories of Silver City residents. These are recollections, and they are given here as the speakers told them. In 1936 Mildred Jordan interviewed William H. Eisele, a former wagon-train freighter living in Silver City. Eisele recalled that he had lived at Fort Bayard for thirteen years before moving to town. (Sources: (Description of a Pioneer’s Experience).)
In 1937 Frances Totty interviewed Mrs. O. S. (Elizabeth) Warren about early days around Silver City. Mrs. Warren spoke about what it took for a woman to get ahead. She used to say, she recalled, that a woman, to be a success, must do not just as well as a man, but much better. (Sources: (Mrs. O. S. Warren) ’Early Days Around….)
Totty also spoke in 1938 with Bill Hamlett, who described a loss he regretted. Hamlett recalled that some time before, he had seen an old Indian village near Gila being plowed up for a garden. By his account, the man plowing saved two truckloads of articles and sent them to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and most of the rest was destroyed. The place, Hamlett said, should have been studied and the relics saved. (Sources: (Indian Village).)
Older ways of building carried on, too. The 1982 National Register nomination for the Chihuahua Hill Historic District notes that new houses in the old Chihuahua Hill styles and materials were still being built in the 1930s and 1940s. (Sources: Chihuahua Hill Historic District nomination, Item 7.)
The war years
Kaas writes that manganese was mined in the district during both World Wars. Kennecott’s Chino Mines Division also became a major zinc producer, and its Oswaldo zinc properties operated from 1942 to 1969. (Sources: L. Michael Kaas.)
The war changed daily work at Fort Bayard. The National Register nomination says that between 1943 and 1945, when many of the hospital’s workers had gone into military service, as many as 100 German prisoners of war were brought in from the large camp near Lordsburg. They worked as orderlies, builders and gardeners. (Sources: Fort Bayard Historic District, Section 8, page 39.)
Historian Nancy Owen Lewis writes that the health-seeker movement ended in 1944 with the discovery of streptomycin. The sanatoriums closed one by one, and many were converted to other uses. St. Joseph’s Sanatorium in Silver City became apartments. (Sources: Chasing the Cure in New Mexico, p. 46.)
Two kinds of pay
What were Mexican American miners and their families up against? Anita Torrez, a member of the Women’s Auxiliary of Mine-Mill Local 890, put it plainly in a 2019 interview with People’s World, quoted in The Nation in 2023: “There was a lot of Mexican American discrimination.” She described segregated housing, with Mexican Americans in one part of the mining town and whites in another, no running water for Mexican Americans, and lower pay. (Sources: What an Epic Women’s Strike Can Teach Us….)
Kaas writes of a dual wage system, two pay scales under which Mexican American miners were paid less than white miners. Kaas writes that zinc mining at Hanover began around 1904, and that the Empire Zinc mine there was the site of a fifteen-month strike over this dual wage system in 1950-1952. The Empire remained a major producer until 1969. (Sources: L. Michael Kaas.)
Ronald Young notes that before the strike, Mine-Mill, the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, was among the unions expelled from the CIO in an anticommunist purge. Ronald Young, writing in the St. James Encyclopedia of Labor History Worldwide, notes that before the strike, Mine-Mill was among the unions expelled from the CIO in an anticommunist purge. (Sources: Salt of the Earth Strike.)
The strike at Hanover
The strike took place at Hanover, not in Silver City. Young writes that in October 1950, after several months of unsuccessful bargaining with Empire Zinc, members of Local 890 went on strike in Hanover. In his account the strike lasted fifteen months. (Sources: Salt of the Earth Strike.)
Then the strike changed course. The New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program, which dates the strike from October 1950 to January 1952, says a judge granted a temporary restraining order that barred men on the picket lines from impeding strikebreakers, people who work in place of those on strike. Young describes a federal district judge prohibiting picketing by union members. In response, the strikers voted to let women take over the picket line, and the women’s picketing began. (Sources: Ladies Auxiliary of Local 890; Salt of the Earth Strike.)
Former Empire Zinc miner Art Flores recalled what the men learned from that change. When the women took over the picket line, he said, the men “found out that the women worked as hard as they did at some things.” (Sources: What an Epic Women’s Strike Can Teach Us….)
The women paid a price for holding the line. The Nation reports that after the picket of June 16, 1951, 53 women and children were held at the Grant County Jail for about twelve hours. They were arraigned two days later at the courthouse, where they showed up with hundreds of supporters. A photo caption on the marker program’s page gives a matching count: 53 people arrested and 45 charged with unlawful assembly on June 18, 1951. (Sources: What an Epic Women’s Strike Can Teach Us…; Ladies Auxiliary of Local 890.)
How did it end, and who gained what? The marker program says the strike was settled after almost sixteen months, with concessions on both sides. Steve Boisson, writing in American History magazine, dates the settlement to January 21, 1952. (Sources: Ladies Auxiliary of Local 890; Salt of the Earth.)
Young spells out what each side gave up. The company kept the 8.5-hour day it wanted, but agreed to raise wages for the extra half hour. Instead of the paid holidays the workers had sought, they received a higher hourly wage. (Sources: Salt of the Earth Strike.)
Making Salt of the Earth
How did a strike at Hanover become a film? Some of the people behind Salt of the Earth had been shut out of Hollywood. Its director, Herbert Biberman, was one of the Hollywood Ten, and Boisson writes that he, producer Paul Jarrico and writer Michael Wilson were all blacklisted, that is, barred from studio work. Boisson adds that Jarrico’s writing credit on The Las Vegas Story, removed by Howard Hughes, was restored only after his death, in 1998. (Sources: Salt of the Earth.)
Boisson writes that the production cast members of Local 890 as miners and their wives. Juan Chacón, the local’s newly elected president, was cast as Ramon. Young describes Chacón as a union leader with a reputation as a hard bargainer, who played the lead in the film version of the strike. Clinton Jencks played the union’s Anglo representative from headquarters, his real-life role, and his wife Virginia played her counterpart on screen. (Sources: Salt of the Earth; Salt of the Earth Strike.)
Anita Torrez remembered the women of the strike having their say in the film as well. Anita Torrez recalled in a 2013 interview that “the women had a lot to say. That’s why it took so long.” When the directors planned to cast a white woman as the lead, she said, the workers “didn’t agree,” insisting that “this [is] our story…we should take that part.” The lead role went to Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas. (Sources: What an Epic Women’s Strike Can Teach Us….)
The American Film Institute catalog gives the production dates as January 20 to March 6, 1953. AFI cites a 1954 Los Angeles Times article saying most of the film was shot on a New Mexico ranch owned by Alford Roos, who also appeared in the picture. Boisson adds that some locals helped build a mine facade on the Roos ranch, and that Roos rented his land to the filmmakers for one dollar. (Sources: AFI Catalog of Feature Films: Salt of the Earth; Salt of the Earth.)
A film under pressure
Filming drew opposition while it was under way. AFI reports that in February 1953, while filming was under way, California Representative Donald Jackson, a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, declared the picture “deliberately designed to inflame racial hatreds” and “a new weapon for Russia.” In Silver City, Boisson writes, a headline in the Silver City Daily Press read “It’s Time To Choose Sides,” and a Silver City schoolteacher wrote to Screen Actors Guild president Walter Pidgeon, worried that a Communist film company was manipulating local Mexican Americans. (Sources: AFI Catalog of Feature Films: Salt of the Earth; Salt of the Earth.)
The film’s star was caught up as well. AFI says Rosaura Revueltas, who played Esperanza, was arrested on February 25, 1953 because her passport had not been stamped at the border. She returned to Mexico on March 6, and her last scene was filmed there. (Sources: AFI Catalog of Feature Films: Salt of the Earth.)
The sources describe the threats of early March in slightly different ways. AFI reports that on March 2, 1953, a citizens’ committee in Central met the cast and crew and ordered them to leave town, and that the next day in Silver City the company was told to get out or “go out in black boxes.” Boisson tells it as a sequence: after shots were fired into Jencks’s car and a fight broke out at the filming, emissaries told the crew to leave by noon the next day or “leave in black boxes.” In his account, state police were then called in and kept the peace until filming ended. (Sources: AFI Catalog of Feature Films: Salt of the Earth; Salt of the Earth.)
The trouble did not stop at threats. AFI reports that the union hall in Bayard was set on fire on March 8, 1953, and that union official Clinton Jencks was beaten and his car shot at. (Sources: AFI Catalog of Feature Films: Salt of the Earth.)
Finishing the film was only half the battle. AFI notes that Salt of the Earth premiered on March 14, 1954, at an independent theater in New York, and that it was never generally released in the United States. Members of the projectionists’ union refused to run it. (Sources: AFI Catalog of Feature Films: Salt of the Earth.)
The land changes after the war
Meanwhile, the land around Silver City kept changing. Kaas writes that in the 1950s Kennecott found ore beneath the town of Santa Rita. To expand the Chino pit, the townsite was abandoned and its residents moved to nearby towns. (Sources: L. Michael Kaas.)
Fort Bayard’s land changed hands. Its National Register nomination says large parts of the old military reservation went to the U.S. Forest Service in 1956 and became part of the Gila National Forest. In 1975 the state transferred land for Fort Bayard National Cemetery, though the same document gives two figures for its size: 16 acres in one section and 14 of the 480 acres in another. An older milestone also bears the Gila name. The Gila Wilderness was established in 1924 after Forest Service employee Aldo Leopold urged that the land be set aside, and the Forest Service describes it as the world’s first designated wilderness area, covering over 558,000 acres. (Sources: Fort Bayard Historic District, Section 8, page 39; Gila Wilderness.)
The hospital itself changed hands too. When the Veterans Administration closed the Fort Bayard hospital in 1965, the State of New Mexico took over the facility and 484 acres. The nomination says one reason was that local communities depended on the hospital for jobs. (Sources: Fort Bayard Historic District, Section 8, page 39.)
A new open pit was taking shape at the same time. Kaas writes that Phelps Dodge began stripping for the Tyrone open pit in 1967, and that ore mining and processing at the Tyrone concentrator began in 1969. In 1984 Tyrone began recovering copper by solvent extraction and electrowinning, or SX/EW, a method that uses chemical solutions and electricity. (Sources: L. Michael Kaas.)
The checked facts for this part, with their quotes and locators, are on the Atlas page Copper, the New Deal and the Empire Zinc strike, 1930 to 1969.
Silver City today
Protecting the old downtown
Silver City’s old town has been recognized in two official listings. According to its National Register nomination, the Silver City Historic District was listed on the New Mexico State Register of Cultural Properties on July 31, 1970. It was entered in the National Register of Historic Places in May 1978; the nomination form carries the date May 23, 1978. (Sources: Silver City Historic District, item 6, page 5.)
What does the district hold? The nomination says it covers about twenty-three acres. Inside that boundary are the earliest Anglo residential area and the part of the business section that withstood the flood of 1895. (Sources: Silver City Historic District, Item 7.)
A town that reinvents itself
Recognition has come from the national level too. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation designated it a Preserve America Community in July 2006. The council’s summary says that after the nation’s silver industry crashed in 1893, the town reinvented itself as a health resort for patients with tuberculosis and other diseases, and as an educational center. (Sources: Preserve America Community.)
The same summary calls Silver City New Mexico’s oldest incorporated community, still governed under its 1878 territorial charter. It gives the town’s population as 10,054 and counts six historic districts. The arts have a place as well. New Mexico Arts reports that in 2008 the state authorized its first two pilot Arts and Cultural Districts, in Las Vegas and Silver City. (Sources: Preserve America Community; Arts & Cultural Districts (New Mexico Arts).)
Telling the community’s own story
On Chihuahua Hill, residents have taken their history into their own hands. Javier Marrufo, writing for the New Mexico Humanities Council in 2023, records that the hill’s original capilla, or chapel, was torn down in 1914 and rebuilt by members of the community in 2004. (Sources: Nuestra Voz: The Chihuahua Hill Story and….)
Marrufo is frank about a gap. The Silver City Museum faces Chihuahua Hill, he notes, yet it had seldom featured the community’s history within its walls. The museum has since started the Chihuahua Hill History Project, an oral history of the town’s historic Mexican American barrio. Begun in 2021, it had gathered over 80 hours of audio from 75 participants by 2023. (Sources: Nuestra Voz: The Chihuahua Hill Story and….)
Historians have also looked back at the labor struggles of the mining district. Jack Cargill’s 1979 master’s thesis at the University of New Mexico builds its account around the Empire Zinc strike. He calls it one of the most important events in the history of the Mine-Mill union. In his view, the strike vaulted Local 890 into the Communist controversy and showed the union’s importance to Mexican Americans’ “post-war quest for self-realization.” (Sources: Empire and Opposition.)
Copper mining since 1970
What became of the big copper mines after 1970? Phelps Dodge, in its annual report for 2001, says it acquired the Chino mine near Silver City at the end of 1986. By 2001 it held a two-thirds interest, and Heisei Minerals, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi companies, held the other third. The same filing says Tyrone had been a mine-for-leach operation since 1992, meaning ore is mined so that its copper can be leached, or dissolved out with solutions. (Sources: Phelps Dodge Corporation Form 10-K405 for…, Item 1.)
There were pauses along the way. Phelps Dodge reported that it temporarily shut Chino’s concentrator in March 2001 and temporarily closed the Chino mine and the Hurley smelter in January 2002. The filing ties the 2001 cutback to a plan to stabilize power costs, and the 2002 closures to restructuring for “the economic environment” at a time of weak copper prices. (Sources: Phelps Dodge Corporation Form 10-K405 for…, Item 1.)
L. Michael Kaas, writing for the Mining History Association, gives the longer view. The Hurley smelter was modernized in 1985 and closed in 2002. Kaas described the Chino pit as 1,500 feet deep and 1.5 miles across, and wrote that after a temporary shutdown in 2008, production resumed in 2011. (Sources: L. Michael Kaas.)
Repairing the damage
Mining has also left costs behind. New Mexico’s Office of Natural Resources Trustee reports that the state and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reached settlements with Freeport-McMoRan over releases at the Chino, Cobre and Tyrone mines. One settlement, for $13 million, covered damage to groundwater. Another, for $5.5 million, covered injury to wildlife and wildlife habitat. (Sources: Chino, Cobre, and Tyrone Mines.)
Some of that money went into work close to home. The trustee’s office says settlement funds extended municipal sewer lines to a neighborhood of 34 homes in northern Silver City that had relied on septic systems. They also paid to replace failing clay sewer lines in Hurley. The restoration work was completed in 2014. (Sources: Chino, Cobre, and Tyrone Mines.)
Silver City and its neighbors today
The 2020 census, as listed in the New Mexico Legislative Council Service’s handbook, counted 9,704 people in Silver City and 28,185 in Grant County as a whole. The nearby towns were smaller: Bayard had 2,116 residents, Santa Clara 1,637 and Hurley 1,256. (Sources: State of New Mexico 2020 Official Census…, page 1.)
The checked facts for this part, with their quotes and locators, are on the Atlas page Silver City today.
What the record has not settled
Some basic questions remain open in the sources checked so far. They give 1868, 1870 and 1871 for the first silver find, and they credit different people with it. John Bullard’s death in 1871 is dated to February, to July 11, and to “the following winter.” The county seat is said to have come to Silver City in 1871, 1872 or 1874, and the town’s incorporation is dated to 1876 and to 1878. Reports of the 1895 and 1903 floods disagree on the losses. Silver City’s own newspapers of the 1870s and 1880s are not digitized, so much of what they said is known only through reprints in other papers. These questions stay open here until a better source settles them.
The Atlas Silver City pages list every checked fact behind this chapter, a timeline of dated events, and the sources themselves. The other chapters of this series give broader introductions to the same history.
Loading comments…