Eighteen Ninety-Three: The Year the Bottom Fell Out
Near Aspen, Colorado
In the summer of eighteen ninety-three, the United States Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, the law that had required the federal government to buy fixed quantities of silver each month. Silver prices, already fragile, collapsed within days. In Aspen, mines began closing before the month was out.
The speed of the collapse was stunning. A city of twelve thousand people that had produced more silver than anywhere in the country emptied out over the following years with the slow inevitability of a tide going out. Merchants locked their stores. Hotels shuttered. The population that had taken a decade to build dissolved within a generation. By nineteen hundred the census counted barely four thousand residents. By nineteen thirty-five fewer than seven hundred people remained in a town built to hold twelve thousand.
The Hotel Jerome closed. The Wheeler Opera House went dark. Jerome Wheeler himself died nearly forgotten and nearly broke in nineteen fourteen. The silver boom had made Aspen one of the grandest cities in the American West, and the silver crash had turned it into something close to a ruin: Victorian buildings that no one could afford to tear down or to repair, a monument to what American booms cost when they end. The town drifted this way for more than fifty years, its streets intact, its ambitions gone, waiting for someone with a different idea about what a mountain this high could be worth.
