Silver Boom and the Crash of 1893

Colorado gold brought the first wave of settlers. Colorado silver made some of them fabulously wealthy, and then destroyed many of them almost equally fast.

Beginning in the eighteen seventies, miners pushing into the higher reaches of the Colorado Rockies found silver in quantities that rivaled the Comstock Lode in Nevada. Leadville, which sits above ten thousand feet in the mountains of central Colorado, became a silver capital of the world. Horace Tabor, a shopkeeper turned mine investor, earned millions from silver claims and built opera houses in Leadville and Denver as testimony to his fortune.

Aspen, Telluride, Silverton, and Ouray each became centers of production through the eighteen eighties. Colorado was producing a tenth of the world's silver supply by eighteen ninety.

The collapse came in the summer of eighteen ninety-three. The United States Treasury, under pressure from advocates of a tighter gold standard, repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which had required the government to buy silver in fixed monthly quantities. Demand evaporated almost overnight. The price of silver dropped by nearly half within weeks. Banks that had lent money against silver collateral failed. Mines that had been profitable in June were abandoned by September.

Leadville's population, which had been around fifteen thousand at its peak, fell by more than half in the decades that followed. Aspen went from a city of about five thousand to a nearly abandoned town of a few hundred. The ghost towns left behind across the Colorado high country are still there, the buildings still standing in some cases, the mills rusting above the timberline.