Silver City — Mining Town at the Edge of the Wilderness

Silver City sits at nearly six thousand feet above sea level in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico, on the edge of one of the largest wilderness areas in the country. It was born from a silver strike in eighteen seventy and has outlasted the mines and the metals market to become a small arts city with a longer history than most American towns care to remember. The silver ore was found at a marshy valley called San Vicente de la Ciénega, which had been home to the Mimbres people for centuries before the Spanish arrived and to the Apache after them.

Juan Nepomuceno Carrasco, an experienced silver miner, uncovered a rich deposit of silver-bearing quartz just west of the future townsite in September of eighteen seventy. He named it La Providencia Ledge, and within months the mining camp had become a boom town. The founder of the townsite proper, John Bullard, was killed in an Apache raid in eighteen seventy-one, one year after the silver rush began.

The railroad reached Silver City in eighteen eighty-six, accelerating the mining and smelter economy while deepening the conflict with the Apache bands who had long used these mountains as their home territory. Victorio, Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, and Geronimo were all active in this region, and the Warm Springs Apaches and the Chiricahua fought to remain on their ancestral lands until the final surrender of eighteen eighty-six. Silver City incorporated under its territorial charter in eighteen seventy-six, and that charter has never been replaced, making Silver City one of the oldest continually chartered municipalities in New Mexico.

Western New Mexico University was founded here in eighteen ninety-three. Today Silver City is known for its arts scene, its Victorian and Territorial brick architecture, the world's largest collection of Mimbres pottery at the university museum, and its proximity to the Gila Wilderness and the Gila Cliff Dwellings. The big copper mines are nearby, and the mining economy never entirely left.

But Silver City has added layers on top of the silver: community, culture, and the strange beauty of the high Chihuahuan Desert.