Review by Ed Quillen
Local History – December 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Mining Camps Speak – A New Way to Explore the Ghost Towns of the American West
by Beth and Bill Sagstetter
Published in 1998 by Benchmark Publishing of Colorado
ISBN: 0-9645824-1-4
Most books about our many abandoned mines and their accompanying camps, towns, and roads focus on their written history. Generally, these are guidebooks, too, telling you how to navigate the wretched road that leads to Holy Cross City or how to find the collapsed chimney that is the sole remnant of some spot that had a post office for a few months in the summer of 1882.
While I’ve enjoyed many books which take that traditional approach, there are other ways to examine our region’s past, and The Mining Camps Speak offers a different and refreshing method.
Think of it as a field guide for amateur archeologists, and you’ve got the general idea.
For instance, you come upon a pile of rusting scraps in the hills (our geographic forebears, practicing traditional Western values, either recycled their refuse or just left it to the elements). It’s old, but how old?
Examine the tin cans in this midden heap. If a streak of solder is visible down the side, with the two ends merely overlapped, the can was likely tossed out sometime before 1887 and almost certainly before 1895. If the joint on the side is overlapped, and the top has a dab of solder over its filling hole, then it dates between 1887 and about 1915. If it looks like a modern can, with no solder visible anywhere, it was made since 1904.
What was in the can? Examine the top to see how it was opened (big holes mean peaches or beans, small holes mean condensed milk), and look for embossing on the bottom. The shape is a clue, too — if it resembles a cabin, it probably held syrup.
You might also be able to date the site, and get an idea as to whether it was an all-male work camp or a place where respectable women ventured, by looking for utensils in the rust. Look for things like a sieve made from a nail-punched can lid, or a candle-holder recycled from a syrup can.
Just about everything you see at an old site is informative, according to the Sagstetters, telling about the people and their times if you know what you’re looking at.
Remnant machinery can give you an idea of how developed the mines were — a steam hoist, as opposed to a horse-drawn whim, means the prospect was at least promising (or that the mine promoters were successful in swindling investors), and the authors provide both modern photos and old catalog illustrations to assist in identifying the equipment.
As for structural ruins, the type of notching on the ends of logs in remnant cabins is a good indication of the camp’s longevity. Sometimes the use of the building can be inferred from its layout — livery stables and boarding houses are fairly obvious, while old smithies and assay offices require some searching for remnants of forges and ovens.
The authors provide much more, of course, from the design of old wagons and wagon roads to a full bibliography and the useful suggestion to visit museums, where you might see a preserved version of some relic you saw but couldn’t identify.
Along this informative path, the Stagstetters offer some interesting insights:
In nearly every site we can count on finding the gnarled remains of a hobnailed boot or two. These must have been standard gear for a hard-rock miner a century ago. But hobnailed boots are one of those items that very little is known about. Consider this. When you save something, you save “special” things — wedding dresses, ceremonial objects, rare or unusual, hard-to-replace items. But most of us don’t go to the trouble of saving everyday things. Neither did our ancestors. Consequently, more is known about weddings a hundred years ago than is known about the workman’s blouse and the hobnailed boots a man wore to work every day. Because of this, libraries and archives have very little information about hobnailed boots.
I wish this book had arrived in the summer, so I could test it on a few sites. I did look around my office, found a reasonably preserved old can which once held steel-cut coffee from Kansas City, and was able to date it to the 1887-1915 period.
And now I’m even more eager than usual for warm weather to return; there are at least a dozen places hereabouts I’ve encountered on walks and drives which were obviously inhabited way back when, and now I’ll be able to learn more about when and who.
— Ed Quillen
