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“As the heartbeat of silver mining slowed and then stopped, the lifeblood of the city ceased to circulate,” wrote Malcolm Rohrbough in “Aspen: The History of a Silver Mining Town,” of how the silver crash of 1893 induced a community coma. “One day the mines teemed with workers and the streets with shoppers; a week later, both lay silent.”
If you were in Aspen in March 2020, when the emerging COVID-19 pandemic shut down the ski mountains and stymied the regional economy, you will have a sense for the Quiet Years when shocked citizens witnessed industrial mining go from boom to bust overnight, leaving farming and ranching as the mainstays for a struggling rural economy. Most of the miners left Aspen for other prospects, leaving a skeletal community that stuck resolutely to their beloved Aspen.
“My favorite years in Aspen were in the ’30s and ’40s,” recalled Ellamae Huffine Phillips in “Aspen: The Quiet Years,” by Kathleen Krieger Daily and Gaylord Guenin, “because everyone was in the same class — we were all poor.” Rather than the promise of riches, the Aspen community was reduced to one common denominator — poverty — perhaps the most cohesive influence the Aspen community has ever had.
“The lights of Aspen began to dim and softly flicker for almost 50 years,” according to “The Quiet Years.” “Still, the lights never went out. These were the years between prospecting and prosperity. We call them the Quiet Years. A town without a tomorrow, from about 1893 to 1947, Aspen’s only future lay in its past. All of its dreams were trapped in its memories of yesterday.”
Aspen’s boomtown population peaked in 1893 at about 12,000 when 227 working mines made Aspen one of the richest silver mining districts in the world. That was the year the U.S. Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which ended the free coinage of silver, removed the silver standard, crippled the populist movement and made gold the basis of the U.S. dollar. That was the year Aspen suffered a crushing blow from which the industrialized economy of the famed “Crystal City” would never recover.
“The Quiet Years,” a paean to desolation, despair and yet to a stern, unyielding community character, stated, “Aspen was knocked to its knees. Here was a community that knew only one thing — silver.” Without silver, the community was left to languish in obscurity. The geographic isolation that had beset early Aspen was now compounded by a lack of promise and purpose. All that was left was community.
A dramatic exodus left Aspen’s population at 750 or fewer. “I can tell you that in the 1930s, there weren’t more than 350 in this town,” said an anonymous source in “The Quiet Years.” “I knew everybody in town. Hell, I knew the name of every damn dog in town, too.” Those who stayed knew that Aspen was down, but it was not out. An intangible and intractable community bond buoyed the hangers-on.
Amid the collective sorrow, sparks of light came with hope, strength and resilience. Almost 20 years after the crash, a speculative mining venture called the Hope Tunnel promised to resuscitate the city with the ever-bright promise of a motherlode. A shaft was begun in 1911 atop Richmond Ridge that was to tap the silver resources beneath Little Annie Basin. Mining commenced, and two train carloads of ore were optimistically shipped. Then calamity struck in 1929 when a fire destroyed the newly constructed mill and most of the surface structures. Silence again fell over the beleaguered city.
“The community of Aspen became dominated by abandoned homes, boarded up businesses and collapsing mine shafts,” according to “The Quiet Years.” “Nature slowly reclaimed the mountains.” Whole blocks were vacant. Some abandoned structures were stripped to bare framing as opportunists made off with materials for their own homes or for resale. Many miners’ shacks were stripped down to nothing and were gone.
What remained was a spirited people who buried their cultural differences and came together in a pastiche of ethnic identities and colorful characters. A small listing of residents’ surnames and nicknames offers a nostalgic whiff of rustic charm from this little-known era: Tekoucich, Mishmash Trentaz, Zordel, Marolt, Vagneur, Zupancis, Jakey Yeckel, Hannibal Brown, Puppy Smith, Panhandle Pete, Rattlesnake Bill Anderson, One-Eyed Joe, No Problem Joe, Groundhog Joe, Horse Thief Kelly, Tom the Weasel, The Whispering Swedes and Chicken Bill.
“Even with ramshackle buildings and vacant lots,” a person interviewed for “The Quiet Years” reflected, “there was something always here — a resurgence. Where there was a cabin, there might be an aspen tree starting up through the floorboards. … Growth came back.”
A newspaper editorial in December 1929, at the onset of the Great Depression, set an optimistic tone for community spirit: “Christmas Day in Aspen was an ideal winter day … and the Christmas spirit reigned supreme. … Everyone glad and happy and full of the spirit of doing good unto others.” This echo of the Lord’s Prayer evinced a resolute ethic that infused a tottering Aspen with respect and esteem. None of it had to do with wealth or pretense or status. “Not a selfish thought or act bobbed up in this beautiful mining camp. … Not a family that went without their Christmas dinner … not a child that Santa didn’t remember… not an empty stocking. And that’s Aspen!”
The Hotel Jerome became a community focal point as a residence hotel for those whose homes lacked central heating and indoor plumbing – and there were many such homes. There were no tourists then to compete for limited space and everyone knew one another from close proximity and shared meals in the dining room. Perhaps the only new arrivals to seek a home in Aspen was an elk herd imported by rail in the 1920s from Idaho to replace the native herds that had been exterminated during the mining era.
Despite the city’s dismal prospects, celebrations were held, including dances and social events at outlying school houses, in empty barns or at private homes where neighbors threw out the welcome mat. The Elks and Eagles clubs organized picnics and outings. Ice skating, roller skating, sleigh rides and skiing brought people together. A flower show symbolized the city’s resurgent essence. Merchants extended credit to provide the necessities. Bootleggers defied Prohibition to keep spirits up. Families collected berries and mushrooms. Hunters and fishermen provided what they could.
When town father and Aspen pioneer David R.C. Brown died in 1930, a mileslong funeral procession ushered his remains over Independence Pass, commemorating his many achievements and saluting the halcyon mining years when well-meaning, ambitious, hardworking and talented men such as Brown could become millionaires.
“The emphasis on community and family was dominant,” according to “The Quiet Years.” Humility, rather than hubris, had cultivated perhaps the most unifying social attribute Aspen has ever displayed.
As the Great Depression took its toll on Aspen, outside eyes began to recognize something in the dissolute city that could become fertile ground for a new era. Interest in skiing took root, first in Ashcroft in the 1930s, then with the cutting of Roche Run on Aspen Mountain by Works Progress Administration (WPA) crews in 1937 under the auspices of the Roaring Fork Winter Sports Club, later named the Aspen Valley Ski Club (AVSC). Roche Run was designed by ski maestro Andre Roche. It was served by the “boat tow,” a toboggan pulled up the mountain by an old mining winch. A ride cost a dime.
Skiing in a commercial sense was barely off the ground in Aspen when, in 1941, the National Alpine Championships were held on Aspen Mountain. Enthused skiers began singing Aspen’s praises as the next big attraction for lovers of snow, speed and a quaint, refreshing atmosphere.
On Dec. 7 of that year, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Grandiose ski dreams for Ashcroft and Mount Hayden were irrevocably derailed while, across the Continental Divide in Leadville, a new breed of skiers donned white anoraks to become the country’s first military ski troops — the 10th Mountain Division. Many of these mountain soldiers would move to Aspen after the war to become founders of the Colorado ski industry, infusing the Aspen community with notoriety and a rambunctious sense of frivolity.
When the war ended in 1945, America shifted into high gear with an exuberance that was perfectly suited to Aspen’s potential, something that Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke would astutely recognize. He wasn’t alone. Radio personality Lowell Thomas was among the early skiers who became an ardent Aspen booster. In 1939, Walter’s wife, Elizabeth Paepcke, had also recognized a gem in the rough in Aspen’s well-preserved cityscape, a relic of past glory that became attractive to cognoscenti who recognized potential in its tarnished charm.
On her ski run down Aspen Mountain, Elizabeth Paepcke gazed upon dormant Aspen and worded a now-famous telephone message to her husband, Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke: “Walter, you simply must see it. It’s the most beautifully untouched place in the world.” With that invitation, Elizabeth Paepcke initiated dramatic changes in the nascent ski town and emergent cultural center when she returned to Aspen with her visionary and opportunistic husband.
In a speech to an Aspen audience decades later, Elizabeth recalled that visit with Walter and her parents in the summer of 1945, a trip they made at her urging. This was Walter’s first view of what Elizabeth had so memorably beheld in 1939:
In those days, Aspen had a different appearance. Along the two sides of every street ran irrigation ditches constantly flowing with water. The cottonwoods, which drew their nourishment from this source, grew strong and tall. One walked in pleasant, leafy shade. Because no street was paved or winter-plowed, the ruts were deep and, where not overgrown with grass, the walking could be tricky and also extremely dusty.
Between the tangle of cottonwoods, ancient lilacs and orchard grass, we could see ruins of collapsing wooden houses, quite beautiful with gables and fretwork carved like lace. Here a door was missing, there a roof gaped. Shutters hung on broken hinges and porches sagged. We looked through broken glass into parlors still carpeted, where flowered paper hung in sad festoons and sofas oozed their horsehair stuffing onto the floor to mingle with long-discarded newsprint. It was a town unspoiled, untouched since 1893, when the collapse of silver placed it in a state of uneasy, somnambulistic shock.
During our leisurely saunter along Main Street on that sunny day, we saw nothing move, nothing that seemed alive, until near the Jerome Hotel where we stumbled upon a woman’s body, half-reclining in the gutter, not dead, only sodden. Where the Ute City Banque now flourishes, to our joy, at last, we saw two human beings very alive and both very drunk. They sat by an irrigation ditch very happily soaking their bare feet while singing irreverent songs.
As my mother approached, both men rose and clutched at her frantically. She was the one stable object on their otherwise reeling horizon. They tried to explain to my fascinated parents through toothless gums that their condition was not normal, but was arrived at by celebrating a wake — their mother’s. That in the interest of safety, they had stowed their false teeth in mugs before the festivities began and were now sitting in the ditch waiting for the return of sobriety.
My father was not amused, my mother was full of sympathy, but I noticed that Walter Paepcke became ominously silent on the way home. In this fashion, even out of irrigation ditches, great ideas sometime emerge.
In a 2019 speech at the Aspen Institute, James Sloane Allen, author of “The Romance of Commerce and Culture,” recounted: “Elizabeth had ventured here on skis and had described it as a Sleeping Beauty waiting to awaken. Walter had never been here when he hatched the idea of buying some vacant Aspen properties as investments or vacation homes for his family and friends and other ‘high type of persons,’ as he liked to label them.”
Despite decades of neglect that had left a layer of grime on old Aspen and a pall of quiet over the potholed and dusty dirt streets, Aspen had charm. Its eerie museum quality, frozen in time, appealed to the husband and wife visionaries. Aspen was as enchanting as anything Elizabeth Paepcke had ever seen, and she was totally taken by it. What she discovered in Aspen was the chemistry that so often describes the first meeting of lovers — a physical attraction of bodies, an emotional gravity that binds and holds.
As the Quiet Years drew to a close in the late 1940s, this Shangri-la would be discovered in a crescendo of ardent lovers whose energy, enterprise and imagination formed the foundation of a new community girded by commercialism that has grown steadily for 80 years and shows no signs of letting up.
Next in this series is a description of Aspen’s community during the post-World War II economic resurgence when the culture of high ideals and fine arts came into contest with the commercial success of skiing. It is set to be published Feb. 2.
