History of Silver City, New Mexico

Silver City did not begin when someone found silver. Before the 1870 strike at Chloride Flat the valley already had a spring-fed ciénaga, an Apache homeland around it, and a copper road to Santa Rita. This book starts there and follows the town to the present.

Part One tells the story in six chapters: the valley before the town, the 1870 strike and the move of the county seat, the mining and railroad years of the 1880s, the people of Chihuahua Hill, the floods that turned Main Street into the Big Ditch, and the historic landscape that remains.

Part Two goes over the same ground from the record, in eleven chapters. It draws on National Register nominations, county histories, government reports, memoirs, Federal Writers’ Project interviews and the town’s newspapers. Each paragraph names its sources, and where the sources disagree the disagreement is left in place.

• Seventeen chapters, about 91,000 words, 326 pages in the PDF edition.
• 554 numbered source notes, listed with their web addresses at the end of each chapter.
• Chapters for 1888 to 1898 drawn from the town’s newspapers: the Silver City Enterprise, the Southwest-Sentinel and The Eagle.
• Covers the floods of 1895 and 1903, the Normal School, Fort Bayard and the health seekers, copper mining, the Empire Zinc strike and the film Salt of the Earth.
• A closing chapter lists the questions the sources have not settled, such as the date of the first silver find.

One purchase includes the EPUB and the PDF. This edition has no pictures.

See what is inside

The revised edition covers these chapters and reader resources:

• Chapter 1. Before Silver City: The Ciénaga, Apache Homeland, and Copper Road
• Chapter 2. The Silver Strike of 1870 and the Making of Silver City
• Chapter 3. Ore, Rails, and Work: Silver City's 1880s Boom
• Chapter 4. The People Who Made Silver City: Chihuahua Hill, Work, and Civic Life
• Chapter 5. When Main Street Became the Big Ditch: Silver City's Flood and Reinvention
• Chapter 6. Silver City's Historic Landscape: What the Streets, Hill, and Ditch Remember
• Chapter 7. Before 1870: the springs at San Vicente
• Chapter 8. The silver strike and the founding, 1870 to 1872
• Chapter 9. The mining town, 1873 to 1887
• Chapter 10. 1888 and 1889: the town in the Enterprise
• Chapter 11. 1890 and 1891: the grand jury, water and the county books
• Chapter 12. The 1890s: the silver crash, the Normal School and the 1895 flood
• Chapter 13. 1893 to 1898: hard times, the school fight and the Normal School
• Chapter 14. Health seekers and copper, 1900 to 1929
• Chapter 15. Copper, the New Deal and the Empire Zinc strike, 1930 to 1969
• Chapter 16. Silver City today
• Chapter 17. What the record has not settled