| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Eric L. Clements. After the Boom in Tombstone and Jerome, Arizona. (Wilbur S. Shepperson Series in History and Humanities.) Reno: University of Nevada Press. 2003. Pp. xv, 389. $29.95.
This is an important book about a long-neglected subject: the decline of western mining towns. Scholarly and popular literature is filled with endless stories of the bonanza strikes and the camps around them that grew into towns and sometimes cities. The possibility of great riches in distant and often inhospitable settings drove this initial impulse to settlement, and happy chroniclers describe the great upward trajectory of these places. Few have remained to describe (much less analyze) their decline and sometimes disappearance. That every western state has its guidebook to "ghost towns" is testimony to the presence of large numbers of these disappeared or declined once thriving towns, and to their hold on the popular imagination.	1
Eric L. Clements has chosen as his subject the boom and decline of two Arizona mining towns, Tombstone and Jerome. He opens his study with a discussion of why he chose these two urban places. He then notes the deliberate choice of a mining town (Jerome) whose history extends well into the twentieth century as a way of lengthening the arc of his study. For, as he notes, "boom and bust in western mining have lasted from the frontier days right through the twentieth century," so a careful study needs to consider both "bonanza camps" and "modern industrial mining" (p. 15). As for the issue representation, he rightly argues that any study needs towns of a certain size to provide an extended historical record, especially censuses and newspapers. Representation is less important than a careful analysis of two towns that now gives us a benchmark from which to consider this important dimension of the western mining experience.	2
Clements begins his study with four chapters that cover the founding, growth, and decline of the two towns. Here his descriptions are clear and to the point. He effectively bridges the gap in the time frames of the two mining towns, which are noticeably different. Tombstone was founded in 1877, shipped its first silver in 1879, prospered in the mid-1880s, and declined after 1893 with the collapse of silver support. Jerome was a copper town, and its arc was later and longer. Its first mining claims dated from 1877 (the same year as Tombstone's founding), but after several missteps, Jerome developed as a copper producer in the 1890s (propelled by the demand for copper and the arrival of a railroad in 1895), its bonanza years climaxed in the high copper prices of World War I, and it continued to lead the state in copper production (as Arizona led the nation) through the 1920s. Within these somewhat disconnected stories, Clements carefully analyzes the several variables of mining towns: the nature and origin of the work force (skills, ethnic origin, wages), commercial development (a few mercantile establishments mixed with large numbers of saloons), housing, recreation, gender ratios and the role of women, concern with education, and civic improvements.	3
The foundations laid, in his next several chapters Clements turns to an analysis of several different dimensions of decline. He begins with a consideration of relations between labor and management, the industrial dimension of the mining enterprise. What emerges from his analysis here are the ongoing symbiotic relationships among the company, the town, and the work force. Whatever their different interests, the commonality of the continuing production of the mines was crucial to the existence of each. As for the business world, the decline of the mining town reduced its businesses but did not much alter the mix of commercial establishments. What the cycle of decline did show was that mining was the engine that drove the town forward. Mining towns were unable to find an alternative, or as Clements concludes, "Mining had no substitute in the short run" (p. 113). In the long run, skiing, tourism, and film festivals would become alternatives.	. . .

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