Kathie Lingle's Work-Life Blog

Contemporary Themes From the "Wickedest City" in Arizona's History

July 2, 2008 — OK. Now that I have your attention, it’s not Tombstone I’m referring to, nor Prescott, from where all the prostitutes were recruited when the first brothel opened on Nov. 27, 1879. No, I’m talking about Jerome, AZ, a mining town of 15,000 inhabitants that was the fifth largest city in the state during its prime, 100 years ago. Perched precariously at 5,000 feet on a steep mountainside from which you can see across the Verde Valley to the red rock cliffs of Sedona over 30 miles away, pieces of Jerome have been sliding downhill for a very long time. The force of gravity has been abetted by extensive dynamite explosions from the mining process throughout the town’s colorful history. The last building to move south was the “famous traveling jail,” which relocated itself 250 feet below its original site. What is the first floor of a building on one street might be the third floor from the street below.

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to stay in Jerome for a friend’s wedding. The place is now something of an artist’s colony, a popular biker destination, and, above all, a ghost town. Ghost tours are a business, there is an aged black-and-white photo of what looks like a white swirling woman’s petticoat labeled “Ectoplasm” at the Grand Hotel, and the Haunted Hamburger is a favorite place to hang – quite literally, given that establishment’s tenuous grip on the mountainside. I picked up a book on the coffee table in the parlor of the Surgeon’s House Bed & Breakfast that the quotes below are drawn from, Jerome Times: Ghosts Upon the Page, apparently self-published by Terry Molloy in 2005. I found the stories about the town’s history so compelling that I couldn’t put it down, beguiled by a cast of famous (and even more infamous) characters passing through this remote Arizona den of iniquity for a variety of reasons, some of them downright evil.

Perhaps two nights in a ghost town is too many, because I can’t seem to shake the place and its intoxicating but ominous overtones out of my head. The central core is mining, a rough occupation that in this case forged a toxic blend of prosperity, despair, sin and physical devastation. The scars on the land are highly visible to this day. The sub-theme is depletion. Although fortunes are inexorably made, in the process many backs and hearts are broken, ore inevitably plays out, mines close and exploration moves elsewhere. 

Our small group of eight chatted long into the night in that thinner, cooler, haunted air about contemporary life, current events, the state of the economy and the political dilemmas we face today. One of these issues has persisted, unbidden, clogging my inbox ever since I returned home, in the form of what I can best describe as hysterical essays about the wisdom (or not) of drilling for oil in such remote places as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).  

Contemporary drilling, 19th-century mining – I’m not technically expert enough to draw reasonable parallels or point out valid contrasts – I’ll leave that up to appropriately knowledgeable readers. But I offer the following vignettes from Jerome’s past as food for thought about the inevitable tradeoffs of life in any age. 

Robert Oppenheimer sat on a bench in front of Krotinger’s one crisp October evening in the late 1930’s, meditating on quantum mechanics and collapsing stars, when a deafening explosion jolted him from his reverie and made him realize that the buildings directly across the street from him were also collapsing. “The scientist was dumbfounded. He couldn’t understand. Detonating a quarter of a kiloton of explosives within a quarter mile of businesses and residences seemed mad. They want the copper for the military,” he was told.

Quanah Parker, a personal friend of Teddy Roosevelt, was given a VIP tour of the United Verde Copper Company’s mining operation in Jerome at the President’s request. Half Comanche and half white, he came away realizing that he couldn’t even half understand the white men’s values or behavior. “The stacks were spewing black murderous smoke over the town and the mountainside. Flames belched from the top of the stacks.  Shadowy men, backs bent from fatigue, scurried around the buildings, servicing the machines they had built. It looked like a scene out of what the whites called Hell. These white men had no idea what they were doing. Their pride and their greed blinded them to the consequences of their actions. This was just one in countless industries that destroyed the air and water and earth upon which they depended for their very lives. Were they mad? Had they no concern for their grandchildren? Or were they just stupid and believed that the earth’s bounties were limitless?”

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of WorldatWork and its affiliate, Alliance for Work-Life Progress (AWLP).