Silver City has never been a one-industry town. From its earliest days, its fortunes rose and fell with forces far beyond its narrow streets and adobe walls. Global metal prices, distant cattle markets, federal budgets, and even the lungs of sick strangers seeking dry air have all had their time driving the region’s economy.
What kept Silver City alive, when so many western mining towns faded into diminished relevance, was not a single boom, but a layered economy, with mines, ranches, hospitals, and government payrolls, all stacked just thick enough to absorb the shocks of history.
The boom-and-bust nature of the Silver City economy is the study of historian Scott Fritz, Ph.D. His writings on the subject are included in “Unpacking Silver City.” Chapter 7, written by Fritz, “Booms and Busts, 1870-1952: The History of Business in Silver City, New Mexico.”
When Fritz, who earned his Ph.D. at Northern Arizona University, was doing graduate work at New Mexico State University, he came upon the history of merchant capitalism in New Mexico and focused his research on the merchants of the Mesilla Valley during the 1870s.
“In the American west you have communities that are dependent on extractive industries, industries that extract commodities, whether they're mineral, commodity products, or agricultural products,” Fritz said. “The problem with the commodities markets, and it's still like this to this day, is that you can have high commodity prices, but then those commodity prices can collapse oftentimes because of oversupply.”
Once the gold is dug out of the earth, there's no more gold. If you graze too many cattle and then you have a drought, the cattle start to die off.
“The drought of 1886 that lasted into the winter int early 1887,” Fritz said. “It was a very severe winter that year, and many cattle died off. The cattle industry collapsed for a short period of time, and that also impacted bankers. Bankers had loaned money to the ranchers and then when all their cattle died off, they couldn't pay off their debts and the banks went out of business.”
The Silver City story begins long before the town had a name.
In 1799, Spanish officer José Manuel Carrasco followed Apache guides into the Santa Rita Mountains, where green-blue copper bled from the rock. The discovery tied this remote corner of what is now southwestern New Mexico to the global economy. Copper was hauled by mule along the Janos Trail to Chihuahua and Mexico City, linking Apache land, Spanish capital, prison labor, and imperial minting into one precarious enterprise.
Profits were slim. Distance, taxes, interest payments, and conflict gnawed away at earnings. When war disrupted Spanish authority in 1810, the mines went silent. They would go silent often.
Mining in Grant County was never a steady hum—it was a stutter. Apache resistance, wars of independence, shifting borders, and transportation costs repeatedly shut down production. Yet each time stability returned, the mines reopened. Under Mexican rule, then American rule after 1848, Santa Rita copper and later gold and silver drew prospectors back like moths to a flame.
The real transformation came in the 1860s and 1870s, when gold discoveries at Pinos Altos and silver strikes near San Vicente Creek ignited a regional rush. Farmers at La Cienega de San Vicente suddenly found themselves standing on silver. When John Bullard staked his claim, the peaceful agricultural settlement erupted into a mining camp—and soon after, into Silver City.
The town grew fast. Adobe smelters smoked at the southern edge of town. Hispanic families like the Carrascos, veterans of Mexican silver mining, used their technical knowledge to turn ore into profit. Anglo merchants installed stamp mills, steam engines pounding rock into powder. Money flowed outward—silver shipped east—but also inward, supporting stores, saloons, hotels, blacksmiths, and boardinghouses. Mining was the primary economic linkage, the engine that pulled Silver City into the national economy.
But mining alone was never enough.
By the 1880s, cattle joined silver as the region’s second great export. Ranching boomed, feeding miners locally and shipping beef east to growing American cities. The grasslands of Grant County filled up with brands: Diamond A, Apache Tejo, NAN, AT Ranch, Warm Springs. Many ranchers, like Daniel McMillan and John Fleming, began as miners. They followed a familiar Western path—prospecting first, then trading uncertainty underground for the lesser gamble attached to cattle.
In addition to the commerce they created as producers sending goods out of town for consumption elsewhere, Fleming and other ranchers and miners became leaders in Silver City and bringing culture in from the larger national landscape.
“Fleming entered the market as a miner, but he also owned mines and real estate in the Silver City area,” Fritz writes. “He donated 20 acres to establish a school because some of his employees who are working in the mines in the 1880s and early 1890s were not educated. They were handling very dangerous chemicals, not the least of which would be mercury, and he wanted his workforce to have some level of education so they wouldn't get mercury poisoning.”
That land is where Western New Mexico University is today.
When it comes to ranching, the largest operation, the Lyons and Campbell Ranch and Cattle Company, was corporate-scale ranching born of mining wealth. Incorporated in New Jersey, capitalized at $1.5 million, it ran cattle from the Gila River to Lordsburg and shipped beef not just east, but west to California.
The ranch functioned as an ecosystem: farms, meat markets, company stores, real estate speculation, and commission sales. Cowboys cashed paychecks at the ranch store; Hispanic sharecroppers took seed and tools on credit. Ranching, like mining, tied Grant County tightly to volatile national markets. When beef prices collapsed or drought hit, as they did brutally in the 1920s, ranches failed by the dozens.
Booms made the town grow. Busts tested whether it would survive.
What finally steadied Silver City in the twentieth century was neither ore nor cattle, but people. As tuberculosis swept industrial America, the dry air of the southwest became a form of medicine. By the 1880s, Silver City branded itself the “World’s Sanitarium.” Patients arrived by train and stagecoach, often wealthy, often staying for months or years. They rented rooms, hired nurses, ate in restaurants, and shopped in town.
Sanatoriums multiplied. Cottage Sanatorium, founded in 1905, became a self-contained community with gardens, a post office, and a store. Methodist, African American, and private facilities followed. Fort Bayard, once a military outpost, became an army tuberculosis hospital. An estimated $75,000 a year flowed into the local economy from health seekers alone—a quiet but steady counterweight to the boom-and-bust cycles of mining.
Hot springs added another dimension. Faywood Hot Springs evolved into a resort complete with verandas, dining rooms, and bottled mineral water sold far beyond Grant County. Health became business. Business became stability.
Government spending formed the final economic pillar.
Silver City was a county seat, a military hub, and later a college town. Public payrolls, construction contracts, and New Deal programs injected cash when private enterprise faltered. During the Great Depression, Works Progress Administration workers built schools, hospitals, sidewalks, bridges, and flood controls, projects that not only reshaped the town, but kept families fed. WPA money stayed local.
By the mid-twentieth century, Silver City had transformed again. Tourism replaced tuberculosis. Automobiles replaced mule trains. The Gila Wilderness became an attraction, not an obstacle. Drive-in theaters, motor courts, and souvenir shops appeared. Students poured into the teachers’ college on the GI Bill. Chain stores arrived, undercutting family businesses even as they expanded consumer choice.
Through it all, one truth remained constant: Silver City survived because it adapted. It never relied on a single source of wealth. When silver failed, cattle helped. When cattle collapsed, hospitals and government payrolls softened the blow. When even those faltered, tourism and education emerged.
Elizabeth Warren and her husband moved to Silver City in the early 1880s. Her husband was an insurance dealer and notary, and he died. Warren took over the insurance business and become the first female insurance broker in the territory of New Mexico. She was also certified as a public notary.
“There are stories of her office having lines of miners, who had to abide by federal laws for them to own the subsoil rights by filing a notarized location notice,” Fritz said. “That was all because of the federal government's 1872 General Mining Act. “She made money providing those notary services to the local miners.”
Warren benefitted from that federal government action, but she was also quick to take advantage of other business opportunities.
“At the turn of the century, the town of Silver City passed an ordinance that any property owner in the town had to pave a sidewalk in front of their properties,” he said. “She saw a business opportunity, and she went into the cement business with another woman, whose name was Matilda Koehler. Ultimately, both Koehler and Warren expanded into construction. They built a lot of buildings that are still standing to this day.”
Silver City was never immune to busts. But it learned, early and often, how to live through them. That, more than any single strike or ranch or institution, is its real legacy.
