Park City

Park City was built to undermine Utah. Colonel Patrick Connor stationed his California Volunteers at Fort Douglas in 1862 with open contempt for the Mormon theocracy — 'a community of traitors, murderers, fanatics and whores,' he called Salt Lake — and deliberately sent his men prospecting in the Wasatch to flood the territory with gentile miners. They found silver in 1868; the Ontario Mine, bought by George Hearst for $27,000, produced fifty million dollars and became the greatest silver mine in the world. Park City was the company town of Connor's plan — a hard-drinking, Catholic-and-Protestant, fire-prone mining camp on the mountain above the Mormon kingdom.

The town burned regularly — the 1898 fire took two hundred buildings and left five hundred homeless, and they rebuilt in brick and stone in eighteen months. The miners were as international as the ore: Cornish, Irish, Chinese railroad workers, and Susanna Bransford, 'Utah's Silver Queen,' a miner's wife who invested in the Mayflower and became one of the richest women in the West. When silver collapsed in the Depression the town nearly died; the miners took a fifty-percent pay cut to keep the Silver King open, and the last mine held on until 1982.

The reinvention is the famous part — skiing since the sixties, Sundance since the eighties, the 2002 Olympics on the slopes above the old shafts. Main Street is the same street the miners built after the fire; the ski runs go over the tailings. Park City is the mining town that made it — the boom camp that figured out the mountain was worth more with the silver left in it.