The Tragic Story of the Western Town Slowly Falling Off a Cliff: Jerome Documentary

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]There is a town in Arizona that is quite literally falling off a mountain. Not in the way that all things decay. Not the slow rod of neglect. Not the gradual forgetting that swallows most dying places. Jerome falls the way the hill it clings to has always demanded. In pieces, in slides, in the quiet [music] and relentless surrender of ground that was never meant to hold a city in the first place. Stand on its streets today [music] and you will see buildings that lean at angles that should not be structurally possible. You will see [music] foundations split open like old books. And if you walk far enough down the main road, you will find a concrete jail sitting 225 ft from where it was built. Not moved by a flood, not relocated by a city planner, [music] but shoved downhill by the very mine that created everything above it. This is the story of a billion dollars pulled from a mountain and what was left when the last [music] company walked away. It is a story of copper kings and underground fires that burned for 20 years of labor wars settled [music] at gunpoint in the desert. Of a city that destroyed its own foundation in the act of building itself. The first permanent structure ever raised in Jerome was a saloon and brothel built by a madam named Norah Brown. [music] The man whose name the town carries, Eugene Jerome, New York financeier, never once set foot in it.

[00:01:20]He funded it, named it, and [music] never came. But this is also against every reasonable expectation. A story that [music] does not end in silence.

[00:01:30]Jerome was left for dead in 1953.

[00:01:33]50 years later, artists, [music] musicians, and stubborn believers had rebuilt something from the ruins. Not the copper [music] boom, not the wickedest town in the west, but something quieter and more durable.

[00:01:44][music] Something that the mining companies in all their calculation never accounted for. The hill is still moving beneath it. It always has been. This is Jerome.

[00:01:56]Chapter 1. Ancient ground and the name without a face. Long before the prospectors arrived, long [music] before the tent cities and the smelter smoke and the sound of dynamite rolling down through the [music] Verde Valley, the hill existed as it always had, bare, exposed, and indifferent to the ambitions that would eventually be projected onto it. [music] Cleopatra Hill rises from the Black Hills of central Arizona at an elevation of just over a mile above sea level. Its slopes pitch [music] at roughly 30°, steep enough that the town eventually built on its face would require not just roads, but staircases, narrow stone flights cut into [music] the rock, threading between buildings that could only be reached on foot. The air up here is cooler than the desert below by 20°. In summer, [music] the Verie Valley bakes under a white sky, while Cleopatra Hill holds its shadow. In winter, [music] snow settles on the upper streets while the valley floor remains dry. It is, in purely physical terms, a dramatic and beautiful [music] place. It is also a place that has always been in the process of sliding toward the valley below, one slow [music] inch at a time. The hill does not announce this. It simply does it quietly, the way geological time does everything with complete indifference to whatever has been built on top. The ore bodies beneath it formed approximately 1 75 billion years ago in the caldera of an undersea volcano. Volcanic activity concentrated copper, gold, silver, [music] and zinc into two massive deposits along a ring fault in the ancient rock. Then came the long patience of geological process, tectonic shifts, plate collisions, [music] millions of years of erosion. All of it working to push one ore body close to the surface [music] and leave the tip of the other visible to anyone who looked closely at the exposed hillside. The Earth, in other words, had been advertising its contents for longer than human civilization has existed. It simply took humanity a very long time to understand the advertisement and even longer to decide what to do with it. The first people to read it were the Hokum, who farmed the Verdie Valley from roughly 700 to 1125 CE. They worked the copper deposits for the colorful minerals the ore body exposed at the surface. [music] Malikite and vivid green, azgerite and deep blue, using them as pigment, pressing those colors into cloth and skin. The Yavapai people who followed used the same deposits in the same way, mining the hillside for paint rather than profit. The distinction matters.

[00:04:33]They took what they needed from the hill and left it [music] standing. Nothing in their relationship to Cleopatra Hill required hollowing it out. The Spanish arrived in 1585 following the same hunger for mineral wealth that had driven their expeditions across the entire American Southwest. [music] They found the copper deposits. Their guides, the Yavapai, who had been leading outsiders to the hill for generations, [music] showed them what was there. The Spanish noted it, recorded it, and left. Their government had sent them to find gold and silver, [music] and copper was not gold and silver. A base metal with no immediate imperial application was not worth [music] the cost of extracting it from a remote mountain in the territory they were calling New Mexico. The hill waited, as it had always waited, for someone who would recognize the full value of what lay within it. That recognition required a technological revolution that had not yet happened.

[00:05:29]What would eventually make the copper beneath Cleopatra Hill worth billions of dollars was [music] not its existence, but its timing. The coincidence of a vast deposit and a world that suddenly desperately needed the metal it contained. In 1585, [music] that world did not yet exist. So, the Spanish left, and the hill continued its slow slide toward the valley, and the ore bodies that had formed 1.75 billion years ago remained in the dark where they had always been. After Mexico gained independence [music] from Spain in 1821, the region passed through political transitions without much changing on the hill itself. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made it American territory. Gold was discovered near Prescott in 1863 and miners flooded the region, but most of them passed through the Verde Valley without pausing long on the steep copper hill to the north. The Yavapai, pushed steadily off their traditional lands by the expanding American presence, [music] resisted through the late 1860s and into the 1870s before being forcibly relocated.

[00:06:33]What had been their territory became open to claim in 1876, three Anglo prospectors staked the first formal mining claims [music] on Cleopatra Hill.

[00:06:43]The site was remote in ways that are difficult to fully appreciate now. The nearest railhead was in Abalene, [music] Kansas. Wagon roads connected the area to Prescott, but the terrain [music] made transport expensive enough to eliminate most profit margins before they could form. A metal water tank hauled from Prescott by mule train in 1879 [music] became the geographic center of the young camp. The one fixed point around which everything else arranged itself.

[00:07:10]And around that water tank, the first structures appeared. canvas [music] tents, rough wooden shacks, the improvised architecture of men who were not yet sure whether they were building something or passing through. The camp's very first permanent wooden building was a two-story saloon and brothel [music] constructed next to the water tank by a woman named Nora Brown, known across the territory as Butter Brown. She was a madam by trade and it appears a pragmatist by temperament. She understood the economy of a mining camp, the loneliness, the need for release, the particular appetite of men who spent their days in dangerous darkness [music] with a clarity that no eastern investor reviewing a balance sheet could have matched. She built where they speculated. She was present where [music] they were absent. Jerome's founding structure was not a company office, not a superintendent's house, not a church. It was a place built by a woman who grasped from the very first exactly what this place was going to be and exactly [music] what it was going to need. In 1883, with the camp still scratching out a marginal existence on the hillside, [music] a group of investors formally organized the United Verde Copper Company. Among them was Frederick Tridle, the governor of the Arizona territory, a man comfortable enough with the arrangement to invest in an enterprise he was simultaneously [music] responsible for regulating. And among them also was a New York attorney and financeier named Eugene Murray Jerome who agreed to provide substantial capital on a single condition. The camp would [music] bear his name. Eugene Jerome was by any measure a well-connected man. His cousin Jenny Jerome was the mother of Winston Churchill, a connection that lends this remote Arizona mining camp an almost absurd link to the center of British imperial power. But Eugene Jerome himself had no interest in the camp beyond its financial return. He would never see the streets named [music] for his family, never breathed the smelter smoke that would strip the hill bare, never stand at the edge of the pit that would eventually consume [music] everything he helped set in motion. He reviewed the prospectuses, signed the documents, and went back to his life in New York. [music] He funded it. He named it. He never came. The United Verde began operations in 1883. built a small smelter and generated early returns that justified the investment. [music] Profits reportedly running between $1,500 and $2,000 per day in those first months of full operation. Then in [music] late 1884, the price of copper fell by 50%.

[00:09:43]The company ceased all operations. The smelter went cold. The workforce scattered. The camp that bore Eugene Jerome's name was effectively abandoned before it had existed for two full years. The hill [music] went quiet again, indifferent, patient, full of copper that nobody at that particular moment wanted. What this first abandonment establishes and what the entire arc of Jerome's [music] story will go on to confirm in increasingly dramatic fashion is the defining logic of the place. Jerome was not built to last. It was built to be used. The men who [music] named it, funded it, and organized it into a legal and commercial entity were not building a community.

[00:10:25]They [music] were positioning capital to extract value from a geological accident. The community that grew up around that extraction, the miners, [music] the families, the merchants, the workers who came from across the world and made real lives on this impossible slope.

[00:10:40]That community was incidental to the plan. It was the [music] residue of profit seeking, not its purpose. A town named by an absentee, built on unstable ground with a brothel for a cornerstone.

[00:10:52]Its fate in many ways was written before the first shaft was ever sunk. Chapter 2. The copper king who lit the fuse.

[00:11:02]In 1888, a man named William Andrews Clark bought the dormant United Verde properties for $80,000.

[00:11:09]It was not a large sum, even by the standards of the era. But Clark was not the kind of man who made sentimental purchases. He bought things because he understood their value in ways other people had missed. And he bought the United Verde because he looked at that abandoned hill. [music] Cold smelter, empty shacks, copper prices recovering, and saw with the clarity of someone who had already made one fortune in copper [music] exactly what lay beneath it. Clark was already famous by the time he arrived in Arizona, [music] or notorious, depending on who you asked. He had made his first money in Montana, supplying [music] goods to miners at prices that reflected his monopoly on remote supply chains, [music] turning a modest stake into a commercial empire with the methodical patience of a man who never confused sentiment [music] with strategy. He had grown that money into a copper empire centered on but where he was one of the three so-called copper kings [music] whose war for control of the richest hill on earth had become a national spectacle. A battle fought with lawyers, bribe judges, [music] purchase legislators, and the occasional act of violence that nobody could quite prove and nobody in power particularly wanted to investigate. He was brilliant, utterly ruthless, and driven by two things in roughly equal measure. The accumulation of wealth and the accumulation of political power. He would eventually buy his way into the United States [music] Senate, an act so naked in its corruption that even the guilded age, not known for its fidiousness about such things, found it difficult to defend. He served one term and was not invited back. He was also, when applied to the correct problem, a genuinely exceptional industrial operator. What Clark saw at Jerome was a copper deposit of extraordinary richness being [music] strangled by a logistics problem. The ore was there. The market was recovering. What was missing was the infrastructure to move the product from a mountain in central Arizona to the smelters and railroads that [music] could turn it into money. His answer was the United Verde and Pacific Railway.

[00:13:11][music] A narrow gauge line threading down from Jerome through terrain so difficult, so full of switchbacks and hairpin turns on a 30° slope that engineers who surveyed the route shook their heads. And the men who eventually rode it gave it a nickname that stuck.

[00:13:27]the crookedest line in the world. Clark built it anyway because a crooked line that moved copper was worth more than a straight line that did not exist. With the railroad came scale, and with scale came transformation. Or that had previously required expensive wagon transport could now move in volume. The smelter was enlarged. New shafts were sunk into the hillside, following the copper veins deeper and wider. The workforce expanded from a few hundred men to several hundred more and then to thousands. By 1895, [music] the United Verde had become the leading copper producer in the Arizona territory. By 1900, [music] Jerome's population had climbed past 2,500, [music] and the camp of canvas and rough timber that Norah Brown had anchored with her saloon was becoming something that aspired, if not always convincingly, to the permanence of a real city. The irony was visible to anyone who looked directly at it. The more productive the mine became, the more it destroyed the environmental stability on which the town depended.

[00:14:29]The extraction process was eating the mountain from the inside through the tunnel network below, while stripping it bare from the outside through the smelter smoke above. The city growing on top of this process [music] had no foundation that was not ultimately contingent on what remained below. and what remained below was [music] being steadily reduced. Jerome was a city that was consuming itself in the act of producing wealth and the production was so profitable and the [music] consumption so gradual that almost nobody with the power to do anything about it chose to look. In those years, the town [music] that Clark's investment created was by every contemporary account an extraordinary place.

[00:15:10]Extraordinary in its energy, its lawlessness [music] and its almost theatrical intensity. Jerome in the 1890s was not merely rough. It was, according to the [music] San Francisco Examiner, writing in 1899, the wickedest town in America. A Phoenix newspaper offered a more precise accounting that same year. One beggarly looking church and at least 16 saloons [music] with more going up. The town had burned to the ground four times in that single decade in 1894, 1897, 1898, and 1899. and had been [music] rebuilt each time from wood quickly and cheaply because the ore was not going to wait for permanent construction. And the men who built Jerome were not in those years thinking [music] about permanence.

[00:15:56]They were thinking about copper. What the statistics cannot convey is the texture of life on that slope. Jerome drew workers from across the known world, pulled by wages that were better than [music] what most of these men could earn at home, even if they were worse than what the work deserved. Irish miners came with skills developed in the minds of Cornwall and the old country, bringing with them a tradition of labor solidarity that would eventually find its most dramatic expression on [music] these very streets. Italian workers settled in clusters, maintaining the rhythms of home in unfamiliar desert.

[00:16:29]Croatian and Slavic immigrants filled the lower wage positions, learning English in boarding houses where the beds were never [music] entirely cold.

[00:16:38]Mexican minors, many of them experienced and technically skilled, [music] made up a substantial portion of the workforce and received in return for equal labor, wages that were officially and unapologetically lower than those paid to Anglo [music] workers doing the same work. The differential was company policy maintained without embarrassment, as though the market had somehow determined that a man's [music] nationality affected the value of the copper he extracted. They all lived in close and chaotic proximity on the terrace streets of the hill. The boarding houses ran on rotation. A man coming off the night shift would climb into a bed still warm from the man who had just left for days. Two bodies sharing one mattress in sequence, never simultaneously. [music] The intimacy of shared poverty expressed in this most basic way. [music] The Cribs District, Jerome's openly operated red light neighborhood, ran its business without apology in the alleys behind the main streets because a town of thousands of men far from [music] home had appetites that were not going to be addressed by the one beggarly looking church. [music] Gambling halls operated beside hardware stores. The opera house, because Jerome had an opera house, which tells you something about the ambitions of the people who built it, stood within sight of the brothel. The contradiction was [music] not felt as a contradiction.

[00:17:56]It was simply Jerome. The fires that swept the wooden town four times in the 1890s are worth dwelling on because they establish a pattern that the rest of Jerome's history will [music] repeat in increasingly dramatic ways. After each fire, the town rebuilt. After the fourth fire in 5 years, it rebuilt largely in brick because by then it was clear [music] that wood and ambition were not a sustainable combination on a dry mountain slope in the Arizona territory.

[00:18:23]The brick buildings that [music] replaced the burned ones were more permanent. They were also heavier, sitting on ground that the mine shafts below [music] were steadily undermining and that the smelter smoke above had stripped of everything that might have held the soil in place. Clark himself was not in Jerome for most of this.

[00:18:39][music] He was in but or in Washington or in one of his various mansions conducting the broader business of being William Andrews Clark. He visited Jerome periodically reviewed the production figures made the decisions that needed making and returned to his other concerns. The United Verde was a profitable asset in a larger portfolio.

[00:19:00]Jerome [music] was the address on the asset. The distinction between those two things, a place that is [music] yours versus a place that is merely an asset, would eventually define everything about how Jerome's story ended. He brought it to life. He never cared about it. And in that combination of capability and indifference, [music] Clark established the template that every subsequent owner of Jerome's minds would follow. Each one taking a little more from the hill and leaving a little less behind until the hill itself, stripped, hollowed, blasted, [music] and finally abandoned, began the slow process of taking back what remained.

[00:19:38]Chapter 3. Rawhidede. Douglas and the Peak. The man who arrived in Jerome in 1912 had a nickname that told you everything you needed to know about his operating philosophy. James [music] Stewart Douglas had earned the name Rawhide Jimmy during his time managing a mine in Nekazari, Mexico, where he had solved an engineering problem by using strips of rawhide to reduce wear on a cable car incline. It was the kind of solution that could only come from someone who had spent enough time in enough [music] mines in enough countries with enough problems and not enough equipment. That improvisation had become instinct. [music] He was the son of a prominent mining engineer, the grandson of a man who had begun the Douglas family's involvement in copper in Canada. And he carried both the technical knowledge and the appetite for risk that his lineage had produced.

[00:20:28]Where Clark had been a financeier who understood mining, Douglas was a mining man who understood [music] finance, a different creature, and in Jerome's story, a necessary one. He had been watching the geology around Jerome for years before he committed [music] to it.

[00:20:42]What Douglas believed, and what most of his contemporaries considered an expensive longshot, was that a second or body existed near the United Verde deposit, one that had been displaced downward [music] by the same geological falting that had shaped the Verde Valley over millions of years. The United Verde's ore body had been extensively [music] mapped. Clark's engineers knew its dimensions and its limits. What they had not found, and what Douglas was betting his reputation and his capital on finding, was the continuation of that deposit, shifted by the Earth's own movement to a depth and [music] position that existing surveys had missed entirely. He purchased the claims that would become the United Verde Extension Mine, the UVX, and began sinking shafts in the direction his geological reading of the landscape told him to go. The work was expensive, the returns initially modest, and the skeptics were not quiet about their skepticism. A man drilling for a theoretical ore body that nobody else believed existed was, in the mining culture of the early 20th century, considered either visionary or reckless, and the line between those two things is only ever clear in retrospect.

[00:21:50]In 1914, his crews cut into it. The war in Europe, which had begun [music] that same summer, was consuming copper at a rate the world had never seen. shell casings, electrical wire, military hardware of every description. All of it required copper, and the demand was climbing by the month. The price per pound, which had been modest in the years when Douglas was drilling his exploratory shafts, [music] began to rise. By 1916, it had roughly doubled.

[00:22:19]Every pound of copper extracted from the UVX was worth twice what it had [music] been worth when the decision to drill was made. And Douglas was extracting an extraordinary number of pounds. For the first time in Jerome's history, the Hill was producing from two Bonanza mines simultaneously. The United Verde, Clark's great operation, was running at scale. The UVX, Douglas's Gamble, was pouring out ore with an intensity that made even the United Verde's managers take notice. The population of the town climbed [music] past 10,000 and kept climbing toward 12,000 toward 15,000.

[00:22:55]New buildings rose on every available terrace of the hill. Jerome was by any measure one of the most productive and economically significant communities in the entire American Southwest. a fact that the residents knew and that the investors reviewing their quarterly returns in offices a continent away appreciated in the particular way that investors appreciate facts of that kind.

[00:23:18][music] Douglas himself made a choice that deserves attention because it is one of the few moments in Jerome's history when an owner of the mines did something that [music] ran counter to the pattern Clark had established. He moved to Jerome. He built his mansion on a rise above his mine, [music] a substantial structure with a library and a view over the Verde Valley that was on clear days extraordinary. And he lived in it. He hired staff, established a household, and became a presence in the community in a way that [music] Eugene Jerome had refused to be and that Clark had considered unnecessary. His mansion [music] still stands. It is now the Jerome State Historic Park, open most days, [music] housing exhibits on the mining history of the region and the story of the Douglas family. Inside, among the artifacts and photographs, there is a three-dimensional scale [music] model of Jerome's underground mine system, a physical representation of the extraordinary and terrifying complexity of what was built beneath the streets. Looking at that model, you begin to understand Jerome in a way that the surface streets cannot convey. The real city was below. Everything above ground, the saloons, the churches, the [music] school, the hospital was superructure built over a hollowed mountain. The model makes this visible in miniature, and the effect is quietly vertigenous. The peak years produced wealth at a scale that justified, at least numerically, the boosters who called Jerome the billion dollar copper camp. Historians have since complicated that figure. geologists [music] and economists putting the total value of metals extracted at somewhere between $800 million and several billion dollars in adjusted terms depending on methodology in which our bodies are included. Whatever [music] the precise number, it was extraordinary. And like most extraordinary wealth extracted from a single place by corporations whose primary connections lay elsewhere, [music] it passed through Jerome rather than accumulating in it. In 1926, the United Verde completed the construction of a five-story [music] concrete hospital on the highest point of Jerome.

[00:25:23]A substantial modern facility visible from the valley below, a physical declaration of institutional permanence.

[00:25:30]It was the last significant building ever constructed in the town. [music] Consider that for a moment. The last major structure built during Jerome's peak years was a hospital. Not a [music] school, not a commercial building, not a civic hall, a facility for treating the sick and injured. The company had, perhaps without recognizing the significance of the choice, built its final monument not to prosperity, but to the cost of prosperity. A building designed to manage the human damage that the mines produced. By 1928, [music] that damage had extended to the town itself. subsidance, the gradual sinking of ground from which the underlying support has [music] been removed, had already irreparably damaged at least 10 buildings in Jerome's [music] downtown core. The Verde fault line, which ran directly beneath the town, was responding to decades of underground disturbance in ways that [music] were now measurable and visible. The hillside, stripped of all vegetation by years of smelter smoke, [music] had nothing to hold it against the pull of gravity and the vibration of the daily blasting. Foundations cracked, walls separated from floors. [music] Streets developed undulations that engineers recorded and residents learned to navigate. The prosperity and the destruction were not running in parallel. They were the same process, advancing together, inseparable from the beginning. Jerome at its peak was simultaneously the richest it had ever been and the most compromised. A city sitting on a mountain that the city itself had been hollowing out for 40 years, growing more [music] magnificent and more unstable in the same motion, like a beautiful building being constructed on a foundation that [music] is quietly, continuously giving way.

[00:27:10]Chapter 4. The hill turns [music] on itself. There is a particular horror to a fire you cannot reach. Beginning in 1918, fires ignited deep in the underground workings of the United Verde. These were not the kind of fires that could be fought with water or smothered with sand. They burned in the high sulfur ore veins [music] that threaded through the mine's lower levels. Veins where the chemistry of the rock itself provided both fuel and oxidizer. Where the combustion was self- sustaining in ways that confounded every attempt at [music] suppression. Crews tried flooding sections with water. They tried sealing passages to starve the fires of air. They monitored. They contained. They engineered the fires burned anyway, deep in the dark, unreachable and indifferent, doing what fire does when given sufficient material and no [music] reason to stop. Over time, they consumed 22 m of underground tunnels. Some sections burned continuously for more than two [music] decades, long after the men who first discovered them had left Jerome, long after the peak years had [music] passed, long after the town above had begun its descent. The fires did not care about any of that. They were simply [music] there underground, as patient and as permanent as the ore that had started them. The practical consequence was enormous and irreversible. Sections of the mine became inaccessible. [music] The heat and toxic gases in the burning areas made sustained work impossible.

[00:28:40]The structural integrity of the surrounding rock was compromised by combustion that had no end date anyone could predict. The United Verde, confronting a problem it could not solve from below, made the decision that would reshape Jerome's physical landscape forever. It would shift from underground mining to open pit operations, removing the overlying rock from above rather than tunneling through it from below.

[00:29:04]What this meant [music] in practice was dynamite. Enormous quantities of dynamite detonated on a regular schedule, carving the mountain open layer by layer to expose the ore beneath. The blasts were felt throughout Jerome. Windows rattled in their frames.

[00:29:20]Dishes moved on shelves. Walls that were already cracked from years of subsidance developed new fractures after each detonation. The ground, already honeycombed with decades of tunneling, absorbed the shock waves and transmitted them upward into the foundations of everything built above. The mountain was now being attacked simultaneously from two directions. Hollowed from below by the remaining underground workings and stripped from above by the open pit blasting. And Jerome sat between these two processes, absorbing the consequences of both with no say in either. The labor situation in Jerome had been building toward crisis for years, fed by the same conditions that produced labor unrest in every copper town across the American West. The miners who extracted the copper that made Clark wealthy and the Douglas [music] family prosperous were paid wages that could not in many cases cover both rent and food in the same week. The rotation system in the boarding houses, two men sharing one bed in shifts, never simultaneously, [music] was not an inconvenience. It was a statement about how little the companies believed their workers were owed.

[00:30:27]Mexican miners who made up a substantial portion of the workforce received wages officially and unapologetically [music] set below those of Anglo workers doing identical work. The differential was not a market outcome. It was a policy maintained deliberately [music] as transparent an expression of contempt as any mining company in the territory produced. [music] Three separate labor organizations competed for the loyalty of Jerome's workers in [music] 1917. The international union of mine, mill, and smelter workers represented the more established workforce and [music] favored negotiation within the existing system. The Liga Protector Latina organized the [music] roughly 500 Mexican miners whose grievances were particular and acute and largely ignored by the other unions. and the industrial workers of the world. The IWW, the Wobblies, represented the most radical current in American labor at the time, a movement that did not want better terms within the existing [music] arrangement, but the transformation of the arrangement itself. They believed, not unreasonably given the evidence available in Jerome, that a system that treated workers the way the copper companies treated their workers could not be reformed from [music] within. It had to be replaced. The companies viewed the IWW [music] with something beyond ordinary hostility. In the summer of 1917, with the United [music] States at war and copper demand at historic highs, any disruption to production was framed not merely as a business problem, but as a threat to the national interest. The Wobblies, many of whose members were foreignborn and most of whom were openly skeptical of the war, were easy to cast as enemies of the country rather than workers with legitimate grievances. The framing was dishonest. It was also effective. On July 5th, the IWW struck.

[00:32:16]Within days, the company had a plan, and the plan had nothing to do with bargaining. On the night of July 9th, in a meeting at Jerome's High School, a group [music] organized itself under the direction of company agents and sympathetic local businessmen. [music] 250 men were assembled and armed with rifles, with axe handles, with the confidence of people who understood that nothing they were about to do would result in their prosecution. At dawn on July 10th, [music] they moved through Jerome's streets and boarding houses with the systematic efficiency of an operation that had been carefully planned. Men were pulled from beds, [music] confronted in doorways, hauled from rooms where they had been sleeping between shifts. Between 63 and 67 men, the historical record varies slightly on the precise number, were identified as IWW members or sympathizers, [music] marched to a mine-owned rail line near the mountain and loaded into cattle cars. The cars moved west. The men were deposited in needles in the Mojave Desert and told that returning to Jerome would cost [music] them more than their union membership. Some of those men had lived in Jerome for years. Some had families in town, wives, children, households built carefully on wages that were never quite enough. They were given no time to collect belongings, no opportunity to send word, no [music] chance to make arrangements. They were extracted from Jerome the way copper was extracted from the hill. Completely efficiently, without concern for what the extraction left behind. No one was arrested. No prosecution followed. The governor of Arizona, when the IWW protested, [music] responded by declaring that the union had threatened him. A claim that served to close the [music] matter rather than investigate it. The mines reopened. The remaining workers returned to the same wages, [music] the same conditions, the same rotation of shared beds and lethal underground shifts that had produced the strike in the first place. The Jerome deportation was, from the company's [music] perspective, a complete success. It was also, as events would quickly confirm, a template. Phelps Dodge, watching from its offices [music] and taking careful notes, recognized in the Jerome operation, a model that could be scaled.

[00:34:30]3 days after the cattle cars left Jerome, the same company orchestrated a far larger version in Bisby. [music] More than a thousand men loaded into cattle cars and shipped into the desert in what became one of the most notorious acts of corporate labor suppression in American history. Jerome was the rehearsal. Bisby was the performance.

[00:34:50]What connects the underground fires and the deportation. [music] What makes them, in retrospect, expressions of the same underlying reality rather than separate events is the logic they share.

[00:35:01]The fires were the consequence of extracting sulfurrich ore with the [music] speed and intensity that maximum profitability demanded without adequate attention to what that extraction was doing to the mountain stability. The deportation was the consequence of extracting labor from human beings with the same logic. Maximum output, minimum cost, and no tolerance for any element of the system that prioritized the workers interests over the company's returns. In both cases, the mechanism of destruction was identical to the mechanism of production. The blasting that freed the copper also fractured the foundations. The labor [music] system that generated the wealth also generated the conditions that made resistance inevitable. Jerome was a place that could not stop consuming itself because the consumption [music] and the production were not different processes. They were one process and it was always going to end the same [music] way. The fires burned underground. The men and needles did not come back.

[00:35:59][music] The hill kept moving as it had always moved, carrying everything built on it a little further down the slope with each passing year. Chapter 5. When the ground gave up. On October 29th, 1929, the New York stock market collapsed and the world that had sustained Jerome's boom began to come apart in ways that no amount of copper could hold together. The price per pound, which had reached nearly 20 cents during the war years and had [music] stayed reasonably firm through the middle years of the decade, fell to 14 cents by 1930. By 1932, it had collapsed to 5 cents, [music] a number so far below the cost of running Jerome's mines that continuing operations was not an economic decision, [music] but an act of institutional denial. The United Verde, which had survived one shutdown in 1884 and had been producing without significant interruption since Clark's arrival in 1888, began cutting its workforce. The UVX, Douglas's Great Bonanza, operated at a loss. The smaller mines in the district closed without ceremony. Jerome, which had always been one commodity away from catastrophe had arrived at the catastrophe. The population that had peaked near 15,000 in the late 1920s, began to fall. At first, the departures were orderly.

[00:37:19]Young men leaving for Phoenix or Los Angeles. Families following the work to wherever work had gone. Then the pace changed. Houses emptied faster than new tenants arrived to replace them.

[00:37:29]Businesses that had served the mining families for decades closed their doors without the usual announcement of a sale or a move, simply going dark one day and staying dark. The boarding houses that had once run on perpetual rotation, found themselves with rooms available, which [music] in Jerome was a condition so unfamiliar that it had no established vocabulary. The streets that had been crowded at any hour. Jerome had always been a 24-hour town because the mines ran three shifts and everything else ran with them. Grew quiet in ways that felt less like peace than like a breath being held before something [music] breaks.

[00:38:04]The underground fires were still burning. The open pit blasting continued through the early years of the depression. Because the pit could still produce ore at prices that the underground operations could no longer justify. And because every owner of Jerome's mines, from Clark's estate to the investors who held the UVX, [music] was determined to extract whatever remained before the mathematics became entirely impossible. Each blast sent its shock waves through the hill. Each shock wave found the fractures that decades of tunneling had opened in the rock and traveled through them, spreading outward and upward into the foundations of buildings that were already compromised.

[00:38:42]Walls that were already cracked. Ground that was already in the process of deciding it had held its position long enough. The subsidance that engineers had been measuring since the late 1920s was accelerating. Contributing factors multiplied on each other in the way that [music] structural failures tend to. The geological falting that ran directly beneath the town. The blast vibrations from the open pit. The erosion that continued unchecked on a hillside stripped bare of all vegetation by decades of smelter smoke. The hollow network of tunnels that threaded through the rock below the streets like a vast and [music] unmapped weakness. Jerome was not simply aging. It was being consumed from within by the exact [music] same processes that had built it. and the consumption was now moving faster than the building had. Buildings shifted on their foundations. The post office moved perceptibly. Entire sections of downtown Jerome subsided, dropping streets and structures by inches, then [music] by feet, opening gaps between walls and floors that no amount of repair could permanently close because the cause of the gaps was still active, still working, [music] still removing the support from below. Dozens of buildings were eventually lost to the process. Not dramatically, not in a single event, but [music] in the gradual and relentless way that ground settles when there is nothing left beneath it to push back. In 1935, the Clark family sold the United Verde to Phelps Dodge for $21 million. The same year, the UVX shut down permanently. Jerome's two great bonanza mines, the twin engines that had driven the town [music] to its peak, were both gone or in the hands of a corporation that had no history with [music] the place and no intention of developing one. Whatever residual connection had existed between Jerome's wealth and the people who produced it was now fully severed. The hill still had copper in it. The company that owned the rights to that copper lived somewhere else entirely. And then [music] in 1938, the jail moved. The city jail had been built in 1905, positioned at [music] the intersection of Main Street and Hull Avenue, a concrete structure that represented something Jerome had always wanted to believe about itself, that it was a real city with real institutions with the kind of civic [music] permanence that distinguished a community from a camp.

[00:41:02]It had sat on its foundation for 33 years, [music] processing the drunks and the fighters and the men whose particular varieties of bad judgment had made them a problem for the town's administration. It was solid. It was concrete. In a town that had burned four times in a decade, that had been built and rebuilt from wood on a slope that had never wanted it there. The concrete jail was as close to a fixed point as Jerome had. In 1938, a dynamite blast from the open pit mine. The same kind of blast that had been shaking the hill for two decades. The same kind of blast that had been cracking foundations and shifting walls throughout Jerome for as long as anyone could remember struck the compromised ground beneath the jail's foundation at precisely the wrong angle.

[00:41:47]Or perhaps precisely the right one if the hill had been waiting for this moment. The concrete structure sheared away from the larger wood and tin building it was attached to cleanly as though the connection had never been structural [music] to begin with. As though the jail had simply been waiting for sufficient reason to leave. It slid 225 ft down the hillside. [music] It did not tip over. It did not crumble. It did not come apart in the way that a building might be expected to come apart when moved by a shock wave down a 30° slope. It arrived at its new location essentially [music] intact. a complete concrete structure slightly displaced from true sitting in the middle of Hull Avenue as though it had always been there and the [music] road had been inconsiderately built through its living room. The town rerouted the road around it because [music] the road could be moved more easily than the jail and because the jail, as subsequent decades would confirm, [music] had no intention of going anywhere further. The jail sits there still. It has become Jerome's most photographed landmark, its most visited curiosity, the detail that appears in every article about the town, and [music] every ghost tour itinerary, and every attempt to summarize what Jerome is in a single image. Visitors line up to see it, to take pictures of the displaced structure sitting sideways in the landscape to explain to children who ask why someone would build a jail in the middle of a road. The answer that the jail was not built there, that the ground it was built on no longer exists at the elevation where the jail stood, that both the structure and the street were moved by a process neither of them chose [music] is a more complicated answer than most tourist landmarks require. But it is the true answer.

[00:43:26][music] And what the image of that displaced, intact, immovable concrete structure actually represents [music] is not a curiosity. It is a thesis. It is the physical demonstration in the most literal terms available of what happens when you hollow out the ground beneath a city and then act surprised when the city stops staying where you put it. The jail cannot go back. The foundation it stood on no longer exists in the form that held it. [music] The displacement is permanent. Jerome by 1938 [music] was in precisely the same condition. permanently displaced from what it had been, sitting in a new position it had not chosen on ground that had been making its own decisions for years. World War II arrived and [music] with it the familiar logic of wartime copper demand. Prices rose.

[00:44:14]Phelps Dodge reopened operations. Men came back to work on the hill and for a few years there was money in Jerome again and the streets [music] had some of their old activity. And it was possible to look at the town from a certain angle [music] and believe that the worst had passed and the recovery was real. But the people who had been watching the ground, who had measured the subsidance, who had seen the jail slide, who had felt the blasting in their walls and watched the smoke finish what the mines had started on the stripped hillside above. They understood something that the wartime optimism made it easy to avoid. This was not a recovery. [music] It was a reprieve. The ore that remained was lower grade than what had already been taken. The cost of extraction at peaceime prices would not justify continued operation. The mathematics that had built Jerome were moving, as mathematics always do, toward their conclusion. The war ended. [music] The demand fell. The reprieve expired.

[00:45:10]Jerome went quiet again. And this time, the quiet was different. This time, it had the quality of something finished rather than something paused. The hill kept moving beneath the empty streets, carrying what remained a little further down the slope, as it had always done, as it would continue to do, long after the last company had taken its last accounting and gone home. Chapter 6. The long goodbye.

[00:45:35]There is a particular kind of ending that does not announce itself. It arrives dressed as a transition, a reorganization, a routine transfer of assets between parties whose names appear in documents that most people will never read. The ending of Jerome's mining era arrived exactly this way. Not with a collapse, not with a fire or a flood or a [music] single catastrophic event, but with a sale. a clean, legal, [music] financially rational transaction that transferred ownership of the United Verde Copper Company from the Clark family to Phelps Dodge Corporation [music] in 1935 for $21 million and in doing so completed the final severance between Jerome and any owner who had ever in any meaningful [music] sense belonged to it. William Andrews Clark had been ruthless and self-interested, but he had been present. His name was on the operation in a way that went beyond a corporate filing. His decisions had physical consequences he could observe.

[00:46:33]The men who worked the United Verde knew in at least a notional sense, who owned the machines they operated and the tunnels [music] they descended into each morning. Clark had visited. He had made choices that affected Jerome and then lived at least partly [music] with the consequences of those choices. The connection between capital and place, however strained and however weighted toward the capital, had existed. Phelps Dodge arrived with no such connection and saw no reason to develop one. Its headquarters were in New York. [music] Its executives reviewed Jerome as a line item in a portfolio that included copper operations across the American Southwest and beyond. A producing asset among [music] producing assets evaluated on yield on cost per ton on the spread between the price of copper and the price of extracting it. [music] The town was not their home. The miners were not their neighbors. The sliding jail sitting displaced on Hall Avenue, the cracked foundations throughout the downtown, the ongoing underground fires that had been burning for nearly two decades. These were operational variables to be managed, not evidence of a community being consumed by its own industrial machinery. This is the [music] essential distinction that runs through Jerome's entire history and reaches its conclusion in the Phelps Dodge years. Eugene Jerome named a town he would never visit. Clark built an empire in a place he treated as an asset. Rawhigh Jimmy Douglas actually lived there. Actually looked out from his mansion [music] at the valley below and felt something that might be called connection. And then Phelps Dodge arrived and the last trace of personal relationship between ownership and place disappeared [music] entirely. Jerome became in the most complete sense simply an address on a resource. The outcome from that [music] point was never really in question. The company extracted what remained with the efficiency that corporate ownership tends to produce.

[00:48:29]The open pit expanded. The blasting continued. Phelps Dodge ran the operations with the cost discipline of an organization that had no sentimental investment in the outcome and no reason [music] to spend more than the yield justified. Through the wartime years of the 1940s, [music] when copper demand surged again and the mines ran at capacity and Jerome briefly felt something like its old purpose, Phelps Dodge produced and profited. When the war ended and demand stabilized at peaceime levels, the company looked at the numbers with the same clinical attention it had always applied, and the numbers began to say something that everyone in Jerome had been afraid to hear. The ore that remained was lower grade than what had already been taken.

[00:49:11]70 years of extraction had removed the richest deposits and left behind material that required more blasting, [music] more processing, more labor per ton of copper produced. The cost of continued operation at peaceime copper prices was approaching the point where it would exceed the return. The Clarkdale smelter, which had been processing Jerome's ore since the United Verde built it decades earlier, closed in 1950. A smelter is not a seasonal facility. Closing a smelter is not a pause. Every minor on the hill who watched the smelter go dark understood what it meant. Even before the official announcement arrived in [music] 1953, Phelps Dodge closed the mines. There was no ceremony. No acknowledgement proportionate to what was ending. A corporate communication [music] went out. Operations ceased. The last shifts were worked. and the company moved on to its other concerns with the clean efficiency of an organization [music] that had never been emotionally invested in Jerome and therefore had nothing to grieve. Roughly $800 million in copper, gold, silver, and [music] zinc had been extracted from Cleopatra Hill over 70 years. The accessible, economically viable ore was gone. The asset [music] had been fully liquidated. Jerome, from Phelps Dodge's perspective, was a closed account. The population collapsed from a peak near 15,000. It had already been falling for two decades. After the closure, the fall became something closer to a route. [music] Families left. Young people who had stayed through the lean years of the late 1940s, sustained [music] by the wartime reprieve and the hope that followed it now had no reason remaining to stay. By the mid 1950s, [music] fewer than 100 people remained in a city built to house and serve 15,000. Streets that had accommodated the traffic of a boom town [music] stood empty. The grand civic buildings, the hospital, the school, the churches that had served congregations from half a dozen different countries stood vacant, their functions gone along with the people who had needed them. The Jerome Historical Society [music] said no. It was a small group, a stubborn remnant of residents who had watched the town empty around them and had decided with a conviction that the balance sheets could not accommodate, that what remained in Jerome was worth more than the cost of tearing it down.

[00:51:28]They organized. They lobbied against demolition. They argued that the buildings, the streets, the whole improbable architecture of a city clinging to a mountain it had spent 70 years destroying had a value that did not appear in any corporate ledger. They were not wrong. They were also by any conventional measure of power outmatched. A handful of local residents arguing with a copper corporation [music] that had just extracted nearly a billion dollars from the hill beneath their feet. They opened a museum on Main Street and charged admission. They declared Jerome the world's largest ghost city, [music] a marketing designation that was by that point difficult to dispute on factual grounds and that turned out to have genuine commercial appeal. People would pay to walk through the ruins of something that had once been extraordinary. People would come to see the displaced jail, the cracked facades, [music] the empty streets, the view over the Verde Valley from a mountain that had been worth a billion dollars and now asked only for a few hours of [music] a visitor's afternoon. There is something distinctly and painfully American in this arrangement. [music] A community reduced by corporate extraction to selling the spectacle of its own diminishment, converting the evidence of its destruction into the only revenue stream left available. The historical [music] society did not flinch from this. They understood what they had to work with and they worked with it because the alternative was watching Phelps Dodge finish what the mines had started.

[00:52:51][music] The post office, which had operated without interruption since 1883, through four fires, through the labor wars, through the deportation, through the depression, through the underground fires and the sliding jail and the collapse of copper prices and the departure of 15,000 people. The post office stayed open. There were perhaps not enough residents left to justify the operational cost. It stayed open anyway.

[00:53:17]Some things, it turns out, are not subject to the logic of extraction. Some things simply refuse to close. Chapter 7. The artists and the Second Life. By the late 1950s, Jerome had settled into a silence that most observers assumed was permanent. The population had bottomed out somewhere below [music] 100. The streets that had once accommodated the noise and movement of 15,000 people held almost nothing.

[00:53:43]Buildings that had survived the fires of the 1890s, the labor wars of 1917, the underground fires, the depression, and the slow subsidance [music] of the hill were now facing the quieter enemy of simple neglect. Roofs going soft, windows going dark. The particular deterioration that accelerates when there is nobody left to notice it and nobody with a reason to intervene.

[00:54:07]Jerome looked from any reasonable distance like a place in its final chapter. What nobody had accounted for was the possibility that the ruins themselves were valuable. Not as copper, not as real estate in any conventional sense, but as something rarer and harder to quantify. As a place that had been through everything and wore its history visibly without apology in its tilted facades and its cracked streets and its displaced jail sitting permanently in the middle of Hull Avenue, a place that looked exactly like what it was. The artists arrive first, as they [music] tend to in such places, drawn by the specific combination of cheap rent and visual drama that abandoned places occasionally offer to people whose work requires them to look directly at things [music] that others prefer not to see.

[00:54:54]The rents in Jerome in the early 1960s were cheap because there was almost nobody left to compete for the space.

[00:55:01][music] A storefront on Main Street that had once housed a saloon or a dry goods operation could be had for almost nothing because the alternative was watching it continue its slow return to the hillside. The artists who moved in were without organizing it into a movement or articulating it as a philosophy doing the buildings a practical favor. They were also doing something that Phelps Dodge in all its corporate rationality [music] had been unable to do. They were choosing Jerome, not for what could be taken [music] from it, but for what it was. They opened galleries and spaces that had been saloons. They set up studios [music] and buildings that had been brothel and company offices and general stores. They held shows and readings in a town that had once had an opera house. and the echo of that original cultural ambition.

[00:55:47]The opera [music] house that stood within sight of the cribs district, the civic aspiration that had always coexisted with the lawlessness seemed to return to the streets in a different register. Jerome had always been a place [music] where contradictions occupied the same block. The artists were simply the latest version of that tendency, [music] establishing something genuine in a space that commerce had evacuated.

[00:56:09]The designation of Jerome as a national historic landmark in 1967 was both recognition and protection. It was the federal government acknowledging formally that what remained on Cleopatra Hill had value beyond the extractable, that a place could matter for what it was rather than what it contained. The designation made demolition significantly harder and gave the recovery a more durable foundation.

[00:56:34]Though the irony of discussing [music] foundations in Jerome, where the ground had already expressed its opinion on the subject so emphatically was not lost on the people who lived there. [music] The population grew slowly through the 1970s and into the 1980s. Not the explosive growth of the copper years, nothing that could be called a boom, nothing that bore any resemblance to [music] the forces that had built Jerome in the first place, but a steady accumulation of people who came to Jerome deliberately. Writers, painters, potters, musicians, crafts people of various kinds, [music] who found in the weathered brick and the steep streets and the view over the Verde Valley something that more prosperous and more stable places could not provide. The feeling of a place that had survived something enormous. The texture of history worn openly on every surface.

[00:57:23]The particular kind of freedom that exists in a place that has already been through its worst [music] and is no longer afraid of it. Among those who eventually found their way to the Verde Valley was a man whose work had spent decades navigating territory that Jerome seemed almost built to illustrate.

[00:57:40]Maynard James Keenan, lead singer of the rock band Tulle, settled near Jerome and established Kaducia Sellers, a winery operating in the town itself. The decision to plant vines in this specific soil in this specific place was not [music] accidental. Keenan has spoken about the Verde Valley's agricultural qualities, the elevation, [music] the climate, the character of the land.

[00:58:04]But there is something in the choice of Jerome itself that resonates beyond viticulture. His music has always moved through darkness towards something on the other side of it, [music] exploring the cost of what is taken from people and places and the long [music] difficult work of transformation. To choose Jerome as the place to make something, wine in [music] this case, something that requires patience and presence and the willingness to tend to a living thing over years is to participate in the logic of the town's second life rather than the logic of its first. That distinction is [music] finally what Jerome's revival means. The copper companies came to take. They were efficient and they were thorough.

[00:58:43][music] And they left when there was nothing left worth taking. The artists, the craftseople, the musicians, the stubborn residents who had never left.

[00:58:52]And the curious [music] arrivals who kept coming. They came to stay. They came not because Jerome had something to offer in the extractive sense, but because Jerome was something. and being in its presence, living on its impossible slope above the Verde Valley, working in its crumbling and beautiful buildings was worth the daily negotiation with unstable ground and a history that [music] never entirely recedes. Presence rather than extraction, staying rather than taking.

[00:59:20]It sounds simple. [music] In the history of the American West, it is almost revolutionary. Jerome did not recover by becoming something new. It recovered by becoming fully and without apology what it had always been. [music] A place where people came and chose to remain.

[00:59:36]Building something on a hill that was never going to stop moving because the alternative was letting the hill win entirely. The hill has not won. [music] Not yet. And on the evidence of the last 60 years, it is not going to. Chapter 8.

[00:59:52]What the hill remembers. Stand at the edge of Jerome on a clear morning, and look out over the Verde Valley below.

[00:59:59][music] The valley floor lies more than a thousand feet down, wide and sunbleleached. The high desert extending toward a horizon that seems impossibly far away. Behind you, the town clings to the slope in its characteristic way.

[01:00:12][music] Leaning, improvised, the architecture of a place that was built fast by people who were not thinking about centuries. Ahead of you, the view is so vast and so [music] still that it is briefly possible to forget what is beneath your feet. Hundreds of miles of tunnel thread through the rock below Jerome. Most are flooded now. [music] Some are sealed. Others are open voids discovered periodically when the ground above them gives way without [music] warning. And the surface opens onto darkness that has been there undetected since the last shift [music] worked it and walked away. The engineers who monitor Jerome's geological stability know where most of the tunnels are. They do not know where all of them are. The maps from the mining era are incomplete, occasionally inaccurate, and in some cases missing entirely. Lost in the fires of the 1890s, misplaced [music] in the corporate transitions that carried records from one owner to the next with varying degrees of care. The Hill keeps some of its secrets. It is still moving.

[01:01:12]Not dramatically, not in ways that most residents feel in their daily lives, but measurably. Instruments [music] record the incremental settlement of ground that has been hollowed and blasted and stripped of the vegetation that once anchored it. The rate is slow enough that the 400 or so people who live here have made their peace with it. The way you make peace with any truth too large and too permanent to change. They build, they renovate, they pour wine from grapes grown in this specific [music] soil. And the hill moves beneath them at a pace that human lives are not [music] calibrated to feel, but the geological time records without comment. The sliding jail sits where it has sat since 1938, 225 ft [music] from its foundation, tilted, cracked, permanently displaced.

[01:01:59]The Jerome Historical Society acquired it in 2017. It is officially a tourist attraction. People photograph it and try to explain [music] it to children who ask why someone would build a jail in the middle of a road. The true answer that the jail was not built there. That the ground it was built on no longer exists at the [music] elevation where it stood. That the displacement is irreversible because what was displaced no longer has anywhere to return to. Is more than most tourist attractions ask of their visitors. Jerome has always been more than most [music] places ask.

[01:02:32]Eugene Jerome, the New York financeier who gave the town his name and [music] never came to see it, died in 1909. He is a footnote now, a sentence in a historical marker, a detail in the biography of a cousin who was famous for other reasons. A name on a place he never visited and could not have imagined surviving what it survived.

[01:02:52]William Clark is a Wikipedia entry and a cautionary note in the histories of but the guilded age. Rawhigh Jimmy Douglas is a mansion [music] open to visitors. A three-dimensional model of an underground city, a family name on a state park. Phelps Dodge was absorbed by Freeport McMoran in [music] 2007 and still holds the mineral rights to Jerome's claims. The copper that remains in the hill, [music] lower grade than what was taken, not currently worth the cost of extraction, belongs [music] to a company headquartered in Phoenix. What Jerome teaches, it teaches quietly without insisting. The wealth was real.

[01:03:30]The cost was real. The companies that extracted one did not pay the other. And the people who bore that cost were the ones who had the least power to [music] refuse it. That is not a unique story in the history of the American West. It is in many ways the defining [music] story repeated in coal towns and steel cities and mining camps from one end of the continent to the other. Each time with the same arc and the same final accounting. What is unusual about Jerome is what came after the refusal to disappear. The post office that never closed. The historical [music] society that stood between the ruins and the demolition crews with nothing but conviction and a museum on Main Street.

[01:04:08][music] The artists who chose presence over extraction and built something in the bones of the old. The hill that kept moving and the people who stayed on it anyway because this was theirs in a way that it had never been the copper companies. And they were not going to let the companies have the last word.

[01:04:23][music] The hill is still moving. It always has been.