The social history of Silver Plume is largely the history of the lives of the early working class miners and their families and a few merchants and other entrepreneurs. Hard rock mining requires drilling and blasting underground, loading the rock to the surface, milling the extracted rock to eliminate as much waste as possible (in fact early milling was only about 50% efficient and tons of silver ore went into the tailings piles), and shipping the ore to smelters for refining. A promising website, one of many, can be found here. An excellent book detailing mining technology is Western Mining by Otis E. Young, available from amazon.com.
One fact is central to the early sociology of Silver Plume. Drilling holes by hand was called “Single Jacking” or “Double Jacking” depending on whether the miner worked alone or with a partner. The technique was named for the Cornish miners who moved here when the tin mining industry in Cornwall crashed. Among the Cornish, “Jack” was the commonest nickname. (You’ve just learned why we call jackhammers by that name.)
Hand drilling was soon replaced by steam and hydraulic drilling. These powered drills produced an enormous amount of silica dust. (A primary component of granite is silica—silicon dioxide—commonly called quartz.)
When the miners had inhaled enough of the silica dust, oftentimes at a very young age, their lungs were in effect petrified—organic matter was replaced by rock—and they died of silicosis, the western miner’s version of the black lung disease of coal mining country. The attempt to regulate the “widow-maker” drills by legislation was one of the first, and largely futile, labor efforts in Colorado.
When silver mining declined after 1893, to be replaced briefly by lead mining to support the WWI war effort (galena is lead sulfide, recall), Silver Plume itself became moribund except for tourism inspired by the Argentine Central Railroad and by the first passenger tramway in the nation. The Sunrise Peak Aerial Tramway began operation in 1907 with twenty-six gondola cars that carried sightseers 2000 feet up Pendleton Mountain.
The town’s further recovery depended on commercial skiing after WWII (largely thanks to veterans of the 10th Mountain Division). From the 1960’s to the present the recovery has depended on the migration into the mountains of folks from urban and rural flatlands in Colorado and elsewhere around the nation.