Legends & Legacies
Many Aspen miners came from the iron mines in Michigan and Minnesota like these in Sellers’ Mine in Hibbing, Minn. Library of Congress photo
Why would someone want to be a miner in the 1880s? Where did those miners come from? There is not an easy answer to those questions as there were a variety of answers, but exploring them shows that Aspen had a diverse populace.
One profile defined the nation as much as Aspen. In the 1880s manufacturing rapidly expanded but much of the developed world, including America, operated with mostly a rural agricultural economy. Immigration to America included males from large agricultural families. The eldest son inherited the farm so the younger brothers knew if they were to have any kind of future they had to go somewhere else.
Amanda Rae
On the last sunny, snowy Saturday in March, Tom Kennedy and friends are posted up on the deck at Bonnie’s. Make that Bonnie’s Beach House, the pseudo pop-up that slings zesty Mexican flavors at 10,400 feet above sea level on Aspen Mountain. For about four or five weekends, hot tacos have heralded a much-anticipated season: springtime. After a long, strange winter, locals and visitors are ready to flock socially distanced, of course and feel transported to an exotic locale that for most of us is but a distant memory: pre-COVID normalcy.
Kennedy strikes a new acquaintance as a diehard skier and genial, seen-it-all kind of guy. Having recently wrapped the Aspen Snowmass Town Race Series, at 40 years considered the oldest ongoing recreational competition series among ski areas in North America, Kennedy sports a silver racing jacket covered in logo patches, flowing white locks, and an inviting smile. He’s lived in Aspen for five good years but has been coming here t
Legends & Legacies
Steam shovel operated by Roy Nowers working on the Lincoln Creek Dam and Tunnel project. Aspen Historical Society photo
I became captivated by steam shovels as a tiny tot. How could I not after having “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shove”l by Virginia Lee Burton read to me multiple times. I am sure I was not the only one and even today it is a popular book picked by the National Education Association for the Teacher’s Top 100 Books for Children.
If you don’t know the book, or have forgotten, Mulligan makes a deal with a city council to dig a basement hole for its new building promising that if he fails to complete the task in a day they don’t have to pay him. In the end he has completed the hole but no way to get his steam shovel out of the hole so it becomes the heating boiler for the building.