King Coal and Queen Silver: Resource Extraction and Spectacular Pedagogy in Late Nineteenth-Century Colorado

• In Event: Pedagogies of the Anthropocene: Constructing and Disrupting the Human and the Natural Through Public Display

Abstract

On July 4, 1891, citizens and visitors to Pueblo, Colorado celebrated the opening of their new Mineral Palace. The huge structure included a stage with a constructed grotto, which was flanked by a statue of “King Coal” sent from Trinidad (southern Colorado) and the “Silver Queen” sent from Aspen, both were made from their namesake material. Massive columns contained cases to display Colorado’s mineral wealth. Four years later, Denver was overwhelmed with visitors for its inaugural Festival of Mountain and Plain, which also purported to put Colorado’s inexhaustible mineral wealth on display. Ephemera and photographs reveal the plethora of extraction-themed material culture that accompanied the six festivals (1895-1899, 1901 and 1912) from allegorical and literal portrayals of the mining industry on parade floats, to hard rock drilling competitions between mining camps. To read these archival materials one could be forgiven for thinking that all was well in the Colorado mining industry, but as historian Thomas G. Andrews corrects, not only did mining affect the quality of everyday life (not always for the better,) but late nineteenth-century Colorado was a hotbed of labor unrest. Leadville, which was praised in the press for its mining-centric float in the face of the recent silver economic crisis, was embroiled in a miners strike within the next year. Of course these instances of public spectacle were more concerned with boosting the mining industry than with considering hardship or economic inequality, but spectacles can also be read as a response to unrest and dissent. This paper will consider how, more than ignoring public uneasiness with the mining industry and its unpredictable boom and bust cycle, public spectacle was engaged as a pedagogical strategy to both assuage local doubts and sell Colorado as a resource landscape on a national scale. By using the Mineral Palace and the Festival of Mountain and Plain as case studies, we can ask how visual culture was employed to teach allegiance to a volatile industry in late nineteenth-century Colorado, as well as consider how these strategies might persist today.

Author

• Michaela Rife, University of Toronto, Canada