New Mexico Mining History, Ghost Towns & Mineral Districts — Book Collecting

The first miners in New Mexico did not carry pick axes or shovels. They carried deer-antler wedges and stone hammers. At the Mount Chalchihuitl quarry in the Cerrillos Hills south of Santa Fe, Ancestral Puebloan people extracted turquoise from open-cut trenches in the rhyolite beginning at least a thousand years ago — and the turquoise they pulled from that reddish hillside has been traced by trace-element analysis to Chaco Canyon’s ritual caches, to the floors of Pueblo Bonito, to Casas Grandes in Chihuahua, to Aztec Ruins, and to Mesoamerican archaeological contexts as far south as the Valley of Mexico. Before there was a New Mexico, before there was a Spanish Empire in the Americas, the Cerrillos Hills were already a continental mineral-trade network node. That is where the story begins.

It ends — or rather, arrives at its most recent catastrophe — on July 16, 1979, when a tailings-pond dam at the United Nuclear Corporation Church Rock mill in McKinley County failed, releasing 94 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste and 1,100 tons of solid radioactive tailings into the Puerco River. The river ran through the Navajo Nation. The Church Rock spill was the largest release of radioactive material in United States history by volume — larger than Three Mile Island, which had occurred four months earlier and had received incomparably more national press coverage. The Navajo communities downstream did not learn of the spill for days. Federal response was slow. The contamination was long-lasting.

Between those two bookends — pre-Columbian turquoise and Cold War uranium — lies one of the richest, most technically demanding, most historically layered regional mining literatures in the American West. Spanish colonial gold and silver in the Ortiz Mountains. The 1866 Elizabethtown gold rush, New Mexico Territory’s first significant Anglo-American mineral boom. The silver stampede of the 1870s and 1880s that produced Hillsboro, Kingston, Lake Valley’s legendary Bridal Chamber, and White Oaks. The copper country of Grant County, where the Santa Rita del Cobre pit had been operating since 1800 and the Phelps Dodge Company was building one of the largest open-pit operations in the Western Hemisphere. The company-town coal camps of the Cerrillos coalfield, where the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway contracted out the coal that ran its transcontinental steam engines and where a company superintendent named Oscar Huber decorated an entire mining town with electric Christmas lights every winter from 1927 to 1954, attracting tens of thousands of visitors in a tradition that became genuinely legendary. And then the uranium boom: Paddy Martinez’s 1950 discovery at Haystack Mountain, the Kerr-McGee operations that turned the Grants belt into the largest uranium-producing district in the United States, and the decades of radiation exposure that killed Navajo miners whose families are still, as of this writing, working through the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act claims system.

This pillar covers the book-collecting market of that entire arc. It is organized around the key authors and works, the major districts, the specific collecting problems of each tier, and the three-tier market structure that governs what these books are worth when they surface in a donation pile or an estate sale.

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

William Jones and the 1904 New Mexico Mines and Minerals — the rarest NM mining reference

William Jones’s New Mexico Mines and Minerals (New Mexico School of Mines, Socorro, 1904) occupies the rarest tier of the NM mining book canon. Published as an official territorial-era promotional document explicitly designed to attract outside capital investment into New Mexico mine properties, the Jones survey is not mining history in any modern scholarly sense — it is a territorial-period boosterist compilation, organized by district, documenting operating and recently-worked mine properties with brief production histories, ore character descriptions, and the optimistic production projections that capital-attraction literature of the era required. The ore is always richer than it will prove. The railroad is always coming. The company always has enough capital to develop properly. This is how such documents read in 1904, and reading Jones with that context in mind actually makes it more valuable as a primary source rather than less: the gap between what was claimed and what the subsequent record shows is itself historical evidence of how the territorial mining economy functioned.

Rossiter Raymond and the Federal Mining Reports (1868–1876)

Rossiter Worthington Raymond (1840–1918) served as U.S. Commissioner of Mining Statistics from 1868 through 1876, producing eight annual reports titled Statistics of Mines and Mining in the States and Territories West of the Rocky Mountains. Published as government documents through the Treasury Department and later the Department of the Interior, the Raymond reports constitute the foundational federal primary source for territorial-era western mining — and for New Mexico specifically, they document the pre-boom situation that preceded the 1877–1882 silver rush with information found nowhere else.

The annual volumes covering New Mexico provide district-by-district production statistics (often the only surviving quantitative record of territorial-era output), ore character descriptions from field agents stationed across the territory, mine-property reports, and economic analysis that contextualizes the NM operations within the broader western mining economy. The Cerrillos Hills district, the Ortiz Mountains Old and New Placers gold operations, the Magdalena district, and the early Pinos Altos operations all appear in the Raymond reports before the Anglo-American silver rush transformed the landscape.

Sherman & Sherman Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of New Mexico (OU Press, 1975) — the canon’s systematic core

James E. Sherman and Barbara H. Sherman’s Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of New Mexico (University of Oklahoma Press, 1975) is the ghost-town canon’s systematic core — the first comprehensive, state-wide documentary survey organized as a research reference rather than a popular travel narrative. The Shermans operated as a husband-and-wife research team over several years of field work, driving to every documented and many undocumented sites across New Mexico, interviewing surviving residents and old-timers, compiling the district-level mining histories behind each community, and photographing surviving structures in the early 1970s before the subsequent decades of collapse, fire, vandalism, and demolition that would significantly reduce the physical inventory at many sites.

The book’s organizational principle is alphabetical by community name, covering over 200 sites from Abiquiu to Zuni Salt Lake. Each entry provides: the discovery-and-boom period with dates and ore types; peak-population estimates; notable residents and historical events (the Sherman entries for White Oaks include the Billy the Kid saloon appearances with specific documentation; the Elizabethtown entry tracks the 1866 gold rush with named individuals and production figures); the decline-and-abandonment sequence with explanation of what killed the town; and the condition of surviving structures as of the early 1970s survey period. The systematic coverage and the field-survey photography together make Sherman-Sherman the indispensable reference against which all subsequent NM ghost-town documentation is measured.

Stuart Northrop’s Minerals of New Mexico (UNM Press, 1959 and 1996) — the mineralogy foundation

Stuart A. Northrop (1908–1991) was a geologist and mineralogist at the University of New Mexico whose Minerals of New Mexico is the comprehensive systematic catalog of every mineral species recorded from the state. For the mining history collector, Northrop is essential in a way that might not be obvious at first: the book is organized by mineral name, not by district or historical period, but the occurrence data and locality descriptions for each mineral species constitute an indispensable district-level mineralogy reference. Knowing that smithsonite of museum-grade quality came from the Kelly Mine in the Magdalena district, that fluorite of collector grade came from the Hansonburg district in Socorro County, that galena with significant silver values characterized the Lake Valley ore, that the Cerrillos turquoise is a specific copper-aluminum phosphate with trace-element chemistry distinguishable from Burro Mountains turquoise — this mineralogical specificity is what Northrop provides, and it is the foundation on which the district-level mining histories rest.

The 1959 first edition was published simultaneously by UNM Press as a trade volume and as NM Bureau of Mines and Mineral Resources Bulletin 86 — the same text in two publication formats. The 1996 revised edition, updated posthumously by Northrop’s colleagues with three decades of additional mineral discoveries and locality data, is the preferred working reference; it supersedes the 1959 edition for research purposes. The 1959 first edition trades the mid-range collectible zone; the 1996 revision trades the mid-range collectible zone.

Inherited a library and not sure where to start? Call or text 702-496-4214 — I handle this all the time.

Julyan and Pearce — the Place-Name References for Mining Research

Robert Julyan’s The Place Names of New Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, first edition 1996, revised edition 1998) and Thomas M. Pearce’s New Mexico Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary (University of New Mexico Press, 1965) are the two essential place-name references for NM mining and ghost-town research. Every ghost town, mining camp, mill site, and mine property in New Mexico has a place name, and the question of where that name came from, what it originally referred to, whether it was a Spanish colonial designation or an Anglo territorial-era invention, and what geographic coordinates attach to it, is often the first research problem a collector or historian faces.

The Pearce 1965 volume was the standard reference for thirty years: approximately 2,000 NM place names with origin, etymology, county, and geographic coordinates, with strong coverage of the Spanish colonial and early Anglo-American naming traditions that dominate the mining-district geography. The Julyan 1996/1998 volume substantially supersedes Pearce in coverage, accuracy, and depth: over 7,000 place names, more thorough treatment of Navajo and other indigenous place names, correction of Pearce errors, and incorporation of thirty years of additional historical and geographical research. For ghost-town researchers, the Julyan entries for abandoned mining communities often include the earliest documented reference, name etymology, county and township-range location, and cross-references to related names not found elsewhere.

The District Canon — Key Mining Districts and Their Books

Understanding the NM mining book canon requires a working knowledge of the district taxonomy. The following covers the major districts, the key events that defined each, and the specific books most relevant to each district’s literature.

Cerrillos and Madrid (Santa Fe County). The Cerrillos Hills turquoise, lead, and zinc district contains Mount Chalchihuitl — the oldest documented turquoise mine in North America. Spanish colonial lead and silver mining at Cerrillos dates from the 1580s. The adjacent Madrid coalfield (company-town operation 1835–1954) was owned by the Albuquerque and Cerrillos Coal Company and supplied the AT&SF Railway’s steam operations. Superintendent Oscar Huber launched the Christmas lights tradition in 1927; by the late 1930s the Madrid display covered the entire camp with animated electrical scenes and attracted fifty thousand visitors annually. The AT&SF conversion to diesel in 1954 ended coal contracts overnight and the town emptied within months. Madrid today is an arts community. Key books: Joseph Pogue The Turquoise (NAS Memoirs 1915; Rio Grande Press reprint 1972); Christiansen Story of Mining (1974); Sherman-Sherman (1975); community histories from the Madrid Mine Museum and Madrid Engine House.

Elizabethtown (Colfax County, 1866–1880s). New Mexico Territory’s first incorporated town (1870) grew from the 1866 discovery of gold in the Moreno Valley by U.S. Army soldiers and civilian prospectors. At peak the town had a population estimated at 7,000, with three hotels, several saloons, two newspapers, and a Masonic lodge. Hydraulic dredging in the 1900s–1910s represented the last attempt to squeeze remaining gold from the valley gravels. Today Elizabethtown is a true ghost town: the Mutz Hotel stone ruins, a cemetery, and scattered foundations. The 1866 gold rush predates the larger silver stampede and represents a distinct NM boom tradition. Key books: Sherman-Sherman (1975) — the Elizabethtown entry is one of the survey’s most detailed; Looney Haunted Highways (UNM Press 1968); Elizabethtown Cemetery Association community publications (Tier 3 collecting targets).

Mogollon (Catron County, 1878–1942). The most remote major ghost-town destination in New Mexico. Gold and silver were discovered in the Mogollon Mountains in 1878; the Last Chance Mine (1890), Little Fanney Mine (1902), and Fanney Mine defined the district’s production. At peak in the 1910s–1920s the canyon-cut town of Mogollon had approximately 2,000 residents. The federal gold-mining shutdown of 1942 ended production for most operators. Mogollon today has a dozen residents and a substantial inventory of surviving commercial structures in a canyon accessible only via NM-159, a narrow mountain road that limits casual access. NM Bureau of Mines Bulletin 80 (Lasky-Webber, 1949) is the district geological survey; Sherman-Sherman (1975) and Varney (1981) provide the best popular-reference coverage.

Silver City and Grant County copper. The Santa Rita del Cobre open-pit copper mine — established as a Spanish colonial operation in 1800 and now operated as the Chino Mine by Freeport-McMoRan — is one of the world’s oldest continuously operating copper mines. The Tyrone Mine (Phelps Dodge company town designed by Bertram Goodhue in Mission Revival style, 1915; demolished and rebuilt as open-pit infrastructure in 1967) represents the architectural high point of NM company-town culture. Silver City itself is a functioning city, not a ghost town, but the institutional literature of the Grant County copper canon — Phelps Dodge company publications, Freeport-McMoRan corporate reports, NM Bureau of Mines Grant County copper bulletins — constitutes a significant collecting category.

Hillsboro and Kingston (Sierra County, 1877–1893). The Hillsboro district (established 1877, Opportunity Mine) and adjacent Kingston (established 1882, twenty-two saloons and a Shakespearean theater at its 1883 peak population of approximately 7,000) were among the largest silver-boom communities in territorial New Mexico. Kingston at peak reputedly hosted Sadie Orchard (the stage-line operator who became the district’s most famous businesswoman), a newspaper, and a visiting cultural circuit that included theatrical companies traveling from El Paso. Hillsboro survived as a functioning small town after the 1893 silver-price collapse; Kingston is a near-ghost with a handful of residents and the ruins of the Victorio Hotel. Sherman-Sherman (1975) and Varney (1981) provide the primary reference coverage.

Lake Valley and the Bridal Chamber (Sierra County, 1882). The Bridal Chamber — a single underground pocket of silver chloride ore roughly 20×10×40 feet, lined with massive native silver and horn silver cuttable with a knife — produced an estimated a few million dollars at 1880s silver prices within approximately two years of continuous mining. The exhaustion of the Bridal Chamber pocket effectively ended the Lake Valley boom. Today Lake Valley is a BLM historic site. The Bridal Chamber chapter in Christiansen’s Story of Mining (1974) is the most vivid passage in that document; Sherman-Sherman and Varney both cover Lake Valley in detail.

White Oaks (Lincoln County, 1879–1904). The North Homestake lode discovery (1879) produced a town with a peak population of approximately 2,500 in the early 1890s — two newspapers, a school, serious candidate for the territorial capital, and Billy the Kid playing poker at the Saloon of the Dobe Walls. The El Paso and Northeastern Railroad surveyed a route to White Oaks in 1899–1900 but chose Carrizozo instead when the grade proved challenging. The town died within five years of the railroad decision despite viable ore still in the ground. The White Oaks story is the canonical NM railroad-dependent ghost-town narrative: not worked out but economically stranded.

Magdalena and Kelly (Socorro County). The Magdalena district operated primarily 1870s–1930s, producing silver, lead, zinc, and fluorite from the Kelly Mine. The Kelly Mine smithsonite specimens are top-tier mineral-collector targets. The AT&SF Magdalena Branch (Socorro to Magdalena, 26 miles, 1885–1971) was one of the last functioning stock-trailing railroad branches in the United States — shipping cattle driven from the Plains of San Agustín across the Magdalena Mountains. Kelly is one of the most completely preserved church-and-commercial-building ghost towns in New Mexico. Socorro County estates with mining-history libraries regularly surface alongside NM Tech faculty collections and Magdalena-district family accumulations — my Socorro & Truth or Consequences estate cleanout service handles the full corridor from Socorro south through the Sierra County ghost-town belt.

Grants Uranium Belt (Cibola, McKinley, Sandoval counties, 1950–1980s). The Cold War uranium boom, triggered by Paddy Martinez’s 1950 discovery, is covered in detail below in the uranium section.

Looney, Varney, and Pitel — the Ghost Town Survey Tradition

Ralph Looney’s Haunted Highways: The Ghost Towns of New Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 1968 first hardcover) is the foundational popular ghost-town narrative for the state — the first major trade-press treatment written for a general audience rather than a mining-history or geological-survey readership. Looney, a journalist and New Mexico magazine contributor, organized the book by geographic region rather than district taxonomy, giving it a travel-narrative quality that the more systematic Sherman-Sherman survey lacks. His prose is accessible and often vivid; the photographs document structures that have since collapsed or been demolished, making the book a primary visual record of the 1960s ghost-town landscape. The 1968 UNM Press first hardcover with original dust jacket is the Tier 1 Looney collector target. UNM Press issued paperback reprints that circulate widely; the first hardcover with jacket is uncommon.

Philip Varney’s New Mexico’s Best Ghost Towns: A Practical Guide (University of New Mexico Press, 1981 first hardcover) is the principal traveler’s ghost-town guide — explicitly selective, identifying the approximately fifty most accessible, historically significant, and visually rewarding ghost-town destinations in the state with detailed driving directions, site maps, and historical context. The selectivity is a feature: Varney distinguishes between ghost towns worth the drive and ghost towns of primarily specialist interest, producing a practical road companion that the more encyclopedic Sherman-Sherman is not. The 1981 UNM Press first hardcover with original dust jacket is the Tier 2 Varney collector target; Varney signed actively at Southwest book events. He wrote companion guides for Arizona and California in the same format; Southwest ghost-town collectors often target all three.

Michael Pitel’s Ghost Towns Alive!: Trips to New Mexico’s Past (University of New Mexico Press, 2003 first hardcover) is the contemporary post-Interstate-era itinerary guide, incorporating three decades of site-condition changes since the Sherman-Sherman and Varney surveys and organized as multi-day regional road trips rather than alphabetical reference or district taxonomy. Pitel is the essential supplement for tracking what has survived, what has collapsed, and what new access conditions or land-ownership changes have affected individual sites since 1975 and 1981.

Kelley, Murphy, and Henderson — The Specialized Monographs

Vincent C. Kelley’s Violence in Lincoln County 1869–1881: A History of Frontier Turmoil (University of New Mexico Press, 1957) occupies an interesting position in the NM mining book canon: it is primarily a Lincoln County War history rather than a mining history, but the Lincoln County War was substantially a conflict over mining-district economics — specifically over access to the White Oaks gold district and the trade and contracting networks that fed off it. The Murphy-Dolan combine that controlled Lincoln County’s mercantile and political economy before the arrival of the Tunstall-McSween faction derived much of its power from supplying the Fort Stanton garrison and from controlling credit networks that extended into the mining camps. Kelley’s documentation of those economic relationships provides context for the White Oaks boom that the purely ghost-town literature lacks. The 1957 UNM Press first hardcover with original dust jacket is the collector target; the book predates the Billy the Kid publishing explosion of the 1970s–1980s and has a different tone from the popular-history outlaw literature that followed.

John Henderson’s Mining in New Mexico (NM Bureau of Mines, various editions) provides institutional survey coverage parallel to Christiansen but with different organizational emphasis, focusing on the economic geology and production statistics of active and historical mining operations. Henderson’s work sits within the NM Bureau of Mines institutional publication tradition rather than in the trade-press popular-history tradition, and it is the type of bureau bulletin that collectors building a serious NM mining research library need alongside the Christiansen circular. Bureau of Mines institutional publications by Henderson trade in the standard bulletin range: the common reading copy to mid-range zone depending on specific bulletin number, topic, date, and condition.

Found old books in an estate or attic? Text me a photo at 702-496-4214 and I'll tell you what I see.

The NM Bureau of Mines Bulletin Series — The Core Institutional Archive

The New Mexico Bureau of Mines and Mineral Resources (now the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, a division of New Mexico Tech at Socorro) has been publishing technical bulletins, circulars, open-file reports, and data releases since 1927. The bulletin series covers individual NM mining districts in monograph-length technical surveys, mineral commodity surveys, geological mapping reports, and economic geology studies — the primary-source archive for serious NM mining history research.

The collecting challenge has several dimensions. Distribution: Bureau bulletins were distributed through the state technical-document system, sold at nominal prices to mining operators and researchers, and donated to university and public libraries — not sold through trade-book channels. Most bulletins never had bookstore distribution. Survival: technical bulletins on specialized mining topics had print runs of 500–2,000 copies, and surviving copies are concentrated in institutional libraries. Condition: bulletins used for field reference suffered working damage; fine copies without library markings are significantly rarer than fine copies of trade-press regional history. Completeness: the Bureau has published over 150 numbered bulletins plus the circular, open-file-report, and data-release series, and assembling a complete run requires sustained systematic acquisition over years.

The Uranium Boom — Paddy Martinez, Kerr-McGee, and the Navajo Miners

On or about May 9, 1950, a Navajo sheep herder and prospector named Paddy Martinez (c. 1888–1973) was working near Haystack Butte (Haystack Mountain) north of Grants, New Mexico, in the Laguna-Acoma country of Valencia County. Martinez noticed yellow-green mineralization in the sandstone outcrops — a carnotite-type uranium ore. He brought the samples to trading post owner Gus Garver, who forwarded them to Anaconda Copper Company geologists with land rights in the area. The Anaconda geologists confirmed uranium values. The Grants uranium belt discovery was underway.

What followed was the largest uranium boom in American history. The Grants mineral belt — a sedimentary-hosted uranium ore system extending through Cibola, McKinley, and Sandoval counties in northwest New Mexico — became the primary domestic uranium supplier for the Atomic Energy Commission’s weapons program and, later, for civilian nuclear power plants. Kerr-McGee Corporation, Anaconda, United Nuclear Corporation, Homestake Mining Company, and dozens of smaller operators drove shafts, built mills, and employed thousands of workers — a substantial proportion of them Navajo men for whom the uranium mines were among the few high-wage industrial employment opportunities available on or near the reservation.

The human cost was not disclosed. Radon gas — a radioactive decay product of uranium ore that accumulates in underground mine workings — was known to cause lung cancer by the 1930s from European mining data, particularly from the Schneeberg and Joachimsthal mines in Czechoslovakia where the excess lung cancer mortality among miners had been documented for decades. The Atomic Energy Commission and the uranium mining operators were aware of the radon hazard. The mines were not adequately ventilated. Navajo miners were not warned in their own language — or in English — that the dust they were breathing was killing them. The lung cancer deaths among former uranium miners began accumulating in the 1960s and accelerated through the 1970s and 1980s, falling primarily on men who had no vocabulary for radiation illness, whose families attributed the deaths to witchcraft or other causes, and who had no access to the epidemiological data that would have confirmed the occupational causation.

The Church Rock spill of July 16, 1979, remains the largest single release of radioactive material in U.S. history by volume. The United Nuclear Corporation tailings pond at Church Rock, McKinley County, held approximately 94 million gallons of radioactive process liquid and 1,100 tons of solid tailings behind an earthen dam. When the dam failed on the morning of July 16, the entire contents flowed down the Puerco River — a wash-type drainage that ran through several Navajo communities before joining the Little Colorado River in Arizona. The Navajo communities downstream were not warned of the failure for days; children played in the water; livestock drank from the river; people were exposed to radiation levels the uranium operators and regulatory agencies subsequently acknowledged were dangerous. The Church Rock spill occurred four months after Three Mile Island but received a small fraction of the national media attention. The contamination in the Puerco River floodplain persisted for years and in places for decades.

Ghost Town Tourism Literature and the Popular Book Tradition

Beyond the documentary survey tradition anchored by Sherman-Sherman, Looney, and Varney, a substantial body of popular ghost-town tourism literature has developed around New Mexico’s mining heritage. This literature ranges from the large-format photography book through the regional travel guide to the county historical society pamphlet, and it constitutes the Tier 3 stratum of the collector market — widely available, inexpensive, valuable as working reference, and significant as a record of public engagement with the mining heritage.

New Mexico Magazine (published continuously since 1923) has run ghost-town and mining-district features throughout its publication history, with a particular documentation peak in the 1950s–1970s that coincides with the surge of popular interest in the ghost-town landscape just as many sites were experiencing final collapse. Bound runs of the magazine covering this period are a Tier 3 collecting target for researchers trying to build a photographic record of specific sites. The magazine’s coverage of Madrid, Mogollon, Hillsboro, Kingston, White Oaks, Elizabethtown, and Cerrillos through the postwar decades constitutes a significant primary visual archive.

The Rio Grande Press (Glorieta, NM, 1960s–1970s) issued limited-edition reprints of several nineteenth-century NM mining histories that had become scarce, including the Pogue turquoise monograph (reprinted 1972) and several other territorial-era documents. Rio Grande Press reprints are printed on quality paper with new introductions and are themselves now collector items in the Tier 3 range; they should not be confused with original editions of the works they reprint. Identifying Rio Grande Press reprints: the imprint line reads “Rio Grande Press, Inc., Glorieta, New Mexico” with a reprint date; a new introduction is typically present.

County historical society publications on the mining history of their specific districts — Sierra County Historical Society on Hillsboro and Kingston; Colfax County Historical Society on Elizabethtown; Catron County on Mogollon; Grant County on Silver City, Pinos Altos, and Santa Rita; Lincoln County on White Oaks — are Tier 3 targets that provide community-level documentation not found in the state-level surveys. These pamphlets and booklets were typically printed in runs of 200–1,000 copies and distributed locally; they rarely appear outside the state and are effectively undiscoverable through standard bibliographic tools, requiring direct contact with the issuing historical societies or knowledge of the local publications circuit.

Marc Simmons and the Ghost Town Journalism Tradition

Marc Simmons (1937–2023, New Mexico historian, author of more than fifty books on NM history, and Trail Dust columnist for the Albuquerque Journal from 1979 through 2019) has contributed more to public knowledge of NM ghost towns and mining history than any single academic historian. The Trail Dust columns — approximately 600–800-word illustrated popular-history essays published weekly — covered over the four decades of their run virtually every significant NM mining district and ghost town at the level of accessible, well-researched journalism: the Elizabethtown boom and bust, the White Oaks saloon culture and the railroad-bypass story, the Madrid Christmas lights tradition, the Cerrillos turquoise heritage, the Mogollon canyon access road, the Kelly Mine smithsonite specimens. The columns have been collected in multiple Sunstone Press volumes; collectors building a Simmons library target the complete Sunstone Press collection series alongside Simmons’s longer monographs.

Simmons’s ghost-town and mining-history contributions extend through his monograph work: New Mexico: An Interpretive History (UNM Press, 1988) provides the mining boom’s economic and political context within the broader NM narrative; his Colfax County and Lincoln County work contextualizes the Elizabethtown and White Oaks histories within the territorial-period land-grant and violence tradition. Signed Simmons copies in first hardcover editions with original dust jackets are the Tier 1 Simmons collecting target; Simmons (1937-2023) signed at NM book events (his current signing status as of 2026 should be confirmed). See the Marc Simmons collecting pillar for the complete bibliography treatment.

Not sure whether to sell, donate, or keep? Call or text me at 702-496-4214 — I'll walk you through it.

The Three-Tier Collector Market

The NM mining history and ghost town book market is structured around three distinct tiers that reflect the combination of scarcity, condition rarity, and collector demand specific to this field.

Tier 1: Trophy and Institutional Rarities (upper mid-range to serious collector territory)

At the apex of the collecting pyramid: William Jones New Mexico Mines and Minerals (NM School of Mines, 1904) in any condition — upper mid-range to serious collector territory clean, solid mid-range collectible value reading copy. This is the field’s trophy acquisition. The complete run of Rossiter Raymond Statistics of Mines and Mining annual volumes (1868–1876) — individual volumes at the mid-range to upper collectible zone complete run at four-figure collectible territory. Paige Christiansen The Story of Mining in New Mexico (NM Bureau of Mines Circular 177, 1974) fine copy without library markings — respectable collectible value. Signed first hardcovers: Sherman-Sherman OU Press 1975 with original dust jacket signed by both Shermans (respectable collectible value); Looney UNM Press 1968 with original dust jacket signed (respectable collectible value); Varney UNM Press 1981 with original dust jacket signed (solid mid-range collectible value). Signed Marc Simmons works with substantial ghost-town and mining content (the mid-range collectible zone depending on title). Fine copies of individual NM Bureau of Mines district bulletins for Mogollon, Elizabethtown, White Oaks, Lake Valley, Kingston, or Cerrillos without library markings (solid mid-range collectible value).

Tier 2: Scholarly Works and Fine Firsts (the mid-range collectible zone)

The middle market: unsigned Sherman-Sherman OU Press 1975 first hardcover with fine dust jacket (the mid-range collectible zone); unsigned Looney UNM Press 1968 first hardcover with fine dust jacket (solid mid-range collectible value); unsigned Varney UNM Press 1981 first hardcover with fine dust jacket (solid mid-range collectible value); Stuart Northrop Minerals of New Mexico (UNM Press 1959 first or 1996 revision, the mid-range collectible zone); Robert Julyan Place Names of New Mexico (UNM Press 1996 first hardcover or 1998 revision, solid mid-range collectible value); Thomas Pearce New Mexico Place Names (UNM Press 1965 first hardcover with dust jacket, the mid-range collectible zone); Peter Eichstaedt If You Poison Us (Red Crane Books 1994 first hardcover, the mid-range collectible zone); Vincent Kelley Violence in Lincoln County (UNM Press 1957 first hardcover with dust jacket, solid mid-range collectible value); Michael Pitel Ghost Towns Alive! (UNM Press 2003 first hardcover, the common reading copy to mid-range zone); the complete run of NM Bureau of Mines bulletins for any single mining district (the mid-range collectible zone per district set); Judy Pasternak Yellow Dirt (Free Press 2010 first hardcover, common reading copy range).

Tier 3: Working Library (common reading copy range)

The broad base: Sherman-Sherman and Varney paperback reprints; Looney paperback reprint; the Rio Grande Press reprint series for NM mining histories; county historical society ghost-town pamphlets (Sierra County, Colfax County, Catron County, Grant County, Lincoln County); NM School of Mines and NM Tech alumni and institutional publications; Madrid Mine Museum, Elizabethtown Cemetery Association, and Moreno Valley Historical Society community-history publications; White Oaks community memoir publications; NM Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources open-file reports for specific NM mining districts; Mine Safety and Health Administration district closure and remediation reports; Bureau of Land Management mine-history and land-status reports; bound runs of New Mexico Magazine covering the 1950s–1970s ghost-town documentation peak; later printings of all above.

Five Identification Problems for NM Mining Books

Problem 1: Christiansen 1974 Circular 177 fine-copy authentication. The majority of surviving copies bear library markings (stamps, call number labels, pocket envelopes, date-due slips, spine labels) because the bulletin was distributed primarily through institutional library channels. A fine copy without any markings in clean original printed wrappers is the artifact. The Bureau’s in-house printing gives the original a specific paper and binding character; photocopied or reproduced versions sometimes circulate and should not be confused with originals. Authentication: the original Bureau imprint on the title page and on the covers, the specific paper stock and printing quality of 1970s Socorro in-house production.

Problem 2: Sherman-Sherman 1975 OU Press first vs. later printings. Multiple hardcover and paperback printings exist. The first hardcover printing is identified by: OU Press imprint; copyright 1975 on the verso of the title page with no printing notice or “second printing” language; original dust jacket with specific cover photograph and back-panel text. Later printings carry a printing notice. The dust jacket in fine or near-fine condition is the critical differentiator for collector value.

Problem 3: Rio Grande Press reprints vs. originals. The Rio Grande Press (Glorieta NM, 1960s–1970s) issued quality limited-edition reprints of several nineteenth-century NM mining documents including the Pogue turquoise monograph. The Rio Grande Press reprints are themselves now collector items in the Tier 3 range but are not first editions of the original works and should not be acquired or sold as such. Identification: the Rio Grande Press imprint line reads “Rio Grande Press, Inc., Glorieta, New Mexico” with a reprint year, and a new scholarly introduction is typically present.

Problem 4: NM Bureau of Mines bulletin edition identification. Several key bulletins were substantially revised and reissued under different bulletin numbers. The original bulletin and the revision may have different authors, substantially updated content, and different research utility. The Bureau’s current catalog (geoinfo.nmt.edu) identifies the current in-print edition and the predecessor bulletin it superseded. For research purposes, both the original and the revision may be needed.

Problem 5: Northrop first edition (UNM Press trade) vs. Bulletin 86 (institutional) vs. 1996 revision. The 1959 Northrop text exists in two concurrent physical formats — the UNM Press trade edition and the NM Bureau of Mines Bulletin 86 institutional edition — and then in a substantially updated 1996 UNM Press revision. For research purposes, the 1996 revision supersedes both 1959 editions. For collecting purposes, the 1959 UNM Press first in original boards is the artifact. Institutional copies of Bulletin 86 trade at modest discount from the UNM Press edition because the institutional format is considered less collectible by trade-book collectors.

What NMLP Does with NM Mining History Books — and What I Want

NM mining history and ghost town books arrive in NMLP donation pickups with meaningful frequency given the state’s deep amateur mining collecting culture. The donor demographics are distinctive: retired miners, mine engineers, and mine managers from the Chino Mine (Grant County), the Molycorp Questa mine (Taos County), the Phelps Dodge Tyrone mine, and the Gallup coalfields, with working-life library accumulations that often include substantial Bureau of Mines bulletin runs; Albuquerque and Santa Fe academic retirees with research-quality mining history libraries; estate donations from Elizabethtown, Colfax County, and Moreno Valley families with generational connections to the gold district; Lincoln County (Carrizozo, White Oaks, Corona) household donations with Billy the Kid and White Oaks collecting overlap; Catron County (Mogollon, Reserve, Glenwood) donations from the remote southwest NM communities adjacent to the ghost town destinations; Socorro and New Mexico Tech community donations with Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources institutional publication concentrations.

Categories I particularly want: any NM Bureau of Mines and Mineral Resources Bulletin, Circular, or Open-File Report in any condition; Paige Christiansen The Story of Mining in New Mexico (Circular 177, 1974) in any condition — especially fine unmarked copies; William Jones New Mexico Mines and Minerals (NM School of Mines 1904) in any condition; Sherman-Sherman Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of New Mexico (OU Press 1975) especially the first hardcover with original dust jacket; Stuart Northrop Minerals of New Mexico (UNM Press 1959 or 1996 revision); Robert Julyan Place Names of New Mexico (UNM Press 1996 or 1998); Peter Eichstaedt If You Poison Us (Red Crane Books 1994); Rossiter Raymond Statistics of Mines and Mining any annual volume (1868–1876); Philip Varney New Mexico’s Best Ghost Towns (UNM Press 1981) especially signed; Ralph Looney Haunted Highways (UNM Press 1968) especially the first hardcover; Judy Pasternak Yellow Dirt (Free Press 2010); any signed copy by a NM mining historian, geologist, or Bureau of Mines author; county historical society mining-camp pamphlets for any NM county; Elizabethtown Cemetery Association and Moreno Valley Historical Society publications; Madrid Mine Museum and Madrid community history publications; Mogollon district documentation of any kind; White Oaks community memoir publications; single-community mining-camp monographs from Sunstone Press or regional publishers.

External References

• New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources — current catalog and digitized bulletin archive
• Wikipedia: NM Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources
• Wikipedia: Paddy Martinez
• Wikipedia: Church Rock uranium mill spill
• Wikipedia: Kerr-McGee Corporation
• Wikipedia: Elizabethtown, New Mexico
• Wikipedia: White Oaks, New Mexico
• Wikipedia: Mogollon, New Mexico
• Wikipedia: Madrid, New Mexico
• Wikipedia: Lake Valley, New Mexico
• Wikipedia: Marc Simmons
• Wikipedia: Rossiter Worthington Raymond
• Wikipedia: Philip Varney
• University of New Mexico Press
• University of Oklahoma Press
• Wikipedia: Grants, New Mexico and the uranium belt
• Wikipedia: Santa Rita del Cobre / Chino Mine