Striking gold in Silver City - tourism in Colorado

New Mexico's most colorful mining town is bustling again

"Though authority be a stubborn bear," Shakespeare wrote, "yet he is often led by the nose with gold." Almost makes you think--give or take a few centuries--that Avon's clever bard was describing Silver City, New Mexico, where pay dirt's heady scent left countless fortune seekers quivering in the 1880s.

On a crisp morning 120 years later, however, the nose leads directly to Jacqueline Shaw's cheery A.I.R. Coffee company and its equally rich aroma of roasting coffee beans. Shaw ranks among Silver City's modern prospectors, mining a steady vein of visitors drawn by the burg's enchanting blend of hard rock history and contemporary culture.

"That's what I love about Silver," Shaw says, hurrying to fill orders amid a sunlit splash of huge windows and colorful paintings. "It's a mix of friendly small-town folks, good art, and lots of great stories."

Her coffeehouse lies right in the city's latter-day mother lode, sandwiched among bustling cafes, eclectic shops, superb museums, and more than two dozen galleries displaying a wealth of fine art.

At first glance it seems an odd fit, this touch of cosmopolitan chic in a land of cowpokes and pickup trucks. But the fact is, art and history share deep roots in southern New Mexico's rugged outback, dating to the Mimbres Mogollon people and their pottery depicting fantastic animal and human shapes. The Mimbres Mogollons lived along the Gila and Mimbres rivers between 200 and 1150. Today the largest permanent display of their clayworks is at the Western New Mexico University Museum on the town's north side.

More relics of indigenous cultures are found at the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, in the vast Gila National Forest and Gila Wilderness that stretch north of Silver City. Home to ancestors of the Pueblo Indians from 1280 to about 1290, the dwellings consist of 42 rooms in a haunting complex overlooking the Gila's vast carpet of pines, extensive network of trails, and teeming wildlife.

The Big Ditch and Billy the Kid

The region's later inhabitants left a less monumental but equally interesting mark at the gold boomtown of Pinos Altos, 7 miles north of Silver City. Slightly rumpled and very quaint, the tiny settlement now consists of several mom-and-pop museums, a smattering of art (check out the Silver Winds Gallery), and three eccentric highlights: the 1898 adobe Hearst Church, funded by William Randolph himself; the Buckhorn Saloon and Opera House, dishing up the best chow around, along with cocktails at a long frontier bar; and the Pinos Altos Ice Cream Parlor, Cafe, and Post Office, where Gary MacGrumbley concocts sandwiches and absorbs local gossip amid charming late-l9th-century paraphernalia.

Pinos Altos boomed with gold. Silver City boomed even bigger with the metal that gave it its name. First populated by Apaches and then by the Spanish, Silver City began attracting Anglo fortune hunters in the 1880s. They were eager for the wealth--some gold, but considerably more silver--that lay beneath the hills. The miners' tent city was later replaced by Victorian homes, dotting the hillsides in between mining claims. The gold and silver mines ebbed in 1893, then were replaced by open-pit copper operations, whose excavations can still he seen near town.

Today farming, ranching, and tourism are the region's economic mainstays. But remnants of Wild West mining days are scattered throughout downtown. Most obvious is the Big Ditch: Once Silver City's Main Street, it was gutted by a series of floods (made powerful by the surrounding mined, overgrazed hillsides) between 1895 and 1906. The result is a 55-foot-deep chasm now creasing a serene, shady park. Meanwhile, businesses formerly facing Main Street had to turn their back sides into their fronts to greet new traffic along Bullard Street.

Billy the Kid's saga provides another footnote. Raised here among hard rock miners, the Kid washed dishes at the Star Hotel, near the Big Ditch, and escaped from the local jail at age 15. His roots and later infamous deeds are recalled on a self-guided tour.

The frontier past is further detailed at the Silver City Museum. Nestled in the 1881 home of onetime businessman H.B. Ailman, it includes an office with antique machinery that just might outlast the computer age, a ranching display and video, and great vistas from a third-floor cupola.

The view takes in Yankie Street, where a string of galleries provides a bridge to the present. They include the Eklektikas II Gallery, with its world-class collection of sculpture and folk art, and the Azurite Gallery's cache of pottery and fine oils.

Downtown's whimsical side is found inside Jay and Janet Hammel's delightful Toytown Store, where nearly everything seems to either spin, glow, or flash. On up the street, Fire Cloud Traders offers arts, crafts, and jewelry from around the planet.

Journeying from past to present builds a healthy appetite, which can be sated by spicy grub in Mexican eateries like Nancy's Silver Cafe or in the Jalisco Cafe, which specializes in red and green chile dishes. Neither restaurant serves alcohol, so visitors should look elsewhere for refreshing margaritas.