Oct 1, 2009
Review: The Good Times Are All Gone Now by Julie Whitesel Weston
By: MattBriggs Categories: Books Review
[ The Good Times Are All Gone Now | Julie Whitesel Weston | University of Oklahoma Press | $19.95 ] It is ironic that a region like the Pacific Northwest, that prides itself on rustic individualism, is also a region that was largely created and remains dependent on the legacy of massive corporate and federal projects. Although a miner, farm hand, or lumberjack doesn’t work behind a desk, they are just as dependent on a paycheck as an office worker, and are at the mercy of the company and finally the market. In fact, in many ways work and the dependencies of labor are more pervasive for a lumberjack then, say, a paralegal. A paralegal may return home at night, but until the middle of the 20th century, the lumberjack lived in a camp in the middle of his work site. Many of our towns were intentionally founded as company towns, such as Renton, Spokane, Boise, and the mining town of Kellogg, Idaho. For many years the boom and bust of towns followed the boom and bust of the company towns (even those dependent on Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, or The Bunker Hill Mining Company).
Every company town has a shared history of discovering a resource (such as silver) and gradually developing an industry and culture around the extraction of that resource. The company town experiences a long period of stability while the seemingly endless resource — such as the forests of the Pacific Northwest or the silver load under Bunker Hill — is worked. And then the silver or forests give out, and the town experiences the sudden collapse of its culture. In the aftermath they must deal with the resulting environmental destruction from the sustained period of resource extraction. Occasionally the company town experiences a paradoxical resurrection with an economy and culture that is completely unrelated to the original founders and yet oddly nostalgic for the good old days. This is a history shared by Tacoma, Washington, and Kellogg, Idaho.
Julie Whitesel Weston has spent years collecting stories about the lives of the miners, housewifes, and prostitutes who lived in Kellogg during the heyday of the mining operations. Weston excels at finding the particular details that bring back the past in its vivid oddness. Kellogg had a standard middle-class veneer and yet it was full of slot machines. The town had a butcher, a school, a hospital, and a number of brothels. The good old days in Kellogg and its nearby town of Wallace lasted from the end of the 19th century to nearly the end of the 20th century. For more than a hundred years, about two thousand miners were employed in mining and processing lead, silver, and zinc. The waste pumped into the hills and mountains by their efforts killed the original forests.
As the rich veins of silver gave out to lesser grade ore, and metal prices fluctuated in the late seventies, the mine closed. It was declared a superfund site and the town began its slow transformation into the service economy, selling cars and hosting tourists. Weston provides a narrative grounded in particular details. She does not begrudge the operation of the mine or the pollution created by the mine, but is rather focused on a world where children skated on the frozen slag ponds and went to school in a day overcast with smelter fumes.
