In 1872, Alta, Utah, drew thousands of seasonal residents during a silver boom; by 1920, George Watson was reportedly its only resident

A bustling mountain valley with its own red light district, countless saloons, and a murder rate of one every week could easily have been the premise of a great movie script. However, what we know today as Alta, Utah, 25 miles outside of Salt Lake City, has one of the most unique stories in the American West.

According to the Town of Alta's official history, Alta was bursting with silver wealth and had many thousands of seasonal visitors in 1872. However, by 1920, the mining industry was no longer as prosperous, and only George Watson was living in Alta. Few ghost towns illustrate that reversal of fortune as clearly as Alta does. Although it may seem surprising, Alta has survived and is now one of the most legendary ski resorts in the country.

A silver rush built on borrowed time


The silver boom in the Alta mining district came from military personnel. A 1943 USGS report titled “Geology and ore deposits of the Cottonwood-American Fork area, Utah,” found that in the 1860s in the Little Cottonwood Canyon area, claims were made and created a silver boom in the area. This was due to many silver and lead veins being identified throughout the Wasatch Range. By the early 1870s, Alta was booming with a bustling mining community.

There were thousands of seasonal workers; a functioning mule-powered railway was transporting the ores down to the valley, and the whole town was reliant on this metal. However, this is something that millennials can clearly relate to. Alta was a completely non-diversified economy that relied purely on the silver price to support its economy. However, silver prices fell heavily in the 1870s, and the US switched to a gold standard. A series of devastating fires culminated in 1878, destroying much of the original town, and by 1885 an avalanche flattened what remained.

One man’s one-dollar negotiation

By the 1920s and 1930s, Alta had gone from having thousands of people to just one person. George Watson had travelled to Utah in 1902 to search for his own silver fortune. However, he bought up around 80 abandoned mining claims. This covered hundreds of acres of land, and by the early 1930s proclaimed himself as the Mayor of Romantic Alta, as per an Alf Engen Ski Museum Foundation account. He spent the better part of three decades trying to keep the memory of the abandoned town alive but struggled with back taxes on his land, finally reaching a settlement with the government in 1937.

Watson couldn’t afford to pay the taxes so he made a deal. He gave away his land (around 1,800 acres) to the U.S. Forest Service for the sum of one dollar, a token payment that allowed his land to be developed into a ski area. Although this seems like an amazing vision, in reality, he was simply trying to get out of paying taxes. He had lived at the bottom of some amazing mountains. The first chair lift was built in 1938 and Alta Ski Area became one of the oldest and most prestigious ski areas in North America.

What a near-ghost town still has to say

The real message was that towns that only have one industry are very delicate. Rarely did the industry that caused a town to survive turn out to be the industry that saved it. A geological survey of the Little Cottonwood mining district conducted by the state of Utah affirms that the silver production in the Little Cottonwood mining district never recovered after the early 20th century. Overall, Alta was not so much a lesson to learn from as it was a lesson that things can often happen by chance. A broke miner, a mountain that nobody wanted, and a government agency willing to take the land off his hands for next to nothing.