Don Wildman

This is the essence of these ghost towns, these boom and bust places, isn't it?

Yeah, we were doing a TV show up in I guess it was northwest Colorado, Cripple Creek.

And we were doing a gold story up there.

And man, we had to go out there to get this story, first of all.

And then we end up at this enormous gold mine, which was owned by a South African gold company.

And they're bleeding the ground, leaching the ground with chemicals to get the rest of that gold out.

Every day, they were producing a button of gold, they called it, which was worth a million dollars.

You could hold it in your hand every single day still to this day.

I mean, it's always been about this out West.

So much, so many rich mineral

rules.

It's just harder to get.

I agree.

The larger story of this frontier exploitation and the violence there is really an economic tale.

I mean, it's industrial level capitalism.

It really is.

It brought violence to an otherwise peaceful frontier, certainly with the Native Americans for the most part.

It's really the effect of the Industrial Revolution as so much is in the 19th century.

And for that, it required land and resources.

That kind of wraps up the idea in a little paragraph, doesn't it?