Silverton, Colorado's promotional brochure

Silverton, Colorado, is isolated, weatherbound, a once-thriving mining town without working mines, nestled in the midst of spectacular mountain scenery. Until the middl 1990s, it was virtually empty except as a ghost town with a few tourist restaurants and one open hotel. As a terminus for a popular nostalgic steam railroad line (once the Denver and Rio Grande Western, the D&RGW), it drew enough nostalgic attention that emigrants and exiles would periodically arrive, plunk down their money, buy a house or commercial establishment, and last between a month and a year before abandoning the place.

Assiduous promotion, however, has turned Silverton around, and this brochure suggests the ways that myths about American land and landscape, about the redemptive promise of Nature, about the divinity of the Rocky Mountain fastnesses (see, on this, William Henry Jackson's 1872 photograph, Mount of the Holy Cross) still can draw commercial and popular success despite overwhelming logistical hurdles.

The opening image could come from Bierstadt's Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak and the notable absence of human occupation or depredation is set in contrast to the back page, which promises a picturesque entry via the steam rail, and the inner pages, which promise a wealth of human activities with a remarkably inconsistent treatment of environmental responsibility-- mountain biking and wildflower hiking is set against Jeep excursions on glacial gravel roads; mountain climbing up glacial ice walls contests with the technological thrill-ride of the yellow snowmobile launched into space. Everything is possible in America, and all of it can be had here in Silverton.

Of course the country is big-- that's the mythos of the American West. And towns are best when they're small-- Jefferson was insisting on that in the 1760s. But to look carefully at the words on the page is to see that this is a brochure aimed as much at entrepreneurs seeking investment opportunity as it is directed to tourists and visitors.