Underwood owns a former mining town and is being interviewed there. The hosts remark on how quiet and romantic it feels today. He answers that the mine once ran around the clock on 12-hour shifts, and that between collapses, lung disease and violence a miner was considered old at 30.
Yeah, I mean, it's really, these days people come up and they love to enjoy the peace and quiet and the beautiful nature. And like even right now, we're sitting in this building. It's relatively quiet.
Yeah. I went out last night at maybe like nine o'clock and everyone was already asleep. But you can just hear like the entire valley, anything that's happening. Any
whispers anybody's doing around town you hear the stars are out and it's very like, like you said, romantic these days. But like back in the day, this building that we're sitting in now would have been insanely noisy 24-7, 365. So the mine was going 24 hours a day. That means miners were coming in, going 24 hours a day on 12-hour shifts. So there's a day shift and a night shift. That means all of the supporting businesses, the brothels, the bars, everything related to that were going 24 hours a day. The mine itself, if you look at the newspapers, there was many, many, many mining accidents that claimed the miners' lives down in there. If they weren't dying from collapses, they're dying of silica. They're breathing in so much dust that their lungs basically became cement, so much to the point where, like, they said a miner was old by the time he got to 30. So, me sitting here at 37, I'm like, I'm like ancient in mining terms. And so, it's interesting to be in this town that was built by people that were all younger than me. And so, if you weren't dying from silicosis, there was a murder week up here that's in the newspapers. There's different, every building here has bolt holes all in it. There's disease that ran rampant up here. It wasn't running water. And so, it was a town that was very difficult for the vast majority of people that lived here. You know, I think that every time we hear about these success stories of the mine owner that went on to do this and that, there's a thousand miners that came up here for a better life and never left this place. Some are still buried 200 feet below where we're sitting right now. And it's just a reality of the place that, you know, isn't the most fun to think about or even that people want to think about as much. But I do my best, even in the museum, to show those different parts of Cerro Gordo's past, just so people can have a full picture of what happened here. But
you don't feel like there's some curse looming over the whole, like when the hotel burned up, where you're like, oh, they don't want me to do this.
Yeah, there's, there's, you can get lost in those types of thoughts up here easily. I mean, even within the people that quote unquote own the town, there's many of them that have just completely lost everything. You know, when I first moved up here, I found a briefcase tucked away in this corner of the general store. And in the briefcase, there was just everything about this miner's life. So there was love letters, there was divorce settlements, there was bankruptcy, there was new mining claims, there's bank stubs. And through it all, he seemed to have just an absolutely miserable life. He was always broke. This guy, this miner that I found, he was broke. His wife divorced him. You know, he was sick. And then, you know, later you find this journal entry that says, you know, lamenting for one more night up here. So there's something about this place that like draws people in, takes everything out of them, but they still want to give it more. And I've definitely felt that over the years here. I mean, two years into living here, when we were full-on on the hotel, it very much felt like I was giving it 16 hours a day. It was just wearing me to the bone and like for what, you know, kind of thing. But these days, I feel like I'm on the other side of that. And I hope, you know, as every mine owner here, I hope that there's another life still for Cerro Gordo. And that's what kind of keeps me going forward.
You found the briefcase in one of the houses? In