The Mining Boom: 1879 – 1893 In 1879 the first prospectors arrived in what would soon become Aspen and determined the area contained large deposits of silver ore. For the next 14 years Aspen’s fortunes rose as it eventually produced 1/6th of the nation’s and 1/16th of the world’s silver. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it has failed, or due to natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, prolonged droughts, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, war, pollution, or nuclear disasters. Boomtowns are typically extremely dependent on the single activity or resource that is causing the boom (e.g., one or more nearby mines, mills, or resorts), and when the resources are depleted or the resource economy undergoes a "bust" (e.g., catastrophic resource price collapse), boomtowns can often decrease in size as fast as they initially grew
