| While the western ghost town has been viewed by scholars as a largely celebratory cultural icon of the "Wild West" frontier, in this dissertation I argue that its popularity and longevity have long drawn from its capacity to function as a site of multiple interpretations; of critique as well as of celebration. The abandoned mining town of the latter half of the nineteenth century, recast as a "ghost town" or "ghost city" during the early twentieth century, offered Americans a site for expressing anxieties about contemporary social issues such as urbanization, immigration, large-scale corporate capitalism and the role of technology in modern society. From the mid-nineteenth century through the 1940s, travelers pondered the melancholy aspects of the ghost town, wrote about wasteful mining efforts, and expressed hope for renewed mining efforts or economic revival in the abandoned towns.; This dissertation thus explores the development of the ghost town as an American cultural icon and tourist attraction, tracing its formation from its roots in nineteenth-century responses to the West's abandoned mining towns, to the works of early twentieth-century travel writers, boosters and business leaders, photographers, artists, and Hollywood filmmakers through the 1940s. My approach relies upon American Studies methods: sources include a variety of perspectives, from traveler and journalist accounts, publications from boosters and from the tourism industry, to visual media such as photographs and films. This era in the formation of the iconic ghost town is important because it represents the time before the "ghost town" became a cliched attraction, because the multiple meanings that early writers, photographers and filmmakers ascribed to these towns help explain why the ghost town as a cultural icon has become so popular and enduring, and because it helps us see that, as a site both of celebration and of critique, the ghost town, and by extension, tourism in the American West, rely upon more than a simplistic or celebratory vision of the Wild West frontier for their appeal. |
