John Zalac

John Zalac(1917-) moved with his mother and siblings from one mining town to another, where his mother ran boarding houses for miners. Eventually they settled in Virginia City. Zalac himself became a miner and witnessed the decline of precious ore mining during World War II. Zalac was interviewed by Denise Mathews in 2002.

The gold mines in Gold Hill and Silver City were working up until 1942, when we got into the Second World War. The miners were forced to leave when the gold mines and silver mines were closed by President Roosevelt, because all of the material they were getting was needed somewhere else, in strategic minerals like lead, zinc, copper, and tungsten—stuff that contributed to the war effort. They forced the miners to go into that kind of work. So they forced these gold mines to close, but these companies still maintained. They had the mills, and they had all that equipment there. They kept it all intact. All the years that they were forced to be closed, they were paying taxes. They were the ones that kept the county alive and kept it going—they were paying the bills.
After the war, the gold and silver prices got to where these companies could operate again, but they could not afford to buy the timber to mine underground like they used to. When they mined underground, timber was cheap. You could buy a thousand feet of eight-by-eights for maybe ten or fifteen dollars a thousand. Now it costs you five hundred or a thousand dollars for a thousand feet. It's just prohibitive. But these companies hung together hoping to go back and mine again. When they got a chance to go back in and make a little profit for what they spent all those years, somebody had moved in and said, "Now, we don't want it." Some environmentalist said, "No, it's going to spoil my air. [laughter] It's going to hurt my eardrums, or it's going to create too much dust." And they had kept the country alive all those years.