The Favorite of Fortune

This chapter shows how southwest Missouri miners maintained their pursuit of market opportunities as industrial capitalism foreclosed those opportunities nationally in the 1870s. They did this by mining and marketing zinc, once a worthless by-product of lead mining. Their zinc mining created a profitable new market that partially freed working miners from the control of smelting companies. At a time of national economic depression, this development made the mining region famous as a poor man’s camp where capital-poor but hard-working men could work on their own account, as independent owner-operator miners, and possibly make considerable sums of money. When smelting companies looked to take control of zinc, some miners turned to antimonopoly politics, but most miners responded as before, by searching for mineral discoveries as prospectors on undeveloped land in Missouri and now in Kansas. By seeking new opportunities to enter the market again as independent producers rather than fight the smelting companies, as workers forming unions elsewhere did, these miners kept alive their faith in capitalism and risk-taking work.