Dear Editor:

“Nostalgia is denial….the name for this denial is golden age thinking – the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in…” — from “Midnight in Paris.”

I would like to address the elephant in the room instead of the dead canary in the mine. To believe Ouray had a genteel golden age of mining is to believe that genocide, sex workers, masked vigilante committees and opium dens did not shadow the Vanoli block of...