A passage in Jessica Bruder’s book Nomadland describes the unlikely birth and hard death of the life of Empire, a mining town in northwest Nevada. “In 1923,” Bruder writes, “laborers established a tent colony on the site of what later became the town. By some accounts, Empire boasted the longest continuously operating mine in the country, excavating a claim first established by Pacific Portland Cement Company in 1910. On December 2, 2010, that history came to a sudden stop. Workers in steel-toed shoes and hard hats gathered in the community hall at 7:30 am for a mandatory meeting. Mike Spihlman, the gypsum plant’s soft-spoken manager, delivered a grim edict to a room full of stunned faces: Empire was shutting down. Everyone had until June 20 to leave. First came silence, then came tears. ‘I had to stand in front of ninety-two people and say, ‘Not only do you not have a job anymore, you don’t have a house anymore,’ Mike recalled, sighing heavily.” Bruder explains how the mine owner and the town’s only employer, US Gypsum, hemorrhaged money in the wake of the Great Recession of 2009, and concludes: “So while many towns had merely been scarred by the recession, Empire would completely disappear.”
This is the foundational tragedy in Bruder’s sprawling reportage of how a group
