The year 1895 saw the debut of the weekly Mercur Miner, one of three newspapers to serve the short-lived mining community of Mercur, Utah. Like most mining-town papers, the Mercur Miner provided news of local and national interest, market prices of precious metals, political endorsements, serialized novels and plenty of advertisements for whiskey. The colorful world of a turn-of-the-century boomtown was captured in the pages of the Mercur Miner in November 1897: "Mercur is an incorporated city having...a brass band..a fire department...one church...The Opera House Saloon has card and wine rooms and affords the patron a convenient place to go out and 'see a man' between acts or dances." Read more. Now a ghost town, Mercur is located about 60 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, in the southern Oquirrh Mountains.