After the chairman of the project, Doug Watrous, asked Richard Moolick, another board director, to negotiate with the city of Leadville, he came back with the offer.

Consideration is given to prospectors, miners, mining leaders, engineers, teachers, financiers, inventors, journalists, rascals, geologists and others.

[7] Notable honorees include Georgius Agricola, Janet Zaph Briggs, Gertrude Selma Sober, Meyer Guggenheim, Herbert Hoover, James M. Hyde, Ed Schieffelin, Harrison Schmitt, Paddy Martinez, Horace Tabor, Fred Chester Bond and Edmund J. Longyear, founder of Boart Longyear.

He states that "Only fourteen people - 12 percent of the total - represent individual miners, prospectors and explorers, politicians, labor leaders, philanthropists, and all others."

The people commemorated are predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men, while historically mining has been one of America's most multicultural occupations.