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The Ariadne comes
back to me. Again financing on Wall Street. Dangerous work in old drifts.
Winter above timberline. Gold mining in Virginia.
The sale
of the power plant brought me $100,000 in securities, and my next objective was
Washington D.C. there, as a bull in a bear market, I promptly dropped some
$8,000 in U.S. Steel common, and Dean, Onatova & Company failed and
swallowed up the rest of my available cash. Then my thoughts again reverted to
my mining property in Colorado, which had come back to me on the failure of the
promoters’ plans in Switzerland.
In New
York I met my old friend and promoter, Ambler J. Stewart, and together we
started out as of yore in search of capital with which to properly develop the
Ariadne. We were successful from the start. We found investors in an office on
Nassau Street in the persons of B. F. Barling and H. H. Seaman. Barling was a
mining engineer and seaman a retired bond salesman. The two made an ideal
combination and impressed capital favorably. The result was that they raised
$55,000 as working capital, for which I gave their syndicate a deed for one-half
interest in the Ariadne group of mines.
During the
two years which followed, new ore was opened up on deeper levels and adjoining
property was acquired which increased our holdings to four hundred acres, with
six thousand feet of development and one tunnel penetrating the mountains more
than half a mile. With this addition to the Ariadne the syndicate organized the
Ariadne Corporation and $21,000 was added to the treasury.
Above
timberline we had another tunnel that had already been driven through the Uncle
Sam lode, but the three-hundred-foot drift, which had been made, was badly
caved, leaving a series of awesome caverns overhead. To retimber this was
probably the most dangerous job I had ever undertaken in mine. Great blocks of
ore had been caught in their descent from a hundred feet above and hung by their
points to the slight swellings in the walls. Every few hours other blocks would
be dislodged from the stope and come down with a crash, bringing in their wake
tons of debris.
With one
man to help me, we had trammed out hundreds of tons, and by dint of placing sets
of heavy timbers close together we were gaining some headway. One particular
vicious looking spot caused us trouble and nearly cost me my life. A three-ton
flat rock had found its “apex of rest” on the footwall, but was gradually
sliding down until it was within ten feet of the level, my object was to set the
timbers so as to keep it out of the drift. A pile of clay muck had accumulated
where I was working, and when I was about to set the post I noticed that the
rock had resumed its slide. I tried to withdraw my foot form the muck, but it
was fast. I wrenched, and reached for a hold on the timbers, but the monstrous
slab of ore kept coming until it was over my foot, and I was fast in a horrible
vise. On and on it came, slowly, inexorably, bearing me down, and would soon be
over my body unless help came. I yelled to my helper to get his arms around my
body and pull, but I could not budge. At last my right foot found lodgment
against a rock and I gave another wrench, which pulled my left foot out of the
rubber boot and I fell back free. The next moment the rock had covered the long
leg of rubber, and I saw it no more until the rock had been blasted and broken
up.
It was
early in February at the time, and the thermometer for days had stood at 14º
below zero. Between the mine and the cabin was a great draw, down which the deep
snow was ready to slide. Without my boot in the bitter cold, I was eager to
reach the cabin, but the draw look too dangerous to cross. Without knowing
whether or not it work, I inserted a fuse in a stick of powder, lit the fuse,
and tossed it into the snow. With the explosion came the roar of the avalanche,
as it tore past the mine workings and swept everything along with it. We now had
a safe trail to the house, where I made a warm fire and thawed out. It was
several days before we could haul away the rock and debris, set the post in
place, and proceed to other caves beyond.
A week after this happening my companion and I went to
Silverton for supplies and I returned alone. The snow was deep, and I left at
daybreak. The sky was clear but the morning was cold, and the lofty peaks of the
region were surrounded in a heavy mantle that glistened in the sun with a silky
sheen. My route lay up Cement creek for three miles, where at our Yukon mill I
would turn up the mountainside. I wore web snowshoes, but the extra weight of
the pack on my back caused me to sink deep at every step, and the snow falling
in on the webs made my progress difficult.
It was one o’clock when I reached the mill, where I cooked
some bacon for lunch and started out again. From the mill it was two miles to
the mine, during which I had to ascend 2400 feet. By the time I arrived at
timberline I was very tired. The snow was harder, but the sun had gone down and
the cold was intense. It was growing dark as I dragged my weary limbs up the
long slope of Uncle Sam Basin, but a bright moon coming up over the mountain
peaks showed me the way. My clothes were stiff with frost, which was rather an
advantage, as they kept out the icy blast. As night closed in I reached the foot
of the steep slope which was covered with the last of the timber, and on the
upper edge of this was the mine boarding house. The snow here was soft and six
feet deep. My snowshoes were useless, as it was necessary to pat down the snow
before I could put my weight on them, so I left them and plunged into it on all
fours. It was only a hundred yards to the cabin, but it took every ounce of my
strength, and when I burst in the door I fell prone on the floor, completely
exhausted.
Those who now travel at ease on the highways which penetrate
the mining district may sometimes see a small cabin or mine dump perched high on
the slope of a lofty peak, and wonder about the tales of adventures and hardship
which could be told by the human beings who clung to the cliffs and battled the
forces of nature in order to discover her secrets and enjoy her treasure. The
stories which I have told of my experiences in and within the mountains of the
San Juan will give the reader some idea of the lives of the prospectors and
pioneers of the rugged country, come of whom were not so fortunate as I in
escaping its dangers.
In 1923 my Ariadne company, on account of a slump in the
price of silver and lead, shut down all operations at the mine. Just as thirty
years before, on account of a depression in mining I had left with my wife for
the east, the cycle had returned and we again took up our residence in
Washington D.C. To be sure the town had changed somewhat since the days of
’93, but my old newspaper, the Washington Herald, was now flourishing under
the ownership of Mr. Hearst and had become a power on Capital Hill among the
great brains of the country.
Like many other new arrivals in Washington, I soon became an
habitué of brokerage office, where I promptly invested and lost my slender
capital in close margins, Among the stock operators I met one John Alden
Standish, who intimated that he was interested in mining and offered me a
liberal commission if I would go to North Carolina and make an examination of
the Gold Hill Mine. Standish was president of the Pyorrout Laboratories at
Rockville, Maryland, and I opined that I could not be wrong in tying up with
such a time-honored name as he was carrying about. After making the report,
which was not a favorable one, we investigated the Vaucluse Mine near
Fredericksburg, Virginia, a two-hundred acre tract of land that in 1830 had been
the scene of one of the earliest gold operations in America. This mine had a
fine record, so I looked up the owner, Judge Alvin T. Embrey of Fredericksburg,
and when I left him I had bought the Vaucluse for $6000, having about $15,000 in
operating the mine, cleaning out the various shafts and tunnels, and putting a
large tonnage of ore in sight. While operating this property I had an offer of
$200,000 for the mine with a down payment of $20,000 from the manager of a large
English company. I took the proposed buyer with me to New York, where we found
Standish occupying the bridal chambers in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel with his new
wife. He nonchalantly refused the $20,000 deposit and calmly asked for two
million dollars. Three months later Standish could not make the last payment of
$4000 and the property went back to Judge Embrey. After many vain attempts to
obtain another option, Henry Ford stepped in and bought the mine for $10,000,
and removed the antiquated machinery to his museum at Dearborn. He has never put
the Vaucluse in operation.
Another combination, under the name of the Virginia Gold
Mines, availed itself of my services, and would have been successful had it been
possible to finance the project, but the fact that it was so close to Washington
militated against it, for no one would believe that there was any gold in
Virginia. Had it been in Alaska, Canada, or Kamschatka, investors would have
fought for the stock, for distance lends enchantment in mining as well as in
personal charms.
The allure of the yellow metal still clung to me, and my
irrepressible quest for gold resulted in a coalition with my old partner Ambler
J. Stewart. Together we secured another Virginia gold mine that prior to the
Civil War had been a noted producer. In fact, it was on this property that the
first nugget of gold was found in this country. The name of this mine was the
Whitehall, and the property consisted of a thousand acres of land. On this tract
there are no less than fifty-two veins of quartz outcroppings, and there may be
many more the apex of which do not appear above the surface. There are large
bodies of iron, both metallic and pyritic, which will be commercially profitable
on the exhaustion of the Texas sulphur deposits. The immediate value of the
property is in the quartz veins, nearly all of which are gold-bearing. These
mine were in active operation at the time of the Civil War, but were closed on
the arrival of the Confederate troops, who demanded that the miners either join
the army or go north. The operators, being Northerners, elected to leave, and
the shafts were filled up, the machinery destroyed, and the building burned. One
shaft in particular, where a pocket of gold amounting to $240,000 was found
within a space of three feet square at a depth of twenty-eight feet, was filled
to the top, and at the time of our arrival an oak tree two feet in diameter was
growing in the center of it. In addition to this pocket, a report written by the
superintendent in 1859 stated that $172,000 was also recovered in a stamp mill
within a few months.
There were some drawbacks, which we had to overcome before
success could be reached. As luck would have it, the best showings of quartz
were found to be in low ground. We had a forty-foot shaft there, and opened
several pockets of the rich quartz that indicated the presence of a prospective
mine. We had sunk the shaft to sixty feet when a heavy rain fell one night and
the next morning we found our shaft in a middle of a lake. As this situation
could not be remedied without the expenditure of much capital, we were compelled
to take our loss and give up the Whitehall.
It would be natural for the ordinary individual to reason
that with so many failures to my credit it would be proper for me to withdraw
from the mining business and try something else. But not I! The glamour of the
mines has been ingrained in my bones, and I must keep on. Any way one looks at
it, I must have a nose for the mineral, or I never would have prowled about in
the Blue Ridge Mountains until I discovered a fine deposit of native copper.
Immediately I got busy in its development, secured a twenty-year lease on a
thousand acres, organized the Blue Ridge Copper Company. I sold some stock, and
one enthusiastic stockholder was so delighted with the showing that he wrote me
the following letter:
Washington, D.C., May 6, 1929
“Dear Mr. Iles,
“Recently, on hearing of your find of copper ore in the Old Dominion
State, in company with some mining friends, it was good pleasure, also great
surprise, to visit your Blue Ridge Copper property, some 1200 feet up on the
southern slopes of Mt. Marshall, Virginia, which we reached by alighting at
Little Washington, journeying by horseback along beautiful Rush River and up the
mountain slopes to the goal, a trip of about three hours and one thrill after
another. This venerable old mountain seemed to tower 2000 feet higher, and from
the enormous amount of the real red metal deposit viable, I think no doubt in
the future it will be known far and near as Copper Mountain.
“I have personally visited bug mines in the great Southwest
and helped to work some. After carefully going over your 1000 acres of unique
holdings, never before have I seen such an opportunity to quickly develop a
great producing copper mine; never before have I ever seen or ever heard of any
mine so favorably located for workings: an abundance of water, health and living
conditions simply ideal and so clean, in god’s sunshine, fine native timber
surrounding, and labor eagerly waiting at minimum wage. The ore can be taken out
so easily, sent down to low levels by gravity to great ore bins, form which it
can be loaded on cars or trucks, and on hard roads taken to nearby markets just
as rapidly as men, machinery, and powder can loose it from the mountainsides,
which should be hundreds of tons daily, then increase to thousands, operating
day and night, by sunlight and electricity. It seems to me that no one can go
over the property, if they have a mining knowledge, without being deeply
impressed with its immense wealth so near at hand. There need be no
long-drawn-out make-ready, but high grade ore quarried right now from the
surface, and millions of tons, as is usual with such copper deposits, will no
doubt be found richer with depth.
“It is so remarkable that the old mountains of the East
have been overlooked since 1849, in the rush to California, and that it has
remained for you, after traveling the world over inspecting various mines, to
make the richest find of copper deposits known to the world today, perhaps, high
up on the Blue Ridge, surrounded by primeval forest, which I think will prove
better then a gold mine soon, growing better for a century.
“You deserve great credit. Your capitalization is small
($500,000), and selling about one-fourth of it will suffice. We predict a big
winner in profits for you and your associates. If you need development funds
your friends here will gladly inspect it and join you quickly if they want to
make good honest dollars fast. It is a rare opportunity, which we have never had
in the east. By all means hold your controlling interest, as its quick earning
will make you rich soon. Your great practical experience and your staying on the
property to watch and direct its progress mean so much, and I would advise my
closest friends to put in with you to the limit if given a chance. I trust, for
a few weeks at least, you may afford them such an opportunity.
Very sincerely,
George Myerz”
The
deposit continued to improve, and I was beginning to see a prosperous mine in
sight, with dividends galore for my stockholders, when the government closed in
on me and took possession of my land for a part of the Shenandoah National Park.
Then, with a claim for damages of $20,000 against the State of Virginia, which
will probably be paid to my grandchildren, if any. I gracefully withdrew from
one of the finest propositions with which I was ever connected.
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