12/22/03

A fool with dynamite. A town underneath the snow. Back to the San Juan on foot. A night spent with lively company in an abandoned cabin. Locating a silver mine. A $100,000 deal and what came of it.

Apparently I was no relation to Midas, and seemed to be an expert in bringing luck to everyone in Leadville except myself. Thereupon I decided to let the town shift for itself and return to the San Juan, provided I could get work for a few days to finance the trip. I had found another partner, Byrd Wilson, nephew of Adair Wilson, a San Juan lawyer, who was also keen to get back to Silverton, so we took a contract with a mining promoter to do assessment work on a claim near Red Cliff. My new partner was as green a hombre as I had ever met, but as beggars could not be choosers, I made the best of it.

We purchased ten pounds of dynamite, a couple of drills, and other essential tools, which when added to our blankets made quit a load to be carried on our backs. Leaving Leadville with our packs on our shoulders, we traveled on skies across the valleys, reaching that deadfall known as Chalk Ranch that night, and found beds in a tent doing double at $1.00 per, meals ditto. We left there early, still on skis, and found the camp where we were to work early in the afternoon. The snow was about three feet deep, and it kept us busy until dark shoveling out a place to camp and preparing for work the next morning. We soon had a rousing fire to dry out the ground, after which the tent was put up and we rolled up in our blankets.

The next morning I woke up to find that Byrd had the fire going, but when I looked closer I had to gasp. He had taken out the forty sticks of giant and ranged them in a row close to the fire! I yelled to him to run, and he leaped over the bank of snow and I saw him no more for an hour. Now ordinarily dynamite will burn like a port fire, and I have seen boxes of high content nitro burn itself out without any explosion. Then again a stick of the stuff will explode seemingly without any reason whatever. There is always a chance of there being a defective stick in the box, and therein lies the danger. In this case I had to consider the long trip to replace the powder, and the chance of saving part of it by throwing it out on the snow. I chose the latter and won. Several of the sticks had already ignited, but I picked up the whole ones and tossed them far out on he snow and not one of them exploded. I saved enough to do the work on the claim.

We completed the assessment work on the property, signed the affidavit, collected the $100, and struck out for Alpine Pass. With only our blankets to carry, and stopping at farms and mine boarding houses for meals, we moved rapidly on our skis. The Alpine tunnel was entered and left behind us, so we were well on the way to Ruby Camp.

We were slipping along on the snow through the heavy timber, when about a hundred yards ahead of us we were astonished to see a man coming up out of the snow. He came toward us, and I called to him: “How far is it to Irwin?” You can imagine my surprise when he replied: “You’re right on the main street. That hole I came out of is the post office.” We looked around then and saw other holes, and later found they were connected underneath by snow tunnels. We descended to the post office, and the postmaster, as a great favor, showed us how to find a boarding house where we could put up for the night.

Next day was long to be remembered in Irwin. A newspaper was to make its bow to the enterprising town. An auction of the first one hundred copies off the presses was arranged, and Dick Irwin, the father of the budding city, bid in the first copy for $145.00. The bids for the succeeding copies ranged from $1.00 up to $100.00, and the editor realized enough from his hundred copies to more than pay for his printing outfit.

While the auction was going on, my partner and I secured a contract to furnish logs for a cabin at $19.00 a log, and we made more money in the next month than we made all the time I had been in Leadville. Unfortunately, there were three gambling institutions in addition to the side issues in the saloons, so that our pile was kept down to our modest requirements of $4.00 a day through the machinations of our old friend “Fare.”

Spring came and the snow disappeared rapidly, exposing a mining camp with two grocery stores, a hardware-clothing-and-drug store, seven saloons, and plans for a church. Here my partner decided to stay.

One fine morning I took a trail for Gunnison. On the way I met a man with one arm. His face looked quite familiar to me, and when he called me by name I knew he was Frank Spinola, the man I had brought down from the Millionaire Mine. He was on his way to Ruby Camp, and I told him I was on my way back to Silverton. In saying goodbye he put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a handful of silver, saying, “You will need this on the way!”

I stopped at Gunnison for dinner, then pushed onto to Ouray, where I put up for the night. In the morning, with my roll of blankets, I took the Uncompahgre trail, which was being changed into a wagon road, and turned up Poughkeepsie Gulch. At the top of the hill I paused at the Alaska Mine, another of H.A.W. Tabor’s investments. They were sinking a shaft and were evidently taking out high-grade ore, for a large block of bismuth silver was leaning against the steps of the shaft house. The foreman said it would run 2000 ounces in silver to the ton. I pushed on past the Canandaigua, the Columbia, Queen Anne, and Tribune mines, and took the road for Gladstone. The whole district seemed alive with prospectors and miners, in sharp contrast to the other side of the range. At Gladstone I was still eight miles from Silverton, but I reached the “gem of the Rockies” at dusk and prepared to settle down.

In the spring of 1880, San Juan County, although the smallest county of the state, far outstripped in activity any other mining camp in the San Juan Triangle. No less than six thousand miners were employed in the hundred or so mines, some of which produced small tonnages of rich surface rock, but most of them were in the various stages of development. The big producers of the present day, with their modern plants, their ball mills and flotation cells, had not even been dreamed of. The railroad had not yet crossed the Conejos Range, and the town site of Durango had only just been located. However, with trains of ox-wagons trundling daily into Silverton from the end of the track in the San Luis Valley, there was no lack of supplies. The Greene smelter at the mouth of Cement Creek was turning out a steady stream of bullion, and an ore-buying sampling works that paid cash for the richer ores furnished return freight for the teamsters, which put plenty of money into circulation.

The hills were swarming with prospectors, all of whom had locations to be recorded, making the county officials rich with their fees. Pack trains of mules and burros provided the transportation between the town and the mines, and strings of a hundred animals loaded with lumber, rail, coal, and other supplies, lined the trails in constant procession. The small sturdy burros, with their shaggy coats, long ears, and stubborn dispositions, deserve a great deal of credit for their help in developing these pioneer communities, as on their strong backs were brought the necessities of life to the mining camps isolated high on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. They are still used in packing supplies to mines where they alone are able to cling to the narrow trails, and returning with bags of heavy ore, which bring riches to their owners.

It was not to be wondered at, with all this excitement around me, that I was again fired with the prospecting fever, and it was only a question of hours before I found a partner to furnish me with a grubstake. Bill Aley, a wagon maker in Mickey Maguire’s blacksmith shop, was my backer, and Bill Long, my old time companion in the Wasatch, went along to prospect on his own account.

The headwaters of Cement Creek offered the most promising field, so with a few burros to pack the outfit, we put up at the abandoned boarding house of the Columbia Mine. The first night we slept there we were visited by a swarm of mice. We had laid our blankets on the floor, and we must have been directly in the path of an army that was about to assault the citadel of our pile of grub, which we had stacked up in one corner of the building. They got under and trouped over the covers of our bed, while another squadron directed a vicious attack on my feet and Bill’s baldpate. Bill was a sound sleeper, and it was only when the vermin began to take bites at his face that he woke up and realized that it was no dream. I got up and made my bed on two long stools joined together, but the mice did not mind the climb, and I brushed them off as they scurried over my body. Lighting a candle had no terrors for the little devils, and there seemed to be no limit to the reinforcements coming up from below, every square foot of the floor having its quota. Arming ourselves with rubber bootlegs, we passed the rest of the night in wholesale slaughter. Not being willing to experience another night in such lively company, we put up a tent in the open and thereafter slept in peace.

Bill took up his trail for riches by climbing Brown Mountain, while I decided to cast my lot on Hurricane Peak. I had good luck from the start, for in a steep draw between the Columbia and Pony Mines, I uncovered a boulder of mineral that shone with antimonial silver. The rock had the appearance of having broken off a ledge above, and weighed five or six tons. As a matter of fact, I later sold four tons of it that yielded a profit of $1,670. Returning to camp for my drills, I put in a shot that split the boulder, and taking two of the largest pieces I could carry, I took them to Silverton and later sent them to the Denver exposition. Returning to find the vein, which was easy, for not a dozen yards above the boulder I found the lode, I made preparations at once for its development. On the footwall ran a streak of galena, and between that and the side of my drift, the rich ore appeared in pockets, at intervals of seven to ten feet.

Antimonial silver is a beautiful combination of the white metal, sulphur, and antimony. The mineral stands out in the quartz-like rays of the sun with points of brilliance not exhibited by any other silver ore. Miners who came to view my strike stood at the mouth of the tunnel and said it looked like a jeweler’s window. One especially attractive specimen I conveyed down to my partner’s workshop. It weighed ninety pounds, and it occupied the key position on his bench as he expounded his enthusiasm to the visitor. Mickey Maguire used to say that Aley said his prayers to it, and there is no question that my partner idolized the chunk of silver in terms if reverence.

But Bill, while he worshipped the specimen as a thing of beauty, thought more of it as a symbol of the almighty dollar than an ornament, and it was not long before he began to get action, for among the crowd that daily came into the shop was a man by the name of Leach, a lumberman of Kansas City. The large boulder of shining metal attracted the attention of the old gentleman, for its refulgence cast a ray of brightness over the dingy shop, and his interrogations led Aley into an enthusiastic description of the mine. Leach was much interested, and asked the wagon maker how much he asked for the property.  “A hundred thousand dollars, and there’s millions in it,” replied Bill, without a flicker of an eyelid.

Leached walked out of the shop, made a couple of turns around the block, and came back. “I will take that mine if we can agree on the terms. I will pay fourteen thousand dollars in cash, and the balance in good bankable paper.” This offer my partner promptly accepted, and sent a man for me with a spare saddle horse.

With visions of wealth engaging my attention, that ten-mile ride to Silverton seemed but a few moments, for we came on a dead run along Cement Creek and wound up with a wild rush down Greene Street until we reached the shop, into which I burst with a “Hurray!”

Bill was in tears. “The buyer,” he said, “after the price and terms were agreed upon and it was arranged that you should be manager and I secretary of the company, went to the bank to make a draft for the first payment and told the cashier what he wanted it for. Werkheiser said he should be very careful, as all this high grade ore was pockety.”  This undoubtedly frightened Leach, and after telling my partner he could not take the mine, boarded the train for Durango. While we were discussing the matter, a telegram was handed to Aley, which said:

“Wm. B. Aley

Silverton, Colorado

            I have a good mind to take that property yet.

                                                                        George F. Leach.”

But he never did.

I was not discouraged at the collapse of this deal, knowing that we had a good thing and we would eventually win out in spite of all the knockers in Silverton, so I returned to Hurricane Peak and pushed my drift with more vigor than before.

On the point of Hurricane Peak was a claim called the “Pony.” It adjoined Alexandria, which was the name of my property, and was owned by an itinerant miner called “Limber Bill.” This worthy came on my dump one day and offered me $800 for a sixth interest. I refused, saying that I did not want to split up the mine anymore, but would entertain an offer for the whole. This did not seem to satisfy Bill, as I found him the next following morning digging under my dump. Each time I brought out a load of waste I would empty it into the hole he was digging, which brought out threats, and finally he appeared on the scene with a pistol one morning, and accompanied by another man.

Without giving any attention to this new development, I calmly dumped my next load as usual, and this seemed to inflame the enemy, for he promised explicitly to “bore a hole through my hide if I did it again.” When I wheeled out my next load I set it down without dumping. Limber Bill dared me to spill the rock, and pointed the gun in my direction. At this demonstration I reached down and picked up a piece of the quartz. Turning it around in my hand, without any idea that I could make a bulls eye, I let it fly. It struck his pistol on the back of his fingers. The gun went off, and with a howl of pain he put his hand to his mouth, cursing me to the finish, as he and his helper disappeared in the direction of his cabin. Bill Aley, who had now recovered from his disappointment, was as optimistic as ever. He got me a Savage rifle, and on my return to the camp I amused myself by popping off the groundhogs that made a playground of the Pony dump. I never saw Limber Bill again.

After mining the ore I carefully sorted it and put it into sacks, which I stacked up against the galena streak on the footwall. There were probably fourteen tons of it ready for shipment, but I did not send it to the smelter, as I figured that it looked much better at the mine then on an ore-buyer’s blank. Inquiries had begun to come in respecting the discovery, and one from people connected with the Denver Fire Clay Company looked particularly attractive. The result of this correspondence was the dispatch of Ernest Waters, a noted engineer, to make an examination.

A heavy snowstorm had covered the country in the meantime, and we had to use snowshoes on our trip to the mine. Arriving there, we found that someone had been there before us and made a tunnel through the snow to the drift. Every sack of ore was gone, and a shot had dislodged all the mineral that had been showing in the face. I made my peace with the engineer the best I could, and the deal was cancelled.