Twitter

United States Mining History

Tiny Town Of Nucla Looks To A Future Without Mining And Sees Opportunity And Uncertainty – by Stina Sieg (Colorado Public Radio – June 24, 2019)

https://www.cpr.org/

Home to just a few hundred people, the town of Nucla, Colorado, isn’t just tiny. It’s far from just about everything. Tucked into the western edge of Montrose County, it’s 350 miles from Denver and 60 miles from the nearest stop light.

For generations, this area — known as the West End — was a hub for mining. Most famously, they dug for uranium here and the area saw a big boom thanks to the Cold War era. Later, coal arrived to support a local power plant.

“You think things are going to boom forever,” said Jane Thompson, a 62-year-old longtime local. “They’re always going to need uranium. They’re always going to need coal.”

Read more

[Homestake Mine, South Dakota] The real Deadwood – by Peter Fish (Sunset Magazine – ????)

Sunset Magazine

Peter Fish explores the South Dakota town made famous by the hit TV show

This is a tale of two cities. The first is a mining camp in the Black Hills, where greed, lust, and violence kindle in such volatile combinations, you think they may burn the whole town down. The second is a tourist attraction whose tidy Main Street throngs with tourists jingling the quarters they won in the casino slots.

The first town is Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in 1876, as experienced on the HBO series Deadwood. The second is Deadwood, South Dakota, as experienced in real time in 2006. The genuine and virtual towns have become inseparable.

It’s Deadwood’s real history that made the television series possible. It’s the television Deadwood that is breathing new life into the real town ― proving that in 2006, some juicy Western history can be as valuable as gold.

Read more

Rebuilding ‘Deadwood,’ Plank by Plank – by Robert Ito (New York Times – May 15, 2019)

https://www.nytimes.com/

Deadwood is based on the South Dakota Homestake Mining Company. Here is a brief history: https://bit.ly/2X8YTAx

SANTA CLARITA, CALIF. — “Deadwood” is back for one final hello and goodbye. Last November, more than a decade after David Milch’s award-winning HBO series unexpectedly and maddeningly folded, Timothy Olyphant, as Seth Bullock, was once again in the center of the town’s perpetually muddy main drag, having words — heated, profane, Shakespearean ones — with Gerald McRaney, the show’s villainous George Hearst.

From the balcony of the Gem casino, Ian McShane (Al Swearengen) glowered; offstage, Robin Weigert, the show’s foul-mouthed, tenderhearted Calamity Jane, waited in the wings.

Against all odds, the producers were able to reunite nearly all of the show’s principal cast for “Deadwood: The Movie,” the show’s much-delayed, much-anticipated finale. “I didn’t think it was ever going to happen,” Olyphant admitted later.

Read more

Cripple Creek donkeys released into the city for the summer – by Zachary Aedo (KRDO.com – May 15, 2019)

https://www.krdo.com/

CRIPPLE CREEK, Colo. – Cripple Creek is one of two cities in the United States where you could run into a wild donkey herd on the streets.

The Two Mile High Club nonprofit released its donkey herd into the streets for the summer. The local group spends each winter keeping the donkeys safe and healthy at a nearby ranch. But every summer, the donkeys are released to run wild for the public to see.

Clinton Cline, the president of Two Mile High Club, said the creatures remind people of the city’s mining history. “The donkeys pretty much built Cripple Creek originally,” Cline said. During the gold rush of the late 1800s, miners used donkeys to pull ore carts and transport materials to local mining camps.

Read more

Mining City History: Augustus Heinze and the Panic of 1907 – by Richard I. Gibson (Montana Standard – April 8, 2019)

https://mtstandard.com/

Local geologist and historian Dick Gibson has lived in Butte since 2003 and has worked as a tour guide for various organizations and museums. He can be reached at rigibson@earthlink.net

Butte’s riches and people have had some far-reaching impacts. Brooklyn-born F. Augustus Heinze arrived in Butte in 1889, and with help from a $50,000 inheritance, soon established the Montana Ore Purchasing (M.O.P.) Company and by 1894 had opened a huge new mill-smelter complex just south of Meaderville on the east side of the hill.

The MOP bought ore from smaller companies to process until Heinze had his own mines, including the Rarus. It’s well known that Heinze went on to exploit the rule of the apex to allege that veins reached the surface within his claim boundaries, winning huge riches in the courts to add to his other mining ventures.

In 1902, Heinze combined all his interests in the United Copper Company, which had a production capacity of about a third of that of the Amalgamated (Anaconda) Company.

Read more

Mine Tales: Payson’s long history included a thriving mining center – by William Ascarza (Arizona Daily Star – April 7, 2019)

https://tucson.com/

The town of Payson, established in the early 1880s, has contributed to Arizona history in multiple ways, including being located near the well-known Pleasant Valley War waged from 1887 to 1892.

It also contributed to Arizona’s economy with a robust logging and cattle industry while billing itself as the “World’s Longest Continuous Rodeo” established in 1884.

Located almost in the geographic center of Arizona in the low, rolling, granite hills between the Mazatzal Mountains and Sierra Ancha Mountains, Payson has acquired the attribute, “the Heart of Arizona.”

Read more

Howard Balsley, uranium pioneer, preserved the past – by Heila Ershadi (Moab Sun News – March 21, 2019)

http://www.moabsunnews.com/

Howard Balsley is known in history books as a Moab uranium pioneer. In the book “The Moab Story: From Cowpokes to Bike Spokes,” author Tom McCourt writes that Balsley is “considered by many to be the father of the uranium industry in the United States.”

McCourt’s account says that Balsley came to Moab in 1908 and primarily made his living as a forest ranger, but also prospected and assisted others in their mining endeavors, even before the WWII uranium boom.

Balsley contracted with a number of small-scale miners across the Colorado Plateau to regularly make 50-ton shipments of uranium and vanadium ores to the Vitro Manufacturing Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In the early 1930s, the company used the ores to make pigments for glass and pottery manufacturers. During WWII, Balsley used a similar business model to supply the government with vanadium needed for the war effort.

Read more

Opinion: They tell you surprisingly little before sending you home from the hospital with… – by Aaron J. Brown (Hibbing Daily Tribune – February 9, 2019)

https://www.hibbingmn.com/

Like a lot of kids who grew up on Northern Minnesota’s Iron Range during the economic crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s I saw plenty of reasons to leave. Many of my friends did. But I’m glad I found good reasons to stay. Many friends did that, too. That doesn’t mean, however, that our lives are easy or our fate resolved.

When I was in college, I saw the movie “October Sky.” This 1999 film tells the true story of a boy and his friends who, during the Cold War space race, launch their own rocket from a West Virginia coal mining town. They win the national science fair with help from the folks back home.

I also sought out the 1941 Best Picture winner “How Green Was My Valley.” This story follows a Welsh coal mining family over several years, beaten down by small town social mores, unsafe mining conditions, and the economic collapse of their town. And yet their valley was so green, you could even see it in black and white; the love and spirit endured.

Read more

A place in history: the Mackay School – by Karl Fendelander (Nevada Today – January 9, 2019)

https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/

Born the School of Mines in Nevada in 1888, the Mackay School of Mines is more than just an iconic building sitting opposite Morrill Hall on the University of Nevada, Reno’s historic Quadrangle.

It was one of a handful of mining schools that opened around then at Land Grant Universities to teach those untrained Gold Rushers the science of extracting precious metals – and John William Mackay, one of those eager early miners armed with little more than ambition and a strong back, would come to change not only this mining school but the entire University.

Mackay spent time in the California Gold Rush mining camps before arriving to mine the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, where he went from penniless Irish immigrant to multi-millionaire and one of four Bonanza Kings known the world over in a few short decades. While his fellow Kings cut and ran with their riches to big cities, Mackay’s deep sense of gratitude to Nevada tethered him and his family.

Read more

Mine Tales: A.P.K. Safford, from California gold rush to Arizona Territory governor – by William Ascarza (Arizona Daily Star – December 9, 2018)

https://tucson.com/

Anson Peacely-Killen Safford, prominent for his mining ventures, served as the third territorial governor of Arizona from 1869-1877.

A native of Hyde Park, Vermont, he ventured to California to participate in its gold rush during the early 1850s. He later served as a mining recorder in Nevada before accepting the nomination as governor of Arizona Territory by President Ulysses S. Grant.

His nomination was at the request of powerful railroad promoters including Coles Bashford who, like Safford, was also a fellow incorporator of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. Safford is known for his focus on law, order and education during his political tenure.

Read more

A return to legacy: The reopening of Central City’s Bates Hunter Mine – by Sarah Haas (Boulder Weekly – November 15, 2018)

Boulder Weekly

It’s 8 a.m. at Central City’s newly reopened Bates Hunter Mine, the sun just peaking over the valley walls. It’s been over 70 years since gold was last mined here, but as the miner’s begin to arrive at work on a November day in 2018, it feels like they’ve been here all along, like this is where they’re supposed to be.

By all appearances today is a normal day, although on the agenda is at least one extraordinary task; after months of removing water from the main shaft, the miners can finally access the 163-foot level, submerged and unseen since an exploratory visit in 2008. And, aside from a few maps that look like a simplistic version of Snakes and Ladders, the crew doesn’t really know what to expect on today’s seminal descent.

“We’re just gonna go down and check it out, gauge the condition of the infrastructure, poke around on the landing,” says Matt Collins, the mine’s general manager and engineer. “It’ll be neat to see how close these are to our maps.”

Read more

Mine Tales: Del Pasco Mine brought fortune seekers in the 1870s – by William Ascarza (Arizona Daily Star – November 12, 2018)

https://tucson.com/

The Bradshaw Mountains in Central Arizona near Prescott produced a series of big strikes in the 1870s and ’80s. The earliest to be developed in the range was the Del Pasco Mine.

It was discovered by Jackson McCrackin, James Fine, Charley Taylor and T.G. Hogle on July 4, 1870. Within a month, two arrastras were employed to extract gold with an initial processing of 112 ounces totaling $1,904. The former placer mine was further developed to access the Del Pasco vein (running 2 to 3 feet in width) which, later heavily worked, necessitated the establishment of a tunnel 1,000 feet in length and stoped to the surface.

Located in the Pine Grove District of Yavapai County on the rugged southern slopes of Tower Mountain overlooking Crown King, the Del Pasco vein, between 6,300 feet and 7,300 feet, strikes north-northeast. The local geology is diorite intruded by rhyolite porphyry and a primary quartz vein with galena, pyrite and sphalerite.

Read more

Montana generous in sharing men, women and treasures to hasten end of WWI – by Kim Briggeman (Helena Independent Record – November 10, 2018)

https://helenair.com/

“I’ve got a quote in my book that every American bullet fired in
the war was encased in Butte copper,” said Robison, who’ll be
part of Sunday’s program at Fort Missoula.

They’re not forget-me-nots, but they could be called that. The scientific name for the tiny blue flowers that grow in France’s Forest of Verdun is Sisyrinchium montanum. “They call it the blue-eyed grass of Montana,” a national forest official in Douamont told the American Foreign Press in 2016.

Douamont is lined with graves of 80,000 of the 300,000 French and German soldiers who died in the 300-day Battle of Verdun in 1916, the year before the United States entered World War I. The flowers aren’t native, Patrice Hirbec told the news service. They were introduced to Verdun as seeds on the hooves of United States Army horses.

It wasn’t a good war to be a horse. It’s said that on one day during the Battle of Verdun, 7,000 were killed in the shelling. Estimates vary but somewhere between 6 million and 8 million horses, mules and donkeys died during the four years of conflict.

Read more

Cheers, tears as historic smelter from Magma Mine demolished in Superior – by Ryan Randazzo (Arizona Republic – November 10, 2018)

https://www.azcentral.com/

Cheers erupted at 8:46 a.m. Saturday in Superior after the historic copper smelter stack from the Magma Mine crashed to the ground. But the cheers only came because the controlled demolition offered such a spectacle. Many of the people lined up along the streets watching the destruction were sad to see the 293-foot brick stack fall.

Even though smoke hasn’t wafted from the top of the stack since 1971, the 94-year-old smelter about 60 miles east of downtown Phoenix was a symbol of the region’s mining heritage, and had sentimental value for those who lived and worked in Superior.

That includes Larry Palacio, a Gilbert retiree who spent more than 21 years working at the Magma Mine after he graduated from Superior High School in 1955. “I did just about everything,” he said, standing along Main Street waiting for the warning sirens before explosions that caused the stack to topple. “I was a mucker, mechanic, worked the cage.”

Read more

The silver kings of the Comstock – by Darold Fredricks (San Mateo Daily Journal – November 11, 2013)

https://www.smdailyjournal.com/

Although gold had been taken out of the streams around Virginia City in 1850, it didn’t create much excitement in San Francisco immediately.

The gold tailings were worked when there was water in the streams that ran east from Mount Davidson, a peak from the Virginia Range in western Utah Territory. As more prospecting produced other catches of gold tailings, word spread that there might be a bonanza in the hot and forbidding area. A few took the bait and they left after the gold strike from Coloma panned out and they were left high and dry in San Francisco.

In 1857, Henry Comstock lucked upon an area where he and some others found some gold and silver veins that were promising for riches. Henry acquired the area after the Grosh brothers died before filing claims. Henry took over the cabin and land and enlarged his holdings by claiming more land around the cabin after hearing of a gold strike at Gold Hill.

Read more