by Jack Nisbet
That equation changed with the onset of World War I. The scale of the new conflict called for an immense quantity of high-grade steel, manufactured by the open-hearth process. This method forced preheated air into a furnace, and the elevated heat burned off impurities to create a better product. Open-hearth furnaces were lined with a lacework of refractory bricks that could handle the extreme temperatures without breaking down. And the key ingredient for making such refractory bricks was refined magnesite.
At that time, the US steel industry, based largely around Pittsburgh, imported about three-quarters of its magnesite from Austria, Hungary, and Greece. As soon as the war began, all but Greece’s small portion disappeared, and German U-boats soon choked off that supply. When officials in Washington, DC, put out a search for domestic sources, a strange cast of characters who knew about the Stensgar dolomite swung into action. Dove-gray rocks were sent to a Pittsburgh manufacturer of refractory brick, and, to everyone’s surprise, their composition matched the company’s requirements very well. When the steel men ordered several hopper-car loads for immediate delivery, the rush to control prominent Huckleberry Mountain outcrops was on. Locals soon heard about one hard-up quarry owner who had been offering to trade all his equipment and land to his neighbor in exchange for a beat-up Ford Model T truck. The neighbor kept refusing, then had to watch as company men arrived from out of town and showered thousands of dollars on the lucky quarry owner.
It turned out that the reddish hues of the Red Marble Quarry were caused by infusions of ferric iron. This meant that less iron had to be added during the reduction process, so Red Marble ore was especially desirable to the Pittsburgh mills. The owners of the quarry, who had been trying to sell their reddish “marble” slabs without noticeable profit since the turn of the century, promptly turned down an offer of $75,000 for rights to extract volumes of stone at some point in the future.
While the Great War raged on, the modest Huckleberry Range starred in an ongoing drama involving different companies who vied with each other for contracts, transportation corridors, and production systems. As lower-elevation quarries in the Stensgar formation began to yield riches, the more desirable ore of the Red Marble, hidden away in the high country, lay tantalizingly out of reach for even the most ambitious East Coast operators. But that was before they met an engineer just down the road in Spokane who had a remedy for their problem.
Tramways
Byron Riblet was born in Iowa and grew up as a clever, restless lad. By the age of twenty, he had parlayed a University of Minnesota civil engineering degree into a job designing the Northern Pacific Railway’s spur line from Spokane to Pullman. After completing that task in 1887, he worked as a divisional engineer for another railroad line, swimming into fierce competition for routes through the Idaho Panhandle’s Silver Valley. When a local economic panic in 1889 led to bankruptcies and labor violence, Riblet slipped west to Spokane, where he focused his talents on the construction of dams, electrical networks, and the city’s forty-mile grid of streetcar lines.
Everyone knew, however, that the real money resided with the mining industry. In 1896, Riblet, now thirty years old and with a world of practical experience under his belt, ventured a few hours north into the Selkirk Mountains above Nelson, British Columbia, to investigate a new offer. The Noble Five Mine needed a water-power plant, and Riblet hoped that if he pulled that off, he might interest the owners in a rail spur to haul their ore to an accessible line. It turned out that what the steep terrain really called for was an aerial tramway. Riblet had never built one himself, but he went to school on an overhead tram that had been recently completed for a nearby mine. Within a year, he had directed the installation of wooden towers that crossed a rugged mountainside bearing miles of steel cable woven into a continuous loop, and ore buckets were bumping somewhat jerkily along the wire rope line. It was an instant success.
Over the next few summers, the engineer designed and oversaw the construction of ore tramways all over the Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia. Local newspapers told stories of drunken oilers getting crushed against the towers and photographed children perched in high-line buckets for the rollercoaster ride of their dreams. Byron Riblet, with no time for such distractions, continued to address several nagging problems that had plagued the overhead concept since its inception. By 1903 he had acquired patents for sheaves, derricks, automatic loaders, bucket latches, and an especially ingenious bucket grip that allowed smooth passage around terminal towers. That same year, Riblet sold his patents and his services to a major wire rope company in Saint Louis and again expanded his reach. He increased the number of his Inland Northwest systems to over thirty and ramrodded the construction of the world’s longest tramway until that time: sixteen miles of towers that stretched from a massive Wyoming copper mine to its tall-stacked smelter.
After five years with the Saint Louis firm, the roving Riblet returned to Spokane and established his own business, the Riblet Tramway Company. He married into local society, built a fancy house on the river, and was in a perfect position when the wartime boom in steel manufacturing called for retrieving tons of fresh ore from one small mountain range above the Colville Valley.
In 1917, Riblet Tramway contracted with Northwest Magnesite to build a five-mile overhead tramway connecting its Finch Quarry, located at the foot of the Huckleberry Range, to a reduction plant on a railroad siding just south of the town of Chewelah. Northwest Magnesite’s main rival decided to bet on six miles of standard-gauge railroad line that would stretch from its own base quarry to another rail spur. During the race that ensued, construction of the new tracks dragged on for more than a year and cost over half a million dollars. Byron Riblet, who was rumored to be stringing used steel cable left over from construction of the Panama Canal, had the Finch tramway up and running in just over eleven months for $60,000. The tramway’s thousand-pound-capacity ore buckets moved twelve hundred tons of crushed rock a day to four large rotary kilns at the Chewelah plant. Inside each giant kiln, a reduction process burned carbon dioxide away from magnesium oxide, reducing the weight of raw ore by half for the hopper-car trek to Pittsburgh. Anyone who witnessed the steady hum of the tramway’s cable and the rhythmic flow of the ore buckets as they swooped out of the hills and down to the kilns was mightily impressed.
When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, Riblet did not handle himself so well. Although he remained president of his company, receipts dried up, and he sold portions of property around his home to stay afloat. When his stately house burned to the ground one Christmas, gossip spread that the tramway titan, perhaps a bit tipsy, had overstuffed his fireplace with gift wrap. He started to rebuild on the same site, but his reputation as a problem drinker began to gain on him. He was arrested for leaning on his horn incessantly in traffic; for refusing to allow a police car to pass him, on the grounds that the officer had no right to speed; and for blocking a freight train at a railroad crossing for exactly the same amount of time that the previous train had blocked him. During the run-up to the Second World War, he made crank calls to Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, and showed little interest in his engineering firm. Local whispers had it that the company remained solvent only because a talented young engineer whom Riblet had hired was running the show.
Meanwhile, up in the Colville Valley, Northwest Magnesite managed to ride out the slowdown of the Depression. After World War II erupted, more high-quality steel than ever before was needed, and the orders began to flow again. It wasn’t long before the company was thinking once more of the high-grade ore that lay just out of reach in the Red Marble Quarry. In the late 1940s, they rehired Riblet Tramway to extend towers farther into the Huckleberries. By 1949, Riblet’s bright young engineer had overseen the completion of the tower line up to the Red Marble Quarry. In his spare time he had developed a lucrative new product by modifying the company’s industrial tramways to work as recreational ski lifts.
This innovation allowed Riblet’s company to t
hrive into a new age, but for Northwest Magnesite, the end was near. After World War II, new methods of steel manufacture altered the required properties for refractory brick, and the Pittsburgh mills developed less expensive new sources. When the Northwest Magnesite operation shut down for good in 1968, the Stensgar dolomite had yielded more than five million tons of ore, and by some estimates the Red Marble Quarry alone still held almost that much more in reserve.
Unspooled
I arrived in the Colville Valley only two years after Northwest Magnesite closed, and many of its key facilities seemed frozen since the moment when the last whistle blew. That was certainly true of the Red Marble when Tom and I stopped there in the stillness of a summer afternoon.
We rambled off the top of the ziggurat and fell in with a well-maintained road that made an extrawide loop before ending at a heavy steel grate set at an angle off the lip of a sidehill precipice. Big wheel chocks remained secure at the edge of the drop-off, where trucks filled with raw ore once backed up to dump their loads through the grate. One worker, usually the newest man on board, would wield a heavy sledgehammer to pound any chunks that didn’t fit through the iron bars.
We descended the steep hill thirty feet or more to reach the level where the sized material would have piled up beside a long rectangular building. Wind had torn a few sheets of tin from the roof, but the timbers inside remained impressively solid. This was the takeoff shed for the overhead tramway, and we marveled at Byron Riblet’s system of towers and steel cables, still firmly secured in place. The tramway’s many ore cars, strung at surprisingly long intervals, waited to be loaded. The cars reminded me of old-fashioned baby prams, solid and squat; the one closest above the takeoff shed had the numeral 37 painted in yellow on each side.
Our eyes traced the elegant double line of cable that sagged between the towers as the tramway system disappeared beyond the up-and-down terrain that led to the Finch Quarry, six full miles away. From there, also standing firm, buckets in place, the next set of towers and cables was poised to make the five-mile run to the reduction plant.
A couple of years later, I would by chance play a very small role in dismantling this operation when I signed on for a temporary stint with the wrecking crew. We released the tension on the cables, allowing them to fly free and terrifying through the trees. We watched a special cable-winding machine, which for all I knew had been used on the Panama Canal, spool the Medusa tangle of wire rope up from the ground. We used an acetylene torch to cut apart the angle-iron towers that had replaced Byron Riblet’s original wooden ones, and I picked up the splattered nuts and bolts that had fallen from collapsing struts to the ground, one by one, and tossed them into an old ore bucket. When it was filled to the brim, we would ship the bucket and its load to a Yakima foundry as high-grade scrap steel. It was a rodeo that came and went over the course of a few months, erasing almost all outward signs of the tramway’s giant footprints from the landscape. Before many more years had passed, lodgepole pines and Douglas-firs had spread back across the abandoned right-of-way, leaving only the decaying buildings of the tramway’s three stopping points—Red Marble, Finch, and the huge processing plant—as witnesses to the reign of that little-known mineral. A few of the former Magnesite workers kept Riblet Tramway ore carts in their backyards as souvenirs, often planted with petunias, but by the turn of the twenty-first century, the original purpose of these had all but faded from memory.
To this day, I continue to drive up and down the Colville River on a regular basis. Every so often, especially in summertime, I make a turn and follow Stensgar Creek uphill, passing through Thomas and Julia’s old farmstead.
Julia witnessed the end of the fur trade era and the beginning of the magnesite boom, each of which lasted a mere half century in the Colville Valley. In contrast, some of her special berry-picking places are still loaded with purple in August. I occasionally stop to check in on the root cellar that is nestled so snugly into its hillside, and at one point I noticed that things were starting to get a little rickety around its doorframe. On a recent trip, I was pleased to see that some carpenter had replaced the portal with craftsmanship that would have made the original homesteader proud. The door remained securely closed, leaving me to wonder just how big the space inside might be, and whether a few jars full of huckleberries might still be perched on a cool shelf, waiting for winter.
VII
TERRA-COTTA MAN
Baked Earth
Besano is a small town tucked into the mountains of northern Italy that has been well-known since the 1840s for fossils from nearby Monte San Giorgio. The record there of a warm-water lagoon and surrounding environments from the Triassic period includes ichthyosaurs and other classic sea reptiles beautifully preserved in beds of jet-black bituminous coal. Sequential stable layers allowed early scientists to establish benchmark relationships of rocks and fossils at Besano, and helped set a clock for deep geologic time, which continues to tick today.
Such large-scale wonders have never entirely staved off hard times in the region, however. Luigi and Caterina Prestini grew up in Besano in the late nineteenth century, but they had to cross the border to Zurich, Switzerland, for steady work. Faithful to the pull of home, Caterina returned to Besano to bear both of their sons: first, Battista, in 1905, then Leno, in 1906. The extra mouths did not help the family’s financial squeeze, and the following year Luigi joined the stream of northern Italian men who left their families to seek jobs in America. Like many of his cohorts, he carried artisanal skills along with him and soon found work cutting stone in the granite quarries of Barre, Vermont. Within a year, he sent word for Caterina and the boys to join him.
Even back in those days, it was known in the quarries that few stonecutters worked past the age of forty because the rock dust caused silicosis. Luigi’s brother, Federico, had escaped that fate by moving all the way across the continent to eastern Washington, where he established a stump ranch on Half Moon Prairie, just north of Spokane. Federico’s letters to his family in Vermont were so enthusiastic that in 1911, Luigi and Caterina decided to join him. Within a couple of years they drifted farther north to Clayton, where Luigi Prestini signed on as a terra-cotta finisher for Washington Brick and Lime.
The lake-bed clay deposits upon which the company was founded reflect a much younger geologic history than the snarling reptiles of Besano. Only fifteen million years ago, the extensive alluvial plain that surrounds Clayton lay on the bottom of Lake Latah. Between volcanic events that saw vast sheets of lava ooze into the area, the edges of this Miocene lake supported a mixed hardwood forest that would not look out of place in the southeastern United States today—everything from ancestral bald cypress, black oak, maple, alder, birch, sycamore, and willow trees to flowering hydrangea shrubs and scuppernong-grape vines. Many of the leaves of this flora that drifted into Lake Latah were preserved in layers of clay that range in color from yellow to blue- and white-tinged gray. This pastel-colored mudstone is composed of small clay particles, which over all that time were never cooked or pressured into harder rock.
A savvy prospector uncovered fossil leaves when he drilled holes with a hand auger to obtain the clay samples in 1893. After testing the properties of the flexible mud, he ignored the ancient forest and began to build a business making brick. His factory and the budding town of Clayton burned to the ground in 1908, but Washington Brick and Lime stubbornly rose from the ashes under the direction of a new owner, A. B. Fosseen.
In a search to understand the subtle variations of his basic resource, Fosseen sank new pits across the breadth of the Latah clay deposits. The startling palette that emerged from one pit had been known by local tribal people and settlers for years but never put to commercial use. Soon dubbed the Paint Pot, its new colors entered the market as specialty pigments of dark orange, ocher, and blood red. But the most valuable excavation carried Fosseen’s own first initials, and formed the key ingredient in his mix for the baked earth products known by their ancient Italian name of
terra-cotta.
When a state geologist visited the A. B. Pit as part of an industrial survey, he drizzled some of its bluish-gray clay between his fingers. The expert approved of the A. B.’s uniform consistency and fine grain size but found sections to be so plastic and sticky that he wondered if shrinkage might be a problem in the kilns. He attributed a slightly harsh touch to small particles of white mica and noted that their color shone through after the clay was thoroughly dried. This was the kind of raw material that could manufacture success, and indeed, over the next three decades, Fosseen cannily developed a reputation for shipping practical terra-cotta sewer pipe and beautifully crafted decorative panels.
It took skilled craftsmen to create a terra-cotta industry in the wilds of eastern Washington, and many of Washington Brick and Lime’s specialists came from northern Italy. That integral relationship was reflected in a 1909 death announcement, published as both the town and the business were bouncing back from their destructive fire. “Battista Giovanni Ponfatto, a native of Italy, 36 years of age, has died of Bright’s disease,” the notice ran. “Ponfatto was an artificer in terra-cotta, and came from Italy especially to take a position with the Washington Brick and Lime Manufacturing Company at Clayton. He has a wife and four children in Italy.” As Luigi Prestini and his family slipped into this world, filling the slack of someone else’s sudden departure, steady demand for ceramic sewer pipe and decorative terra-cotta was just beginning to take hold in the Northwest. Both processes required an organic knowledge of the soil, an eye for detail, and the expertise that could only be developed through long hours of practice with the tools of the trade.
