The Trail of Gold and Silver

by Duane A. Smith

  Many Coloradans hung onto hope, encouraged as a few new discoveries were made and an older district or two revived. An example of the latter was California Gulch. Despite Hollister’s ominous assessment, a few people kept placering there, while searching for the original gold deposits that they were sure must be in the nearby hills. Success rewarded their efforts with the opening of the Printer Boy Mine and its rich gold ore. A mini-rush ensued in 1868, as what was left of Oro City moved up California Gulch to near its head and settled in again. At the end of the road from Denver, it languished in the backwaters of Colorado mining.

  Even with the new development, though, tiny Oro City did not promise a bright future for the territory, and neither did any of the other abandoned or nearly abandoned sites scattered about the mountains. They were too small to command attention for more than a brief moment. What kept Colorado going was the belief that not all the rich districts had been discovered nor all the rich mines opened. Somewhere in the mountains, the mother lode still beckoned prospectors, miners, and investors.

  Interestingly, one myth was perpetuated even in the government documents. In a report that covered 1866, James Taylor, while admitting that Colorado mining took place “at a great cost of time, labor, capital, and skill,” went on to say: “The testimony is quite general that the mine widens and grows more productive of gold at its lower stages.” In his next report, Taylor was more emphatic. “A peculiarity of the Colorado gold veins is that they are invariably found richer the deeper they are sunk upon. This rule seems to be without exception and in no instance is a vein lost except by a break-off in the adjoining formation.”5 That old adage might prove true if—and it was a major if —the milling and smelting problems could be solved. The future of Colorado mining clearly hung in the balance, and those both within and without the territory knew it.

  Even local papers joined in the criticism. Central City’s Daily Colorado Herald (January 17, 1868) stated bluntly that 1867 “was a very bad year.” It observed, “We were overwhelmed with processes of all kinds and denominations, warranted as a contemporary observed, to save 102% of the precious metal.” In the October 14, 1868, issue, the editor blasted: “Colorado is a mining country cursed by processes.” In one notable case, the Lyon process of lead liquation was adopted “when there was no lead in the region,” making “the furnace not . . . worth the bricks used in its construction.”

  In 1867, the federal government started publishing reports on the western “Mineral Resources.” One of the major subjects was the ore reduction crisis:

  The successful reduction of auriferous rock is a problem of the future. Quartz mining in Colorado has hitherto been unsuccessful from the failure of numerous processes and methods of desulphurization and amalgamation [report for 1866]. The process-mania, commencing in 1864 and lasting till 1867, was one of the main causes which damaged the reputations of the mines to such a degree that the country was nearly ruined by the reaction. Upon the first failure of the stamp-mills, people came to the conclusion that the ores must be roasted before the gold could be amalgamated. One invention for this purpose followed another; desulphurization became the Abracadabra of the new alchemists; and millions of dollars were wasted [in] speculations, based on the sweeping claims of perfect success put forward by deluded or deluding proprietors of patents [report for 1869].6

  Commissioner Raymond spent a great deal of time chastising Coloradans for that “Abracadabra,” their “processes, past and present.” Six pages recounted the sorry details of the decade: “not practical”; “it is supposed that the process is abandoned”; “[its principal legacy] was it was neither metal-lurgically nor economically successful on a large scale”; “it is difficult to reconcile the history of this invention with the hypothesis of honesty on the part of the inventor”; the process resulted in “serious loss of precious metal in the slag.”

  Raymond took not only the mines but also the miners to task for the problems. In Raymond’s opinion, “[t]he miners of Colorado were inexperienced in deep mining, and they made sad work with it at first. Even now there are few well-opened mines in the Territory.” He gave advice that everyone should have heeded: “Mining is a business, full, at best, of difficulties and risks”; “it is the part of wisdom to secure at the outset as many of the chances as human foresight can perceive, or human skill control. When a man engages in this business with all the chances against him, it requires no prophet to foretell the result.”

  What were those chances? Bad management—“scientific men without practice and the practical men without science,” “honest men without capacity,” and “smart men without honesty”—made “stupendous mistakes of judgment.” Greedy or naive eastern speculators, combined with “bad management, will ruin any mine.” Inexperienced milling men and poor reduction methods did not help. Raymond rated bad management as the worst, though, saying that it “has done more to injure mining in Colorado than all other causes together.”

  Nevertheless, his report was not entirely negative. Raymond added that 1869 “marks the new era of mining in Colorado. The old spirit of idleness and speculation has passed away. The new spirit of labor and economy has sprung into power. It is beginning to be recognized that the men to develop the resources of this country are the men who live in it.”7

  Raymond’s general assessment was on the mark, along with an earlier 1867 report that also held out some hope. The times were changing: Ore had been freighted across the plains and forwarded to the world’s leading smelter center, Swansea in Wales, where “it might be experimented upon by the skilled experience employed there.”

  The man who sent the ore, and who also saved Colorado mining, was Nathaniel Hill, a respected and successful chemistry teacher at Brown University. In 1864, the thirty-two-year-old professor had been hired to travel to Colorado to look into mining properties that some Massachusetts and Rhode Island investors had purchased during the gold bubble. Concerned about why their properties were not producing the wealth they had assumed would soon be theirs, they contacted Hill for help.

  The investors thought Hill, who had a reputation as a “man able to solve practical problems at little expense,” would find the answers to their worries. With some reluctance about leaving his family and his college position, but with interest in what seemed an intriguing problem—refractory ores—Hill agreed to go, after faithfully promising his wife to “never let an occasion pass without writing a line at least.” Off he went to Denver, by stage, in late May of 1864, and thereafter into the foothills and mountains. He kept his wife apprised of what he was doing and what he saw, in the process providing an excellent look at a depressed Colorado Territory.

  Central City is in a deep ravine. Mountains more than a mile high surround it on all sides. The gulch is so narrow that if you go into the backyards of the houses, you are in danger of falling down the chimney (June 23, 1864).

  The chapter of my own experience since I last wrote, is short and not particularly full of interest. I spent the time in Central City & surrounding district, in examining mines, and in becoming acquainted with the owners of mines (June 30, 1864).

  He then went off with a party of men, including former governor William Gilpin, to the San Luis Valley, looking at mines along the way. Although he enjoyed the people and the opportunity to see “Mexican culture,” Hill was not particularly impressed with the valley or nearby mining prospects. He then traveled to Boulder and wrote his “dear wife” that “Boulder City is the most Yankee of any settlement I have seen in Colorado.” After an “exhausting climb in the mountains,” he examined some ore samples. Back in Denver, Hill found himself in the midst of the Indian war that had closed the plains to travel. Reassuring his wife that all was well, he returned to Central City and eventually journeyed on to Buckskin Joe.

  Hill was becoming fascinated with Colorado and its mining problems. He probably shocked his wife when he wrote, on September 4, “I bought a house and lot for $1800 in Central” and “have taken bonds of much val
uable property. But they have cost me nothing and will of course be of no account unless I sell the property.”

  Friday night brought us to Fair Play, a small mining town, near Buckskin Joe. A place of some note as a mining district. . . . I am now prepared to drive my business to a close. I will be prepared to leave in the third week of this month, unless I accept an offer to go back to Buckskin to examine a mine (October 3, 1864).

  Returning to Central City, Hill assured his wife:

  Tomorrow I am going to a section of the country, 10 or 12 miles from here, to examine mining property. It is the last trip I will make from this section.

  The journey across the Plain does not trouble me hard as it is. I have “roughed it” to use a Colorado expression, so much, that I am sufficiently toughened for anything (October 16, 1864).8

  Completely fascinated and challenged by the problems of mining and smelting, Hill resigned his professorship and returned to Central City the next year. For him, this was no “seat of the pants” effort; he studied the reduction problem from a scientific viewpoint. Although Hill rarely discussed the local mining situation with his wife, he included some detail in a letter during his 1865 visit. On June 7, he seemed in a pessimistic mood: “I felt quite blue on arriving here and finding business so dull.” He elaborated:

  Mining matters are extremely dull at present. But few of the mills are running and every thing seems very quiet. To a stranger it tends to produce a want of confidence as to the future. But the fact is wages remain the same that they were when gold was worth twice as much as it is now. There is no mining country in the world that will stand 5.00 a day for labor and the product gold at par. That is particularly true in a place where but about one fourth of the gold in the ore is saved.

  Hill felt that “two things are necessary to make mining here highly successful”: labor at about $2.50 a day and a method of treating the ores “to save at least 50% of the gold.”

  Hill further noted that “The conditions which now tend to check operations does [sic] not seem to depress the price of good mining property. Such property is held as high as at anytime since my first visit.” He had purchased stock, “now worth more than the estimated value.” Considering all he had written, Hill may have worried that his wife was becoming concerned. He assured her: “Our mining interests are extensive and our ores are rich and with the management we have adopted, we are in my opinion, certain to realize handsome profits at an early day.” All in all, “on analyzing matters I do not find any cause of discouragement.”

  What he had to find out in Central City was what process might work and, if it did, how to make it profitable. After trying and failing with a stamp mill, Hill returned to Providence to study ore reduction. To him, it seemed the answer lay with the “Swansea Process.” The answer indeed rested there, and in February 1866 Hill left New York for Wales, where he toured the smelting plants and discussed his Colorado problems with metallurgists there.

  In 1866, Hill and his partners decided to embark upon the costly and time-consuming process of shipping ore to Swansea; their gamble paid off when he returned to England and saw that the Welsh process worked. The Rocky Mountain News (June 28) proudly announced that the ore tested had “yielded astonishingly.” Back in the States, Hill and his partners organized the Boston and Colorado Smelting Company before he returned to Gilpin County. After moving his family to Central, Hill purchased four acres near Black Hawk, a little over a mile from his home. A summer, fall, and early winter of hard work found the smelter ready to “blow in,” in February 1868. The Daily Colorado Herald (July 10, 1868), pleased finally to have some good news, noted that “his reduction works are running night and day.”

  It took a while to work out all the problems, but Hill was on the right track. Initially, the matte containing gold and silver had to be sent to Swansea, but the reduction to matte could be done in his Black Hawk works. Despite complaints about a complicated price schedule and overly high charges, the inability of the process to work profitably on anything except high-grade ore, and the method being too slow and unsatisfactory, Hill was about to revitalize Colorado’s mining industry almost single-handedly.

  Rossiter Raymond did not criticize his efforts. In his 1870 report, he wrote about Hill’s works. “The success of Professor Hill’s smelting works . . . shows that the policy of consolidating metallurgical operations other than those of stamps and pans, is equally wise and necessary.” The works “are owned by an eastern company and superintended by Professor N. P. Hill, formerly of Brown University, to whose excellent business management their success is largely due.”9

  Colorado mining and smelting were slowly making progress, but various other issues constantly recurred. Despite the rushes to Georgia, California, Nevada, Colorado, and places in between, the United States had no national mining law. As in 1859, each mining district had simply addressed its situation by creating district laws. This proved an easy and democratic way to solve a host of problems. Nevertheless, local rules were sometimes unclear, with vague terminology and unclear word choices. Records were kept haphazardly and sometimes even lost; the backup plan of relying on an old-timer’s memory was not the best. Further, rules differed from district to district and sometimes conflicted, even though the Colorado Territorial Legislature had recognized the district laws in 1861. All this meant trouble for miners, investors, districts, and territorial mining in general and led to legal problems and expense—particularly unwelcome in the troubled Colorado mining times.

  That the United States needed a national mining law was recognized in the 1850s, and a movement for it gained momentum in the 1860s, particularly after the war ended. United States Senator William Stewart, a Nevada miner and skilled mining lawyer, led the successful fight to gain a statute for lode claims in July 1866. The preamble stated:

  All minerals lands of the United States, surveyed and unsurveyed, are laid open to “all citizens of the United States, and to those who have declared their intention to become such, subject to statutory regulations,” and also “to the local customs or rules of miners in the several mining districts not in conflict with the laws of the United States.”

  The act itself contained three significant provisions. First, it sanctioned prospecting and mining on the public domain, both retroactively and for the future. Second, it established the procedure for obtaining a United States patent for mining claims. Third, it legalized local “laws, customs, or rules of miners of the district” for such things as size and description of a claim and land used for milling purposes.10

  Of course, the new act did not resolve all the miners’ concerns, but it was a good start. One obvious omission was resolved in 1870 when an act regarding placer claims was passed, though with placer mining on a downhill trend in Colorado, the oversight had not proven burdensome. As of 1870, prospectors and miners had a uniform code to follow wherever their wanderings took them.

  Rossiter Raymond pleaded strongly for the public and Washington to become involved in another issue: widespread timbering and the resultant disappearance of trees. A related problem was the destruction wrought by fire, either unintentionally started or deliberately set by persons attempting to make prospecting easier. Raymond used as an example Central City, “the oldest and most populous gold-mining center of Colorado,” where the “consumption of wood for fuel is very large.” As nearby wood sources disappeared, the woodmen moved further away, and the cost per cord moved upward with them, soaring from two dollars to ten dollars. The lumbermen were also robbing “Peter to pay Paul” because “they are robbing and skinning districts that may at any day require their own timber.” This “reckless and disastrous” practice, Raymond stated strongly, became “one of the worst abuses attendant upon the settlement of the mining regions and other portions of the West.”

  “Where is all this to end?” he asked. Then he answered his own question: “And the answer of the denuded hill-sides, of the dismal wastes upon the mountain slopes, with their millions of charred tr
unks and ghostly whitened branches, is terribly suggestive.”

  He saw no easy fix. The government policies had failed, and the territorial acts were no more successful. His solution was to “put the lands in market, and sell them to settlers.” “Such a plan will soon put a stop to the waste of timber. The timber once in the hands of private parties, precautions will be taken to guard it against destruction by fire; none will be cut down that is not needed; and once down, it will all be used up.”11

  Raymond spoke to the future, however. Pioneering Americans considered natural resources theirs to use as they wished. That had been their ancestors’ right since settlement came to these shores; further, the development of the West benefited Washington and the entire country.

  Uncle Sam’s generosity overflowed during these years. Ease, comfort, and speed of transportation had been concerns of pioneers and later folks trekking west to the promised land. By the time of the Pike’s Peak rush, the answer was clear, if far away: the railroad, which provided the cheapest, safest, fastest, and easiest way to travel that Americans had ever known.

  Agitation had roiling for years about a transcontinental line, but the tension between North and South had prevented a final decision as to the route. During the war, with the Southerners out of the Union, a route was selected across the central Great Plains and over the mountains through the South Pass region. The task was too great for individuals or companies to subsidize, so Washington chipped in money and free land. The Central Pacific Railroad (CP) would build east from San Francisco and the Union Pacific west from Omaha.