The Trail of Gold and Silver

by Duane A. Smith

  San Francisco’s Mining and Scientific Press was not so sure about gold and silver, either. Its editor worried about “fearfully exaggerated” reports of ore yielding from $2,000 to $5,000 a ton, and even up to $8,000. The MSP finally grudgingly admitted that San Juan might draw off the drifting crowd from older districts: “It will have one good effect at least, as it will cause easier times in the old camps with high wages and plenty to do.”5 The MSP’s national competitor, the Engineering & Mining Journal, was more cautiously optimistic, but wisely warned readers of its December 2, 1873, issue, “There is a large field for prospecting, but none should attempt the trip during the winter.”

  Of more immediate importance was the question of what to do now that prospectors and miners were trespassing on Ute land—a development the Utes understandably did not like one bit. The Indian Bureau initially tried to deny access to the oncoming whites. The Central City Register blasted the attempt: “We can but regret that this decision is adverse to the development of so desirable a region.” The News, on April 20, 1870, wholeheartedly agreed: “Our opinion exactly!” So did other Colorado newspapers.

  It became a classic case of a mining rush quickly resolving the Native American/white question. As the “Ute question” came to the forefront, Colorado newspapers took the issue up and “demanded” that the region be opened, so that it could be developed to benefit the territory and the nation. Congress created a commission in 1872 to negotiate with the Utes. They failed to reach a satisfactory agreement, and the government threatened again to send in troops. A second effort, in September 1873, was more successful, and an agreement was negotiated under which the Utes ceded 4 million acres of mountainous mining land in return for $25,000 a year.

  The miners received virtually all they had asked, yet trouble lay just beneath the surface. Not everyone agreed on the interpretation of the agreement. The Utes believed they had the right to hunt in the mountains, as they had for centuries, and the whites believed otherwise. Furthermore, Ute land still surrounded much of the San Juans. Neither side was truly satisfied, and the racial conflict that underlay much of the conflict still festered. The Rocky Mountain News warned in a bold headline: “NOTICE TO ALL PERSONS GOING TO THE SAN JUAN MINES:” do not “trespass upon any portion of the Ute Reservation by passing over or settling upon same” (April 23, 1874).

  The San Juans, and the Ute land, were still rather isolated. In other areas Coloradans were welcoming some developments that would literally change their lives, and none was more popular than the arrival of the railroad.

  The glorious day finally dawned when the Denver Pacific’s first train at last chugged into Denver on June 22, 1870. Notably, the city’s own efforts had brought this long-awaited relief. The territory’s cup overflowed when a second railroad, the Kansas Pacific, hurried into Denver in August. The jubilant “Queen City” now had two outlets to the rest of the nation and the promised railroad millennium was at last at hand. Now that it had become a railroad hub, no Colorado, or other central Rocky Mountain, city would be able to challenge the “Queen” successfully.

  These, however, were standard-gauge trains, running on rails 4 feet 8½ inches wide, which were not really suitable for the mountains, because of the width of the rails, the size of the cars, their problems in going up steep grades, and the cost of construction. The mountain mining communities and districts, therefore, would not receive the much-anticipated benefits of the railroad unless something could be done.

  Rossiter Raymond understood the importance of railroads to mining. In his 1870 mining report, he emphatically stated, “The erection of smelting-work for the treatment of Colorado ores is a matter closely connected with the question of railway transportation.” He went on to say, “The art of mining may be said to have given birth to the railway system.” The mountains, however, had always presented problems because of the “unusual difficulties of grade and curve, and thus enhancing the cost of construction, while they offer in return a comparatively small amount of remunerative traffic.” The answer, as Raymond saw it, was narrow gauge.6

  That solution was nearly a reality when the two standard railroads steamed into Denver that summer. Soon a narrow-gauge railroad, only three feet wide, would be under construction. Narrow gauge obviated the problems of the standard gauge: It could climb steeper grades, go around sharper curves, and cost less to build. The tradeoff was smaller engines that could pull fewer cars, which were also smaller than the passenger and freight cars of their standard-gauge rivals.

  The man of vision who put all this in motion was a Civil War veteran and experienced railroad man, William Jackson Palmer. With all the transcontinental lines building east to west, Palmer saw an opportunity. His simple plan was to construct a north-to-south railroad from Denver, eventually to reach Mexico, with feeder lines west into the mountains and east to the agricultural plains. Unlike his rivals, he did not take land from the government, but planned to make money by building communities along his route, in addition to passenger and freight traffic. Palmer selected narrow gauge because of its flexibility in mountains and canyons, and because it was familiar to his British investors.

  In the fall of 1871, the Denver & Rio Grande reached Palmer’s new community of Colorado Springs and then marched southward, until the crash of 1873 and subsequent depression forced construction to stop. Meanwhile, the D&RG reached the southern coal fields, and coal mining came of age, a long-needed development for Colorado and mining. Although Palmer had not as yet reached any hard-rock mining community, his railroad was poised to bring a better tomorrow.

  A railroad boom was at hand. The Colorado Central out of Golden had once hoped to join the Union Pacific line, but the Denver Pacific beat it there, long before it finally arrived in 1877. Meanwhile, the Colorado Central turned its attention to a more attainable and lucrative idea: Build up along Clear Creek Canyon to the mining districts nestled in the mountains. One branch reached Black Hawk and another Georgetown in 1877, with Central City gaining a connection a year later. Appropriate speeches, happy people, and perchance a gold or silver spike to honor the occasion greeted the arrival of railheads and lines everywhere. Other rail lines were already in the planning stage, and mining people eagerly awaited their coming.

  This proved to be just the start. As railroads reached out to tap the wealth of the mining districts, both prospered. Cheap transportation provided the long-awaited key to mining success and prosperity, and to the emergence of a regional smelting center. With rail access, low-grade ore could be moved economically, supplies could arrive regardless of the weather, and travel was simplified. The cost of living too seemed destined to go down.

  While construction boomed on the east side of the mountains, the Western Slopers could only fretfully look forward to the “glorious day” when they could hear a train whistle. The Denver, South Park and Pacific had plans of going there, but the crash of 1873 stopped that expansion also.

  Two important matters about the future of Colorado had thus been addressed: Railroad connections promised a better future, and the “Ute question” had been partially resolved. Despite these blessings, though, Colorado mining still faced some technological problems in the early 1870s.

  Even with the fanfare over Nathaniel Hill’s Black Hawk smelter, miners soon complained. They had long wanted a good local smelting plant and “higher prices for their ore.” The cost of reduction seemed too high, the saving of gold and silver too little, and the price paid for other metals recovered too low. When railroads finally brought a large area within the economic orbit of Hill’s smelter, in theory smelting charges should have fallen. Hill was forced to defend his practices on numerous occasions during the decade, despite making almost yearly upgrades to his methods and equipment. Even as he continued to improve and enlarge his Black Hawk works, he encountered his own problems, including the isolated location, the cost of fuel, and the absence of the flux needed to make his process work successfully.

  Improvements in mining came in a som
ewhat spasmodic fashion. Steam-powered, compressed-air drills began to replace hand drilling in some mines where the familiar single- or double-jack drill had been the order of the day. There was skill and pride in being an expert single-jack miner or, with a partner, double-jacking a “round” in preparation for blasting. That professional skill would be negated by a machine. Despite some miners’ refusal to work with power drills, and their complaints about danger, dust, and lost jobs, they could not stop its introduction. Rossiter Raymond, in 1870, put his finger on why: Drills “accomplish from three or four times as much as can be done by hand for the same cost, and in much less time.” The tradeoff was more rock dust and an eventual health issue for many miners: “miners’ con” [consumption], or silicosis.

  Drills were not the only steam-powered innovation. In the larger and more productive mines, steam hoists moved miners up and down in cages; ore came up and supplies went down shafts; and, increasingly, powerful steam engines pumped water out of the mines. Safety cages, which released hooks that bit into timbers along the shaft walls if the cable broke, added a protective feature. Timbering methods also improved, but the granite of the Colorado Rockies afforded natural protection from cave-ins that many other districts lacked. Dynamite, or giant powder, eventually replaced the less-effective black powder for blasting, but the miners needed to be particularly careful if it froze.

  The high elevations, isolation, and long trails to some mines led Colorado mine owners to begin using tramways, or trams, by the 1870s. Developed in California, trams proved an answer to a Colorado miner’s prayer. They were like ski lifts, with buckets in place of chairs, running on cables stretched between towers. Some could be run by gravity, with loaded buckets going down bringing empty ones back up; others used steam, or later electric, power to operate.

  The Georgetown area, with its high mountain mines, readily adopted trams. They eased the ever-present local concern of getting ore out, bringing supplies in, and transporting men. Though vulnerable to snow slides, costly to build, and sometimes difficult to maintain, trams were a common mine feature throughout the rest of the century. An amazed public read about one tram at the Stevens Mine, high above Silver Plume in the December 1870 issue of Overland Monthly:

  But what is that, a thousand feet up the cliff? A house—ye gods! A boarding-house! The glass shows us fragments of a zig-zag trail, interspersed with ladders, where the precipices are otherwise impassable. Now we see at the foot of the cliff another house, and between the two fine lines, like a spider’s web, stretch through a thousand feet of air. That is the somewhat celebrated Stevens mine; the men, lumber, provisions, etc., are all carried up, and the ore is all brought down, by means of one of the ingenious wire tram-ways, becoming common in Colorado. How the mine was ever discovered I cannot say—someone must have “lit on it.”

  The Stevens later gained a bit of reflected fame when one of its owners, George Armstrong Custer, died at the Little Big Horn.

  When it came to innovations and inventions that touched directly on their professional and personal experience, miners in the nineteenth century tended to be a conservative lot. From the start of Colorado mining, there had always been self-proclaimed mining engineers. A positive trend came with the increasing presence of university-trained mining engineers, who had learned from books instead the “school of hard knocks.” Until the 1860s, Americans desiring to gain a mining education had had to travel to Europe, as no facility was available at home. In the 1860s, this began to change, with (among others) the Columbia School of Mines and the University of Michigan graduating their first classes in 1867, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doing so the next year. Seven other institutions joined them in the 1870s.

  The Colorado School of Mines became the first state mining school established as a separate institution, with mining instruction commencing in 1873; the first student graduated nine years later. The reason for the lag in graduation reflected the education of the era. The “school seems to have been well equipped for the time, for laboratory and field work, but apparently had difficulty in securing students who were adequately prepared to undertake work of collegiate grade.” Some students only wanted to take a few courses dealing with specific mining topics, and did not plan to pursue a degree program. Nevertheless, over the 1860s and 1870s a “great advance [was] made in the facilities afforded by American schools and colleges” in mining education.7

  As mining engineer Herbert Hoover later wrote, “It was the American universities . . . [that] lifted [mining engineering] into the realm of application of science, wider learning in the humanities with the higher ethics of a profession ranking with law, medicine and the clergy.” “For all the world,” mining historian Clark Spence wrote, “the American West served as a kind of gigantic post graduate school of mines.” Colorado stood in the forefront of this “mining revolution.”8

  The effects of the educational advances would be felt nearer the turn of the century. Great reluctance on the part of the mining community to acknowledge the skills of these college-trained mining graduates held back their full impact on the industry for a while. Trained and experienced miners were more readily accepted, and none were better than the Cornish. Thanks to centuries of honed skills, they benefited Colorado mining as few others had done. “Cousin Jacks” were skilled hard-rock miners who migrated from Cornwall to places throughout the world as the industry declined in their homeland. They had, it was said, a “nose for ore,” and they brought with them invaluable experience in drilling, timbering, dewatering, hoisting, and blasting. These Cornishmen brought better equipment as well, such as the Cornish pump. Cousin Jacks also tended to recruit their countrymen to the mines in which they were working, which explains why they migrated to Central City, then on to Caribou, and then throughout Colorado.

  Considering the dangers, noises, and strange occurrences that took place while working underground, it was no surprise that the Cousin Jacks carried superstitions with them. “Tommy Knockers,” those invisible folk who inhabited mines, for instance, needed to be treated carefully and considerately, to ensure that they gave warnings before a mine disaster or help in finding ore bodies. Proper consideration might include leaving part of one’s lunch for them; after all, if one did not, tools might mysteriously disappear, rocks might fall on miners’ heads, and leads to good ore might vanish.

  The Cornish might have been some of the best miners around, but they also had occasional lapses from virtue. Some owners suspected that they “high-graded” ore, or stole to supplement their income. It was said that a “mine could not be successfully worked without them or make a profit with them.”

  Even with the evolution of mining techniques, the advances in education, and some improvement in the smelting industry, the pace of developments within the industry did not please everyone. Rossiter Raymond was one who was not enamored of the territory’s efforts:

  Whether Colorado ores are really as rebellious as in past times they have been supposed to be, or whether this Territory is supposed to be a legitimate and proper field for the trial of every new and outrageous idea that is hatched by would-be metallurgists, it is certainly true that the metallurgical industry here grows slowly and does not show anything like the advance that is necessary to keep pace with the increasing ore-product.9

  In the same 1870 report, Raymond expressed concern about Gilpin County having “about seventy stamp mills with more than 1,300 stamps. Probably half of this number of stamps have been in operation more or less steadily.” He called for a proper system of mine ownership and management. Gilpin County was upset with such “negativism.” When Raymond criticized Clear Creek County silver mines production and mills, locals rose up in their defense: “[T]he commissioner was accused of ‘croaking,’ and ‘bearing’ the silver mines of Colorado.” These East-versus-West debates over mining dated from the early days and continued well into the future.

  While critics were vocal about Hill and his smelter, miners and investors had even more c
oncerns and complaints about outlying, smaller smelters that tried to resolve district problems. Generally, either the process chosen did not work well on local ores, the overenthusiastic smelter owner misjudged the amount of ore available, or the cost simply ran too high to make it profitable to work the ore that was available. Even as close as it was to Hill’s smelter, Georgetown, for example, became a center of experimentation for silver smelting. Both locals and outsiders spent huge amounts of money and time in trial after trial, but each time their hopes and their investors’ dreams of profits were dashed.

  Not every innovation proved a blessing. For instance, “booming” gained some popularity in Summit County where placer mining was declining steadily. This environmental horror involved storing water behind a dam and then letting it flood over low-grade placer ground. The water was then channeled through a flume, which, it was hoped, would capture some gold. The procedure required few workers, worked “otherwise worthless claims,” and was touted as “labor saving.” Nonetheless, it left behind an ecological mess.

  That was not the only environmental problem that appeared in the 1870s. Black Hawk had severe smoke problems, thanks to Hill’s smelter. The Boston and Colorado Smelter roasted heaps of ore for six weeks, giving off smoke containing “considerable arsenic.” Besides silencing the “song birds,” the smoke potentially endangered everyone in its area.

  The smoke also supplied “the cloud hitherto lacking in this morning’s spotless sky.” The “immense smelting works fill the atmosphere with coal dust and darkness. One mill at our right is sending forth volumes of blackness from seventeen huge smoke stacks.” Black Hawk smelled much like its counterpart in Wales had when Hill visited there a decade ago. Residents were used to it, visitors were not. A correspondent to the Engineering and Mining Journal noted “villainous vapors, choking gases, cough-compelling odors.” Other visitors recorded distinct impressions of the pungent odor that drifted down the canyons: “The road enters a gulch filled with sulphurous vapors, highly suggestive of the infernal regions.” Another account described it this way: “What a glorious time pilgrims had in struggling with these sulphurous fumes, as the lumbering heavy coach dragged its way at a snail’s pace up the steep grade, past huge piles of roasting pyrites!”10