Gold mining

Alfred Packer – Cannibal Of The Old West

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In the state of Colorado
In the year of seventy-four
They crossed the San Juan Mountains
Growing hungry to the core.
Their guide was Alferd Packer
And they trusted him too long:
For his character was weak
And his appetite was strong.

This is the first stanza to The Ballad Of Alfred Packer, by Phil Ochs.

I include it here because I was checking the This Day In History Calendar and I came across a rather grisly story of the old west.  In the late 1860s and early 70s, Alfred Packer was a Rocky Mountain prospector who supplemented his income by serving as a guide.  In the winter of 1873-74, Packer started out with a party of 21 men from Bingham Canyon, Utah headed for the gold fields in the Breckenridge, Colorado area.  Several months later Packer showed up, alone, at the Los Pinos Indian Agency.

 To read about what happened in the interim, check out this link: Alfred Packer – Maneater

And to see the rest of the lyrics to the ballad, check this link:  The Ballad of Alfred Packer

Before and After a Boom

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I absolutely love this picture. This is just the kind of image of that can transport my brain to another era, like falling into the rabbit hole.  Doesn’t it just come alive? Makes me feel like I’m standing right there on the edge of town…a tiny new community popping up in the middle of no where…which is exactly what happened in this historic town of Bodie, California. I came across this picture while looking up info on Montana mining towns, but I marked the site because I was really struck by the contrast in pictures, like I”d been pulled into the bright shiny start of a new gold rush community and then dropped into the aftermath following the boom by the picture below.

Here’s Bodie from another angle, the ghost town I’d expect to see nowadays with a skeletal reminder of its booming heydays. Can you see the church?  Kind of  spooky the difference lighting and angle can make. Bodie was a Quintessential boom town, making a sleepy start in 1859 when prospector W. S. Bodey discovered some gold. He died during a freak blizzard in November of that year, so the town was named in his honor…sort of.  A painter accidentally lettered the stable sign to read “Bodie Stables”, and the new spelling was adopted by the town.

Bodie remained an obscure little mining community with a handful of residents until 1876. A large deposit of gold-bearing ore was discovered and by 1880 the population had exploded to nearly 8,000.  The town grew to more than 2,000 buildings, including two banks, a brass band, railroad, miner’s and mechanic’s unions, several newspapers, and a jail. Over the years Bodie produced nearly $34 million worth of ore and bullion.

At its peak 65 saloons lined Main Street, which was a mile long. Murders, shootouts, barroom brawls, and stagecoach holdups were regular occurrences. “Badman from Bodie” described the town’s rambunctious inhabitants, earning the community a reputation for violence that rivaled Tombstone, Deadwood and Dodge City. Eventually the gold went the way of water in these hills…and the booming town dried up along with it.

Here’s an interesting tidbit I found on Bodie History.com:

The Founder Has His Day

“Bodie’s confirmed status as a gold-producing community inspired its historically-minded citizens to wonder about the unfortunate prospector who had succumbed in a snowstorm some 20 years earlier and become the town’s namesake. They located his shallow grave and dug up his bones. One area pioneer said the remains were those of William S. Bodey from New York, but his presumed widow in Poughkeepsie said his first name was really “Wakeman.” The New York Times printed “Waterman.” Despite uncertainty, which continues to this day, citizens organized a grand funeral procession and formally interred the bones in the town cemetery. But they failed to mark the new grave and quickly forgot its location. “

Still, it’s the spark  of life in the first picture that really takes me back.  Do you feel it?  Or maybe that picture really makes me believe in GHOST towns 😉

Caroline Fyffe: Eureka!

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There’s gold in them thar hills…somewhere!  Throughout the history of the West, stories are told of lost, forgotten and misplaced mines.  Many have been sitting undisturbed for years, shrouding their boundless wealth, just waiting to be re-discovered.  Gold and silver-bearing regions are awash with stories of miners losing their way; Indians killing off the miners and then hiding the markings; flash floods destroying the lay of the land; earthquakes changing the rock formations that helped a miner find his way.  
Some of these accounts, of course, are surely yarns, just like the “fish-stories” told by sailors.  But many are the true tale of mines “gone missing” to the poor fools that lost them.  In Arizona alone, there are thought to be at least twenty such sites.  Can you imagine how many the vast American West could be hiding?  

The naysayers can scoff, but in 1959 the Burro Mountains gave up their treasure of the long-lost Spanish mines, twenty-five miles northwest of Lordsburg, New Mexico. And in 1965, Arizona’s “Lost Coconimo” mine was found in the state’s Sycamore Canyon.  

If you’re feeling lucky and have been bitten by wanderlust, you might want to check out a few of the accountings I’ve listed of some of the most famous or colorful lost mines:

—Lost Blue Bucket at the Malheur River in eastern Oregon.  The date was 1846 when a wagon train pulled into camp on the middle fork of the Malheur.  Some pioneers, finding some stones in a creek bed, filled a hand-made blue papier-mâché bucket. Later they learned their finding was gold. Status: still lost.

—Lost Rhoades in the Uintah Mountains, northeastern Utah.  This mine was said to be owned and strictly guarded by the Mormons.  Only Brigham Young and a handful of elders and two other members of the Rhoades family knew of its location.  In 1877 the Indians placed a ban on visits to the ledge where the mine was located, because it was on the Uintah Reservation.  In 1905, Caleb Rhoads, the last living person to know its whereabouts, took the secret to his grave and the “bank” of the Mormon Church was lost, so to speak.  He left a crude map with only Rock Creek and Moon Lake as landmarks, but others have been unable to find its location. Status: still lost.

—Lost Padre, somewhere in the 113,809 square miles of Arizona.   This mine, originally owned by Indians, was taken over by Spanish missionaries.  After the California gold strike of 1849, the Southwest had a surge of hopeful miners looking for their Eureka.  To keep their mine secret, the padres sealed it off. It’s been re-discovered several times, but with all the lucky finders ending in a violent death. Status: still lost.

—Lost Gunsight in California’s Death Valley.  No date is given for the first discovery of a reef that was said to be heavily laden with silver.   It was discovered by a single man who was part of a Mormon migrant party.  He fashioned a gun sight for his rifle with the silver from the reef.  Stories of this silver reef in Death Valley have circulated for years, and it’s been found and lost several times.  It’s believed that the cause of its elusiveness is the shifting sands.  Status: still lost.

—Lost Adams, south of the Little Colorado River in northeast-central Arizona.  In 1864, this gold-bearing dry wash was discovered by a man known only as Adams, along with a party of prospectors.  They were led by an Apache half-breed.  Soon after the colorful discovery, a war party descended and killed many of the men and ran the others off.  For ten frustrating years, Adams tried to get back to the findings, but was always held off by the Indians.  Finally, after the Apache Indians had been moved, Adams went back in search but was never able to find the correct spot.            This discovery is also known as the “Lost Adams Diggins” and has been made into a movie called Mackenna’s Gold. Status: still lost.
As you now see, there is still gold in them thar hills! You just have to be lucky enough to find and keep it.  Have you ever been gold panning?

Have you visited a haunted mine or discovered something special?  We’d love to hear about it…
 
Today, in celebration of the release of MONTANA DAWN, I’m offering a signed copy to a commenter.  Also, if you go to my website (www.carolinefyffe.com) and sign up for my News Letter on the contact page, you will be entered in the drawing for a basket filled with candies, chocolates, muffin mix,  a handsome coffee mug (filled with even more chocolate!) and a jar of scrumptious jam, all made from the Big Sky State’s coveted huckleberry.  

Also included is an autographed copy of both MONTANA DAWN and WHERE THE WIND BLOWS.  It’s as easy as pie. The winner will be drawn on December 10th, 2010–just in time for Christmas.
 It’s wonderful to be here again at Petticoats & Pistols.  

Thank you to all the Fillies for having me.  It seems like only yesterday when we were talking about Pioneer Teachers and how they helped shape the West.  Don’t know about the rest of you, but time seems to have jumped its bank…and there’s no holding it back.

<— CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

The Bard of the Yukon

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There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Few periods in American history have spawned as many legends as the 1896-99 Klondike Gold Rush.  The rush brought out the best and worst in the men and women who swarmed north in search of wealth.  The tales of their adventures, some true and some myths, have filled many books.  But few writers captured the spirit of gold rush life like poet Robert W. Service, sometimes called “The Bard of the Yukon.”  His writing was so expressive, and so evocative of the time that his readers took him for a hard-bitten old Klondike prospector. 

Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Robert William Service never prospected for gold and did not, in fact, arrive in the Klondike until years after the gold rush played out. 

Service was born in 1874 to a Scottish family living in England.  Trained to be a bank clerk like his father, he left Glasgow for Canada at the age of 21, hoping to become a cowboy.  He drifted around western North America for a time and finally took work with the Canadian Bank of Commerce.  After working in a number of branches, he was posted to the branch in Whitehorse in 1904, then later to Dawson City in the Klondike in in 1908.  Inspired by the vast beauty of the wilderness, Service began writing poetry about the things he saw.  Conversations with local characters who’d lived through the gold rush led him to write about things he heard, embellishing them with his own imagination. 

After collecting enough poems for a book, he offered a publisher $100 of his own money to publish the work.  The publisher returned the money and offered Service a contract.  The book, published as The Spell of the Yukon in America and The Songs of a Sourdough in England, made him world famous and also very wealthy.  Within two years he was able to quit his job at the bank and travel to Paris and Hollywood.  Service remained a British citizen for life.  During World War I he served as an ambulance driver.  He wrote many poems about the war and about other places he visited – more than 1,000 poems in all, as well as two autobiographical novels.

He married a Parisian woman and lived most of his life in France, where he died in 1958.  His wife, thirteen years his junior, died in 1989 at the age of 102.

If you’ve never read Service’s Gold Rush poems you’re in for a treat.  I especially love “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” quoted in part at the beginning of this blog, about the prospector who was always cold.  It’s too long to include in its entirety, but here’s a link:

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-cremation-of-sam-mcgee/

Enjoy!

The Glory Days of Black Gold

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pat2One of my all-time favorite films is “Giant,” a sprawling epic of Texas with Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor and the ill-fated James Dean who was killed in an accident immediately after the filming.It was the highest grossing film until “Superman” assumed that the honor, and it was nominated for eight Oscars, including best supporting actor for James Dean. One theme of the movie was the conflict between oil men and the ranchers.
I was reminded of those raucous oil years not long ago when I heard one of those old family stories that occasionally pop up. My dad’s family homesteaded in southern Arizona in 1911, and I have great family stories, including one in which my then toddler father played with a rattler. But then that’s another story.
There were three brothers and three sisters. The three sisters were all older than the brothers. My oldest uncle, an intrepid fellow who later became a war correspondent, worked on the early wells to earn money for college. One of my aunts ran a boarding house for roustabouts.

So I thought I would check out a little history of oil in the west. It was a little ironic that men searched so long and hard for minerals when black gold lay beneath their feet across the great plains.

One of the first finds was in Texas. Indians had known of places where brown fluids seeped from the earth, oils which healed battle wounds and skin diseases. Around such seeps were invisible substances in the air that would burn forever – better than pine torches to light the night during times of tribal ceremonies. The first pioneers learned to use the brown fluids for softening leather, lubricating wagon axles and making ointments. But most ranchers hated the stuff. It ruin their water for drinking.

In 1886, a rancher near San Antonio drilled for water and hit oil instead. He was not a happy man, not until he discovered he could use it for fuel around the ranch.

But nothing more happened until 1894 when a well being bored for water at Corsicana suddenly spouted oil in a steady stream. It caught fire and started the first oil boom in the west. Corsicana was soon producing petroleum commercially – 1,450 barrels the first year. Four years later production rose to more than half a million barrels.

The find encouraged other petroleum drilling, leading to the Spindletop, a oil gusher near Beaumont that was big enough to surprise even a Texan. The driller expected maybe fifty barrels. With his old fashioned rig, he drove down a thousand feet. According to “The Settlers West” by Martin Schmitt and Dee Brown, the drill pipe shot up out of the casing and knocked off the crown block. “In a very short time,” the driller said, “oil was going up through the top of the derrick and rocks were shot hundreds of feet into the air. Within a few minutes, the oil was holding a steady flow at more than twice the height of the derrick.” Spindletop spilled oil all over the Texas landscape, a hundred thousand barrels a day. The Corsicana oil discovery of 1894 marked the start of a Texas oil boom. It spurred commercial production, with Corsicana yielding 1,450 barrels in the first year and half a million barrels just four years later. This success led to more exploration, eventually resulting in the legendary Spindletop gusher near Beaumont, a surprise that spilled a hundred thousand barrels of oil daily. For those interested in investing in the oil industry or staying informed about its developments, Oil Evex Profit offers valuable insights and resources in this dynamic market.

In a few weeks Beaumont was running a high fever. Wooden oil derricks shot up like weeds. The population jumped from ten to thirty thousand. Land values soared from $40 to $1,000,000 an acre.

From then oil fever consumed the country, just as gold fever had a few decades earlier. Oil was found in an impoverished Oklahoma near a sleepy village which the natives called Tulsey Town. Gamblers and speculators and the new fraternity of oil men in big hats and laced boots swarmed into the little town on the Arkansas River. Little Tulsey Town became Tulsa.

The finds in Texas and Oklahoma spurred more searches north and west across the great plains, and strike followed strike. There was so much oil that there weren’t enough storage tanks and thousands of barrels flowed back into the earth or wells caught fire and burned for days.

And wherever oil was found, tents, shacks, saloons and gambling houses, and boarding houses sprung up just as they had in the old cattle trail towns of an earlier generation.

California had some small fields before the Texas finds but boomtowns and oil fever was constrained, perhaps as an aftermath of gold fever until a gusher blew in neaar Lake View and poured out 90,000 barrels a day.   The spray covered an area 15 miles around and the well became the richest of all time.

Do any of you have any stories of those black gold glory days. And have you seen “Giant?” If not, do yourself a favor and rent it. The music is great, too.

 

 

Hunting for Gold in The Lone Star State

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“A gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar at the top.” – Mark Twain

When I began doing research for my debut novel, Touch of Texas, I knew I was searching for a special type of location. It needed to be isolated, with a means of support for those who settled in the town. I didn’t want the town to be too prosperous – that eliminates some of the available conflict for a story. Also, the area had to be right for the nefarious to operate – cattle rustling, horse stealing, etc. – and have numerous places for them to hide.

texas-ranger-badge

The hero of the book was a Texas Ranger, the tall, dark and dangerous type, who preferred taking on assignments that sent him out alone, far from civilization. My mental picture of the heroine was his total opposite, a fragile-looking woman with golden hair…

Golden? Aha! A gold mining town. But was gold ever mined in Texas in the 1800’s? I don’t mind making stuff up in the name of my art, but I believe fiction needs to have a basis in the credible.

Silver mining has been going on in Texas since the Franciscans Friars discovered the precious ore near El Paso in 1680. These mines were hidden by the good Friars from the Jesuit brothers and the locations lost for many years. One mine was rediscovered in 1793, then lost again, then found again thanks to church records in 1872. In 1880 the Presidio Mine was discovered. In the ensuing years, strikes were made in all over the western half of the state, and even in the Hill Country.

From The Handbook of Texas Online: “In 1905, 387,576 ounces of silver were produced in the state, and in 1908 the Bonanza and Alice Ray Mines in the Quitman Mountains in Hudspeth County were producing ore valued at $60 to $65 per ton. In 1918 the Chinati and Montezuma mines closed. The Presidio Mine was one of the most consistent producers of silver in the country; from 1880 until it closed in 1942 it had produced 2,000,000 tons of ore from which 30,293,606 ounces of silver, about nine-tenths of the total output of the state, had been extracted, along with a small value in gold and lead.”

There it is. The answer to whether anyone ever mined for gold in Texas. The operations weren’t profitable, but there have been gold mines in Texas since the 1800’s. In fact, there has been a gold mining operation going on in the Hill Country continuously since the expeditioBig Bend National Parkn of Bernardo de Miranda y Flores left San Antonio in February, 1756.

Most gold mining took place in the far southwestern part of the state, in the area called Big Bend. (That’s a picture of Big Bend National Park to the right. Gorgeous, isn’t it?)

There was some mining around Fort Davis and in the Davis Mountains, and also in Presidio County.

 While reseFort Davis, Texasarching the history of Fort Davis, a United States Army post in operation from 1854-1891, I found mention of a wave of gold seekers coming through on their way to California from San Antonio. The need to protect these adventurers and pioneer was part of what helped drive the placement of the fort.

Amateur prospectors have discovered arrastre, granite bedrock milling stones, abandoned by the Mexicans and Spanish in and on the banks of the creeks where they searched in vain for gold.

But since when has gold fever been cured by the words “you aren’t going to find it panhandlerhere”.  To this day, the persistent legends of large veins scattered through the state are enough to keep hopeful panhandlers searching.
 
Panning still turns up small amounts of gold around the ruins of Fort Davis, as well as in the Hill Country around Llano and Mason Counties, where there were mostly placer mines—that’s the mining of alluvial or sediment deposits for minerals. Despite the odds against finding anything, they’re still mining for gold in the Lone Star State.

While no one person or mining company ever got wealthy digging or panning for gold in Texas—the total recorded value of the gold dug out of the ground is less than $250,000—they did and still do hunt for the precious metal. And for a fiction writer, that’s all I needed to create my own little piece of the past.

Maybe Mark Twain had it right – although I’d rather consider myself a weaver of a tall tale rather than a liar.

Petticoats & Pistols