Historic Photos of Colorado Mining

Ed Raines

Description

In 1859, 100,000 folks started the journey to the Pikes Peak goldfields, but only 50,000 completed the trip. An additional 25,000 soon gave up and went back home. The remainder not only brought statehood to the central Rocky Mountains, but they also brought the industrial world to isolated areas in the high mountains, where they mined mineral deposits for gold, silver, lead, zinc, and copper, among others.

This book, Historic Photos of Colorado Mining, provides an introduction to Colorado's mining history through photographs from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Accompanying captions provide specific contexts for the photos and tell the story of the prospectors, miners, engineers, teamsters, railroaders, and townspeople who served as entrepreneurs and workers in industrializing the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

Many ruins from the mining days are now recognized as historic landmarks. But the stories behind the ruins are often as fascinating as the ruins themselves—the struggle to survive and thrive in the wilderness is always a compelling tale.

Sujets

• Techniques
• Energie et Environnement
• Energie & environnement
• Local
• History
• West
• United States
• State
• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781618583871
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 9 Mo

Extrait

HISTORIC PHOTOS OF
COLORADO MINING
T EXT AND C APTIONS BY E D R AINES
When this photograph was taken of the Gregory gold vein, almost 40 years had passed since its 1859 discovery. A railroad served the district; various structures had been built and torn down; and the richest, near-surface portion of the vein had been completely depleted, or mined out, leaving the open cut. The Gregory-Bobtail vein system produced about $20,000,000 (gold values when mined) between 1859 and 1959.
HISTORIC PHOTOS OF
COLORADO MINING
Turner Publishing Company
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Historic Photos of Colorado Mining
Copyright 2009 Turner Publishing Company
All rights reserved.
This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009922625
ISBN: 978-1-59652-535-1
Printed in China
09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16-0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C ONTENTS
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
P REFACE
T HE G OLD R USH AND THE I NITIAL M INING E FFORT (1859-1895)
S ILVER , T OO ! (1867-1895)
U NDERGROUND H ARDROCK M INING (1859-1920)
T HE S AN J UANS (1871-1920)
T HE L AST T WO R USHES (1889-1920)
M INING FOR I NDUSTRY (1893-1920)
N OTES ON THE P HOTOGRAPHS
The Ice Palace was a regular sightseeing stop on the Argentine Central Railroad s McClellan Mountain route. Here, a tourist examines an abandoned mine tunnel encrusted with a beautiful growth of sublimated ice crystals.
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume, Historic Photos of Colorado Mining , is the result of the cooperation and efforts of many individuals, organizations, and corporations. It is with great thanks that we acknowledge the valuable contribution of the following for their generous support:
The Colorado Historical Society
Colorado School of Mines Arthur Lakes Library
Colorado School of Mines Geology Museum
The Denver Public Library
The Library of Congress
We would also like to thank Silvia Pettem for her valuable contributions and assistance in making this work possible.
With the exception of touching up imperfections that have accrued with the passage of time and cropping where necessary, no changes have been made. The focus and clarity of many images is limited to the technology and the ability of the photographer at the time they were taken.
P REFACE
My parents, both Texans, met in Estes Park, Colorado, in the late 1920s. Throughout the rest of their lives, they came to Colorado almost every year. After my fourth birthday, they brought me with them. That s what Texans did in the pre-air-conditioner summer days of 95- to 105-degree heat: they got in their cars and drove two days in that heat so they could relax in the mountains for a few weeks, before they had to climb back in their cars and drive through that heat again. It was worth it, a thousand times over.
When we came to Colorado, we always brought along Muriel Sibell Wolle s Stampede to Timberline . As we drove from one old mining town to another, Mom would read aloud Mrs. Wolle s descriptions and stories of the place where we were headed. By the time that I was 18, I had visited 80 percent of those old mining areas that Mrs. Wolle described. And I had started a hobby.
Mom and Dad were avid fishermen. At the age of nine or ten, while standing alongside some mountain stream, I decided that I was not. I was bored stiff and I wasn t going to fish anymore. So I picked up some rocks and began to work on my curve ball. I threw rocks at all the surrounding trees and retired by the side. Before the next inning could start, my mind had shifted scenes, and I was lobbing hand grenades at some imagined enemy. I discovered that if I threw my grenades into the stream, the ensuing splash would approximate the explosion that my imagination required. Mom s words brought me back from the Battle of the Bulge. Ed, you are ruining the fishing. Why don t you look around and see how many different kinds of rocks you can find? Make a collection and we can identify them. So I did. And I still collect rocks. I don t fish.
Every place that we went in Colorado had rocks, and in lots of those places people have mined them. I knew, because Mrs. Wolle had told me so. So if we went someplace where silver was mined, I tried to collect silver ore, and the same with gold, zinc, lead, tungsten, et cetera. I soon learned that it was difficult for a beginner to find good rocks.
Then in my sixteenth summer, I was fortunate enough to meet Stan Noga, a prospector and the owner of a small rock shop near Buena Vista, Colorado. Stan took me collecting, explained that mineralogy was a science, and introduced me to the literature of geology, mineralogy, and mining. I began to read whatever I could find (and understand) that would tell me where to look. I was hooked.
Later, when I studied geology in college, a graduate student told me that there was a day that every geologist could look back and say that on that day, he became a geologist. He was right; mine came when I discovered that, from cover to cover, I could read and understand Samuel Franklin Emmons s U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 148, The Geology of the Leadville Mining District, Colorado. I also read the USGS papers, bulletins, monographs, and annual reports on Cripple Creek, Breckenridge, Central City, Georgetown, Lake City, Creede, Silverton, Telluride, Bonanza, and lots of others. My studies, work, and collecting have taken me to lots of other places in the world, but I always seem to come back to Colorado. In fact, I moved here in the late 1980s and married Silvia Pettem, who shares my interest in mining history.
There really are only two basic industries in this world-mining and agriculture. A wonderful Art-Deco bas relief over the front door of the Boulder County Courthouse illustrates that basic fact to all who come to do business with the county. For years, those two industries were, economically, Colorado s most important, and it was mining that paved the way to statehood. I have spent most of my life studying that industry.
The story of Colorado mining is intriguing. As the consulting Collections Manager at the Colorado School of Mines Geology Museum, I am sometimes asked what book to read about Colorado mining. I always say Stampede to Timberline , a copy of which sits on the shelf by my desk. Mrs. Wolle was an artist, as well as a wonderful storyteller, and her book is filled with her drawings. Pictures can speak louder than words, and this book, Historic Photos of Colorado Mining , is meant to be an introduction to Colorado mining history told through photographs, each of them with identifying captions. I couldn t cover everything-the subject is truly vast-but I tried to provide a solid introduction to a wonderful story. I hope you will enjoy that story as much as I do.
-Ed Raines
This map of the state of Colorado shows mining towns, districts, and areas pictured and discussed in this book.
T HE G OLD R USH AND THE I NITIAL M INING E FFORT
(1859-1895)
In 1850, a party of California-bound prospectors discovered placer gold near present-day Denver. During the summer of 1858, Green Russell, along with several others of those same forty-niners, returned to the Colorado Rockies to further investigate the potential of the area. Gold discoveries were made along the foothills of the Front Range near present-day Idaho Springs, Gold Hill, and Central City. During the next several years, 100,000 people started for Colorado and half completed the journey, but 25,000 soon gave up and went back home. The 25,000 who stayed built a state.
Soon prospectors found the source of the placer gold in veins cutting through the mountains above the stream valleys. Lode claims were staked, and underground hardrock mining soon surpassed the placers in gold production. Local prospectors and miners in each region established mining districts and wrote rules and regulations to specify standard operating procedures concerning claim size, location, recording procedures, and water rights. Many of these districts and their rules are still recognized by government today.
There were only so many veins on a given mountain, so a district would eventually become claimed-up. Late arrivers had to move on and prospect unexplored areas. New discoveries followed old as more and more prospectors fanned out to look for gold. The towns of Dumont, Lawson, Empire, Georgetown, Silver Plume, Geneva, Montezuma, Breckenridge, Ward, Tarryall, Fairplay, Alma, Buckskin Joe, Granite, and California Gulch all resulted from the ever-widening search.
In each of the gold camps, the mining landscape changed over time. As placer deposits played out, miners sank shafts and drove adits into the veins. Sluices, dams, and gravel piles along the streams gave way to headframes, boiler plants, shaft houses, and mine dumps that perched on the mountainsides. As miners dug deeper and discovered more complex ores, mills were built to process the ores. Freighters drove multiple teams of horses or mules that pulled and pushed wagons loaded with heavy equipment up narrow, steep mountain roads. Mining engineers assembled sophisticated machinery to allow armies of miners to dig deeper into the earth. Metallurgists processed and concentrated the ore. And then the freighters returned to fill their wagons and haul the concentrates to smelters. Put another way, the engines and machinery of the Industrial Revolution had come to the Colorado Mountains.

Actual photos of the journey to the goldfields are very scarce because the fifty-niners didn t own cameras. These early Pikes Peakers were mostly farmers and townspeople from communities scattered along the Missouri River system. The Panic of 1857 had brought hard times, and a jour