Although mining holds more of the glamour for those in and interested in the minerals industry, smelters have continuously played a critical role in the industry’s evolution since their introduction in Colorado in the 1860s. At that time, miners desperately needed new technology to recover gold and silver from ores resistant to milling. Beginning as small independent enterprises, progressing to larger integrated firms working in urban centers, and finally following a trend toward mergers, the entire industry was absorbed into one large holding company—the American Smelting and Refining Company. Over time, fortunes were won and lost, business success was converted to political success, and advances were made in science and metallurgy. Drawing on archival material, Fell expertly presents the triumphs and troubles of the entrepreneurs who built one of the great industries of the West.
Although mining holds more of the glamour for those in and interested in the minerals industry, smelters have continuously played a critical role in the industry’s evolution since their introduction in Colorado in the 1860s. At that time, miners desperately needed new technology to recover gold and silver from ores resistant to milling. Beginning as small independent enterprises, progressing to larger integrated firms working in urban centers, and finally following a trend toward mergers, the entire industry was absorbed into one large holding company—the American Smelting and Refining Company. Over time, fortunes were won and lost, business success was converted to political success, and advances were made in science and metallurgy. Drawing on archival material, Fell expertly presents the triumphs and troubles of the entrepreneurs who built one of the great industries of the West.
Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Although mining holds more of the glamour for those in and interested in the minerals industry, smelters have continuously played a critical role in the industry’s evolution since their introduction in Colorado in the 1860s. At that time, miners desperately needed new technology to recover gold and silver from ores resistant to milling. Beginning as small independent enterprises, progressing to larger integrated firms working in urban centers, and finally following a trend toward mergers, the entire industry was absorbed into one large holding company—the American Smelting and Refining Company. Over time, fortunes were won and lost, business success was converted to political success, and advances were made in science and metallurgy. Drawing on archival material, Fell expertly presents the triumphs and troubles of the entrepreneurs who built one of the great industries of the West.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780870819469 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University Press of Colorado |
| Publication date: | 06/30/2009 |
| Series: | Timberline Books |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.56(w) x 8.56(h) x 0.79(d) |
About the Author
James E. Fell Jr. has been a professor at the University of Colorado since 1990. In 2004, he received the Mining History Association's Rodman Paul Award of the for distinction in the field and for service to that organization. In addition to Ores to Metals, he coauthored Aurora: Gateway to the Rockies and Mining the Summit: Colorado's Ten Mile District, 1860-1960.
Read an Excerpt
Ores to Metals
The Rocky Mountain Smelting Industry
By James E. Fell Jr.
University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2009 University Press of ColoradoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87081-946-9
CHAPTER 1
"A Savan among Us"
Rumors of gold and silver in the Rocky Mountains had drifted down through the years since Spanish times. Rivera, Purcell, Frémont, and others all claimed they had found precious metals in the high country, but their reports were conjectural. No one had ever confirmed them. The California gold rush gave rise to a new spate of rumors; yet not until the winter of 1857 descended on Auraria, Georgia, did anyone make a systematic effort to learn the truth.
It was in that season that William G. Russell took a notion to explore the foothills of the Rockies near the point where the South Platte River enters the high plains on its journey to the sea. Not much is known about Russell, but he had a forceful personality matched by a moustache and beard that made him stand out like a musketeer from a Dumas novel. Russell had been in the Rockies before. In 1850 he had driven horses to California, and he may have found a few flakes of placer gold while passing through the mountains.
Early in 1858 Russell set out from Georgia with his brothers and a few friends. At Leavenworth in Kansas Territory they joined a band of Cherokees led by John Beck, who, like Russell, may have found gold in the high country while on his way to California in 1849. With their ranks now swelled to more than a hundred, the adventurers crossed the prairie to reach the South Platte, then traced the waterway to its rendezvous with a smaller stream known as Cherry Creek. After pitching their tattered canvas tents, Russell's men fell to work on the sands and gravels. Here on the future site of Denver they found tiny particles of placer gold, confirming the rumors that had abounded for so long.
Russell's men were exultant, but their dreams of instantaneous wealth gave way to frustration and disappointment. "Pay" from the "diggins" was meager, so meager it hardly justified the backbreaking toil of shoveling and panning, the crude techniques of placer mining. Nearly all the adventurers became discouraged and abandoned the search that fall, but by chance an itinerant trader bound for Missouri happened upon the camp. He traded for a few flakes of gold and went on his way. Once he reached the first line of settlements farther east, his exaggerated account of riches spread from town to town like a prairie fire. Merchants and newspapermen boomed the discovery to bonanza proportions, touching off the Pike's Peak gold rush that came the next year. But the Cherry Creek placers hardly justified the coming frenzy, and a fiasco loomed as winter settled over the high plains.
Even before the end of 1858, the first treasure seekers arrived on Cherry Creek. It was not long before they realized that the stories of easy wealth had been vastly exaggerated. Many cursed the Pike's Peak "humbug," turned around, and went home; but others were not so easily discouraged. Miners experienced in Georgia and California perceived that the gravels at the base of the Rockies contained flakes of gold washed down from the white-tipped mountains that rimmed the western skyline. And so, as the year of discovery drew to a close, bands of prospectors set out to ascend the partly frozen streams that flowed out of the Front Range into the South Platte.
In one of those companies was John H. Gregory, an old Georgia miner who arrived in the foothills late in the year. He and several companions decided to trace into the mountains a stream known as the Vasquez Fork of the South Platte, a name soon changed to Clear Creek as the American tide over-whelmed the Spanish influence remaining in that part of the high country. Battling snow and ice and cold, the adventurers struggled up the narrow, high-walled canyon until the stream branched at the base of a steep ridge. Choosing the right-hand fork, soon known as North Clear Creek, they pushed on to where the narrows opened into a series of high hills timbered with firs. There in January 1859 John Gregory found flakes of placer gold in what became the town of Black Hawk.
Gregory and his companions, however, wanted to locate the source of the placer — and so they kept looking. They nearly perished in a late winter snowstorm, but on May 6 their persistence was rewarded when Gregory uncovered the rust-colored outcropping of the lode that bears his name. This was the first vein of gold discovered in Colorado. Like prospectors everywhere, Gregory and his friends tried to keep their good fortune secret, but this proved impossible. The news carried down to embryonic Denver City, and up Clear Creek came a rapid influx of fifty-niners. Some concentrated on placering at the Gregory diggings, but others spread out into the surrounding hills, where they located the Bobtail, Bates, Gunnell, Illinois, and other lodes. Before long the ragged tents and hastily improvised log cabins thrown up along the banks of North Clear Creek grew into the towns of Black Hawk, Central City, and Nevadaville.
While Gregory and his companions were trudging upstream to the future site of Black Hawk, George A. Jackson, a veteran California miner, was tracing another path to gold. He ascended the south fork of Clear Creek until he came to a stand of barren willow trees hard by a smaller current that flowed into the main stream. Here at the confluence he panned telltale flakes of placer gold. Unlike Gregory and his friends, Jackson managed to conceal his discovery for some time, but the news leaked out a few months later, and Pike's Peakers rushed to Jackson's "diggins." By summer fortune hunters were sluicing the sands and gravels all the way from the forks of Clear Creek to the site of Jackson's discovery, soon to be the town of Idaho Springs. Other fifty-niners pushed farther west, where they located placer and vein gold that gave rise to the mining camps of Spanish Bar, Empire, Elizabethtown, and Georgetown.
Prospectors poured into the high country all year long, but not all sought their El Dorado in the sands and gravels of Clear Creek. Some traced the tawny-colored foothills to a stand of rotting cottonwoods on South Boulder Creek, about twenty-five miles northwest of Denver City. Here they located a placer they called the "deadwood diggins," which prompted more extensive mining in the mountains to the west. Still other fifty-niners crossed the Front Range of the Rockies into the great valley of South Park, traced meandering streams across to the northwest rim, and found placer and lode gold near what became the mining camps of Fairplay, Tarryall, and Buckskin Joe. And well to the south some prospectors hurrying west along the Arkansas River followed that stream into the central Rockies rather than heading to the popular tributaries of the South Platte. They realized their dreams of finding placer gold at Kelly's Bar, Cache Creek, and other sites now long forgotten.
No one knows now many people came to the mountains in 1859. Some estimated the number at 100,000, but this seems a vast exaggeration — a figure inflated by enthusiasts to promote the country. A better estimate would be fewer than 25,000. Two years later the first official census showed the population to be about 23,000. In contrast, something like 80,000 newcomers poured into California in 1849. But, regardless of the number of people who arrived in the Pike's Peak Rush, there was chaos throughout the region. Denver City, Central City, and other "cities" were little more than a confusion of tents, shacks, and log cabins. And not until the middle of the secession crisis of 1861 would Congress create Colorado Territory. In the meantime, what "legal system" prevailed was hardly more than an arcane jumble of local rules and familiar customs enforced by popular opinion or lynch law. The pioneers tried to re-create the social, economic, and political institutions they had known, but their efforts only led to a mosaic that differed from camp to camp and town to town.
Despite the chaos, the first miners shaped the outline of the minerals industry for the next twenty years. The heart of all their activity would lie on the forks of Clear Creek in the country opened by the discoveries of Gregory and Jackson. The most important towns would be Black Hawk, Central City, and Nevadaville, which the first territorial legislature grouped as Gilpin County. A close second would be Empire, Georgetown, and Idaho Springs, which territorial lawmakers included in Clear Creek County. The amount of gold and silver mined in those two regions made up nearly two-thirds of Colorado's production until the epochal year of 1879.
Like other western mining regions, Colorado was part of cordilleran America — the great highland formed by the Rocky Mountains on the east, the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade range on the Pacific slope, and the arid plateaus in between. When the mountains were created centuries ago, hot mineral-bearing liquids flowed upward toward the surface of the earth. Sometimes they pressed into fissures and cracks in the crust, leaving veins of metal. At other times the molten matter dissolved the existing rock and substituted other materials, creating replacement deposits. Whether the minerals formed a true vein or a replacement deposit, the result was the same — a sheet of solid rock in which the accumulation of gold, silver, or other metals varied in length, depth, and thickness. It was this crazy-quilt pattern that accounted for the high risk and heartbreaking failure that characterized the mining industry.
In Colorado the minerals lay in several forms. Some were pyrites — compounds of iron, copper, and sulfur. Others were galena-sphalerites — mixtures of lead, zinc, and sulfur. Still others were combinations of the first two — compounds of iron, copper, lead, zinc, and sulfur. And a fourth group, unimportant to the early miners, were tellurides — compounds of the metal tellurium. Encased within the minerals were gold as the free element and silver as silver chloride or silver bromide. Such deposits held valuable metals besides gold and silver, but the ores were complex, and except for placers they would be difficult to process — something no one realized in the optimistic days of 1859.
In the millennia that followed deposition, the incessant activity of the atmosphere created a three-level system of ores. As air, water, and sun oxidized and disintegrated the surface minerals, rainwater and melting snow dissolved the silver compounds and washed away some gravel, leaving an outer deposit richer in gold, copper, lead, and zinc. (Running water also carried some of the gold downstream, forming the placers found by Russell, Jackson, and others.) Below the surface lay a second layer known as gossan. Here the elements oxidized and enriched the minerals down to depths of fifty or even a hundred feet, forming an ore system that could be easily mined and processed. Below this region, however, was a vast third tier of sulfides that proved far less rich and far more difficult to work than the ores above.
In 1859 fortune hunters like Gregory and Jackson sought their winnings from "dirt" with pans, cradles, and sluices — the ageless techniques of placer miners. These simple devices were all similar in principle. Each depended upon the high specific gravity of gold — its great weight relative to that of other substances — to cause it to be left behind when a current of water washed away other substances presumed to be worthless.
Once subterranean mining began, Colorado's miners had to employ new techniques to crush the gossan and free the gold. At first they turned to a crude device long employed by the Spaniards — the arrastra. This consisted of a circular stone trough and several heavy stones known as "mullers" that hung from an arm attached to a central pivot. The miners placed their ore in the trough, then oxen, mules, or other draft animals dragged the "mullers" over it to crush it and free the gold, which was later recovered by sluicing. The first arrastras appeared in July 1859, only two months after Gregory's discovery. By the end of the year several were in operation along the banks of North Clear Creek, each earning as much as $200 daily. Arrastras were easy to finance and simple to construct, but they were slow and inefficient — distressing faults to men bent upon instant wealth. Throughout the Rockies they were little more than transitory devices that soon gave way to stamp milling.
Stamp mills were far more characteristic of an industrial society. Stamps were heavy iron blocks attached to wooden or iron rods that rose and fell in accord with a revolving horizontal beam. With monotonous, incessant crashes, they reduced hard rock to sand, which was then washed by a stream of water over large copper plates impregnated with mercury. This substance formed an amalgam — a kind of alloy — with the gold. Later, mill operators heated the amalgam in a retort. This broke down the alloy, vaporized the mercury (which was condensed and reused), and left behind the gold, which could be cast into bars. The principle was simple, but stamp milling required a knowledge of engineering, a supply of semiskilled labor, and access to capital. The appearance of mills marked a step in the passing of the fortune hunters.
Stamp milling developed rapidly in 1859 — so rapidly that the essential machinery must have been on its way to Colorado before Gregory made his famous discovery on May 6. Though they required capital, mills were relatively inexpensive to build and operate, and the first plants came into production during the summer. Returns were often large, some enterprises recovering as much as $400 in gold a day. Such spectacular yields, however, created an unjustified optimism that spurred mining companies and independent milling outfits into overconstruction. Only rich lodes, like the Gregory and the Bobtail, could produce large supplies of ore worth more than the $30 a ton, which enabled both mine and mill to work profitably. Since many ores paid no more than the cost of milling, idle stamps quickly become commonplace.
Yet the boom was on. Good times brought in settlers, stimulated capital investment, and provided a measure of prosperity. The tents, shacks, and log cabins of the fifty-niners gave way to more substantial buildings, many with tall, narrow windows and false fronts. The bustle of life in the narrow streets was punctuated by the thud of underground explosions, the rattle of steam engines, the shriek of whistles, and the crash of stamps that echoed across the canyons. Trees disappeared to provide fuel for the furnaces and timber for the mines. And with all this activity the yield of gold rose steadily from just about nothing in 1858 to perhaps $3,000,000 in 1861 and about $4,500,000 in 1863. Many back East looked to Colorado as a land where they might improve their lot in life, if not get rich quick.
Yet this was an illusion. By the end of 1863 the miners had exhausted the best placers and the easily processed supplies of gossan. In the mines, all that remained at levels no more than one hundred feet below the surface was a vast tonnage of un-oxidized ores known as sulfurets because they smelled so strongly of sulfur. They proved resistant to stamp milling because they held the gold in the form of a solid solution. The metal was so finely divided that crushing freed little of it. But no one understood this. When mineowners sent ores to be milled, they learned to their horror that the recovery rate dropped from as much as three-quarters of the assay value, the normal yield, to less than one-quarter of what they expected. And sometimes there was no yield at all. A few people had noticed the trouble as early as 1860, but in those days miners had dismissed the problem as an aberration peculiar to certain lodes. By the end of 1863, however, the impasse had become widespread. More than anything else, the inability of the stamp mills to recover gold from sulfurets brought on the severe economic contraction that convulsed the high country over the next few years.
Yet the failure of the stamp mills was only one problem facing the industry. As mineowners blasted farther into the earth, they had to raise more capital to buy new machinery and replace flimsy timbering. The need for money happened to coincide with the surging inflation created by the Civil War, an inflation that caused many investors to believe that shares in a gold mine were a better means of preserving wealth than the depreciating paper money. Taking advantage of this sentiment, many mineowners floated stock issues that touched off a speculative boom in Boston, New York, and other cities. Some offers were legitimate, but others were sheer fraud. When the frenzy collapsed in April 1864, an important source of capital dried up. To make matters worse, a severe drought and a hardwinter hindered wagon freighting on the high plains. Then Cheyenne and Arapaho war parties virtually severed the transportation routes for the best part of a year. Farther east, Confederate guerrillas sometimes attacked wagon trains bound for Colorado. As supplies grew scarcer, the costs of mining in isolated towns grew ever higher. Few producers could operate in such an environment. By the end of 1864 the failure of the stamp mills, the lack of new capital, and a sharp increase in costs had disrupted the mining industry.
As the specter of financial ruin hovered over Colorado, mineowners launched a desperate search for a method of recovering gold from sulfurets. Yet, since scarcely anyone in Colorado possessed a thorough knowledge of mineralogy and metallurgy, the industry fell prey to a group of quasi-scientists who created what Rossiter W. Raymond, the United States commissioner of mining statistics, dubbed the "process mania." The chief objective of the extravagance was to remove sulfur from ores. As Raymond said, "Desulphurization became the abracadabra of the new alchemists." Speaking learned nonsense about "gaseous gold, silver-sheathed gold, air-filmed gold, and chemically-combined gold," these charlatans induced credulous mineowners to purchase contraptions and patent rights that, however absurd, still seemed plausible because they generally employed the familiar technique of amalgamation as the terminal step.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ores to Metals by James E. Fell Jr.. Copyright © 2009 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Foreword by Stephen J. Leonard,
Preface to the Paperback Edition,
Preface,
1 "A Savan among Us",
2 High Country Years,
3 The Struggle for Survival,
4 "The Realms of Puff",
5 The Crest of the Continent,
6 Smokestacks on the Plains,
7 South by Southwest,
8 HardTimes,
9 Reduction in the Age of ASARCO,
10 "Groping in the Dark",
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,