Ores to Metals: The Rocky Mountain Smelting Industry (Timberline) - Softcover

Fell, James E., Jr.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870819461 ISBN 13: 9780870819469

Verlag: University Press of Colorado, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

This comprehensive treatment of the smelting industry of Colorado, originally published in 1979, is now back in print with a new preface by the author. Packed with fascinating statistics and mining data, Ores to Metals details the people, technologies, and business decisions that have shaped the smelting industry in the Rockies.

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Ores to Metals

The Rocky Mountain Smelting Industry

By James E. Fell Jr.

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2009 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-87081-946-9

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, 

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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University Press of Colorado
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0870819461
• ISBN 13: 9780870819469
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 341
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar