Of Boom and Bust 243

Mines and Roads OF BOOMAND BUST Gold. Nothing made the hearts of many nineteenth-century Americans beat faster than the possibility of finding it and becoming independently wealthy overnight. Stories of feverish activity abound from the placer claims of California to the Comstock Lode in Nevada, and from Cripple Creek and Leadville in Colorado to the Black Hills of South Dakota. The reward for most of the large number of people who flooded to these areas were claims that did not pan out, debts that remained for years, and an experience that was better left forgotten. When the boom went bust there was little reason to remain, and so the miners packed their essentials and left for the next strike, where conditions would undoubtedly be better. San Juan County has seen its own rushes-first for silver and gold, then oil, and finally uranium-each with its own get-rich-quick pattern, ebb and flow of men and machines, and frenzied quest for wealth. Strikes have occurred all around the county, in the Carrizo, Henry, Sleeping Ute, and La Sal mountains. Even before the area became a county, there were miners on the prowl, trying to find that Eldorado that was going to make them rich. Earliest mining attempts involved individuals or small groups of prospectors searching in a rugged country where few had previously ventured. Ernest Mitchell and James Merrick invited George Hobbs of the 1879 Mormon exploring party to join them in search of a secret Navajo silver mine whose ore reportedly assayed at ninety per- cent. Hobbs fortunately declined. Seven months later, a group of searchers found Mitchell's and Merrick's bodies at the foot of the mesas that bear their names in Monument Valley, victims of a UteIPaiute faction that resented their presence.' In March 1884 a similar fate befell two prospectors, Samuel Walcott and James McNaUy, who split from a larger group of miners to try to find silver in the Navajo Mountain region. The two men camped near a group of Navajos and offered to trade for corn and meat. Some of the Indians had lost loved ones in a previous conflict with whites in southwestern Utah a number of years before and so decided this was a good opportunity to repay old debts. The Navajos killed the two men, but not before the prospectors wounded an older Navaj~.~Mining in Navajo country was risky business for whites trav- eling in small groups. Yet Cass Hite, an avid seeker of'the "lost" Mitchell and Merrick mine, spent years by himself or with a handful of men stumbling through the canyons of the San Juan and Colorado rivers in search of something he never found. At one point, he so persistently pestered Hashkeneinii, a headman from the Navajo Mountain- Monument Valley area, that the Navajos named him Hosteen Pish- la-ki [Hastiin Beesh Ligai], translated as "Mister Silver." Perhaps "Mister Copper," deposits of which he discovered at the head of Copper Canyon, or "Mister Gold," which he found near the mouth of White Canyon at a place now named after him, would have been a more appropriate title. Following his discovery in 1883, he started a mild rush along the banks of the Colorado River in Glen Canyon that encouraged several hundred miners to search for placer gold-a boom that lasted for the next seven years.3 Prospectors staked their claims on the gravel bars at the river's edge, by 1889 claiming twenty- one sites from the mouth of White Canyon to Lee's Ferr~.~Miners drifted in and out to try their hand, but none achieved any dazzling success. A HUNDREDYEARS OF BOOM AND BUST 243 Placer mining at Mexican Hat Rock in the 1890s. Notice the absence along the shoreline of tamarisk and Russian olive trees, first brought into the Southwest at the turn of the century as a means of flood control. (San Juan Historical Commission) The first large gold rush occurred on the San Juan River with Bluff as the terminus for the claims scattered all the way to the con- fluence of the San Juan and Colorado rivers. Most of the activity occurred in the region around and below Mexican Hat. The rush started when a trader named Jonathan P. Williams showed some entrepreneurs and railroad men samples of coal and other minerals found where the two rivers met. Word leaked out that it was gold, not coal, that was being sought.' Since silver, in the early 1890s, was no longer used as specie to back United States currency, and since a nation-wide economic panic was then occurring, many of the silver miners from Colorado saw the discovery of placer gold as an entic- ing solution to unemployment. Overnight, the rivers in San Juan County became their destination and placer or "flour" gold the object of an intense search for wealth. The greatest promoters of the rush were the newspapers that kindled the interest and then fanned the flames of expectancy with headlines such as "Utah's Eldorado," "The San Juan Craze," and "The Utah Gold Fields . Everybody Is E~cited."~Promoters described the land as having "weird wonders" but with a "delightful" winter climate "so mild that snow never lasts more than twenty-four hour^."^ The Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad offered a special fare of $8.50 for those going from Salt Lake to Thompson and then to Bluff and the goldfields beyond; teams of horses and equipment sold at premium prices to the men in Arizona towns heading north; and Denver papers reported that "The reputation of the Utah gold fields has gone abroad and people from all points of the Union are arriving on every train."" How many people actually came to San Juan will never be known. Near the height of the rush in January 1893 an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 men, "with more arriving every day," scrambled along the banks of the San J~an.~Other figures vary from a low of 700 to a high of 5,000 miners with one person claiming that 1,000 miners passed through Bluff on New Year's Day alone.'' Within a few months, just as many had lefi the San Juan, poorer but wiser for the experience. The peaceful Mormon town of Bluff assumed a bustling, mer- cantile atmosphere as the demand for goods of all types increased. A HUNDREDYEARS OF BOOM AND BUST 245 Freighting from Mancos, Cortez, and Durango took on new propor- tions, because everything from clothes, tools, and food for miners, hay for horses, and lumber for flumes, sluice boxes, and rockers was in short supply. The unruly element that follows any booming enter- prise came close on the heels of the goldseekers, bringing alcohol, gambling, and other vices that the Mormon citizenry felt obligated to curtail. Albert R. Lyman, then a young boy, watched as the Bluff city fathers purchased a load of whiskey from a would-be saloon keeper, locked it in an old shop away from the thirsty throats of a gathering clientele, and then made the mistake of letting an outsider ascertain the kegs' location in the building. That night, a man crawled under the store, drilled through the floor, punctured the barrels, and filled the jugs passed to him by the waiting crowd. Lyman reports, "The plot worked like a charm, and before morning, more drunken men wallowed in the streets than Bluff ever saw before or since."" Some prospectors floated the river to their destination in boats made in Bluff especially for the occasion. Others blazed trails across the mesas and through the canyons to a point where they could lower their supplies down the cliffs to the banks below. Bert Loper, who came to San Juan in 1893, described the difficulty of supplying the camps served by the Honaker Trail. We freighted our stuff to the rim of the canyon and there two or three of us young fellows at that time carried the stuff down from ledge to ledge until we got to the last big ledge [which] was about 130 or 140 feet down from the rim. We had to let our stuff over with ropes, and then when we got our stuff let over the cliff, we would go out to the point where the trail now goes over and climb down a rope ladder and then come back to the ledge and down to the river." Working on the San Juan provided some of the most difficult mining conditions in the American West. Yet even at the boom's height, strident voices declared the whole thing a scam. The Rio Grande Western sent an engineer to examine the goldfield, which in his estimation was "a fraud"; "there is no possibility of miners making average wages anywhere on the river."" Platte D. Lyman, an original settler in Bluff, sent a letter that made its way into the Salt Lake Herald. In it he cautioned that the continuous stream of travel going west through Bluff to the goldfields below was matched only by the stream of traffic heading east as discouraged miners told their tales of misfortune and sold their equipment at a loss." By the beginning of February, the word had spread sufficiently: the tide began its ebb. Not that there was no gold. The problem rested in its fine granu- lar nature and extracting it from where it lay in the gravel deposits along the river's course. The exact source of the gold, or its mother lode, is unknown but feeds from mountain streams into the San Juan." Thus, the big question became how to efficiently remove the mineral.

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