Telluride Mining

The Mineralogy, Geology, and Mining History of the Telluride District, San Miguel County

In 1858, the first gold was discovered. John Fallon made the first claim to Marshal Basin above Telluride in 1875 and
early settlement of Telluride occurred. The town itself was founded in 1878. Telluride was originally named "Columbia," but due to confusion with Columbia, California, the name was changed by the post office in 1887. The town was named after the chemical element Tellurium, which was never actually found in the mountains of Telluride. Tellurium is a metalloid element associated with rich deposits of gold and some silver. An alternate theory for the naming of Telluride is that it is a contraction of "to hell you ride". Telluride's mines were rich in zinc, iron, lead, copper, silver, and, of course, gold.

Telluride began slowly because of its very isolated location. In 1881 a toll road was opened by Otto Mears which allowed wagons to go where only pack mules could go before. This increased the number of people who settled in Telluride, but it was still expensive to get gold rich ore out of the valley. In 1890 the first trains reached town which brought in more mines and brought out more ore.

In June 1889, Butch Cassidy and his gang The Wild Bunch robbed the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride. This was his first major recorded crime. He exited the bank with $24,580.

Around the turn of the 20th century there were very serious labor disputes in the mines near Telluride. The Colorado National Guard was called out and there were deaths on both sides. Unions were formed as miners joined the Western Federation of Miners in 1896. 1899 brought big changes with most mines granting miners $3 a day for an 8 hour day’s work plus a boarding pay of $1 a day. This came at a time when workers were putting in 10–12 hour days and the mines ran 24 hours a day. Work conditions were treacherous, with mines over 12,000 ft and a lack of safety measures, not to mention bitter weather in winter months. Even the boarding houses were precariously placed on the mountainsides.

Telluride's labor unrest occurred against the backdrop of a state-wide struggle between miners and mine owners. Bulkeley Wells was one of the mine operators expressing considerable hostility to the union. The leader of the Telluride Miners' Union was Vincent St. John. There developed considerable intrigue and national interest over the disappearance — Wells declared it was a "murder" — of mine guard William J. Barney. The accusations, animosity, gunplay, and expulsions which followed were one part of an ongoing struggle throughout Colorado's mining communities which came to be called the Colorado Labor Wars.

In 1891, Telluride's own L.L. Nunn joined forces with Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse and built the Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant, the world's first commercial grade alternating current power plant, near Telluride. The hydro-powered electrical generation plant supplied power to the Gold King Mine which was located 3.5 miles away. This was the first successful demonstration of long distance transmission of industrial grade alternating current power. The invention sparked the "War of Currents" between the Westinghouse Electric Corporation and the General Electric Company headed up by Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan. At the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 AC current went head to head with DC current and with 25 million people attending the fair, it was overwhelmingly decided that AC Power was superior. Following the success of the Tesla and Westinghouse exhibit, the Westinghouse Company was awarded the contract to build the power plant at Niagara Falls. Nunn and his brother Paul, went on to built power plants in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Mexico and built the Ontario Power plant at Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the river. Nunn developed a keen interest in education as part of his electrical power companies and in conjunction with Cornell University built the Telluride House at Cornell in 1909 to educate promising students in electrical engineering. Later, Nunn along with Charles Walcott, started the Telluride Association. Nunn founded Deep Springs College in 1917. All of Nunn's educational endeavors are going strong today. Each year the Telluride Tech Festival honors Nunn, Tesla and Westinghouse along with current day technology and science leaders who have changed the world.

Telluride’s most famous historic mines are the Tomboy, Pandora, Smuggler-Union, and Sheridan mines. Beginning in 1939 the hard rock mining operations in the Red Mountain and Telluride mining districts began a lengthy consolidation under the Idarado Mining Company (Idarado), presently a division of Newmont Mining. The consolidation ended in 1953 with Idarado’s acquisition of the Telluride Mines. Idarado kept the underground workings and mill operations open at Telluride’s Pandora hard rock mine until 1978. Advancements in mineral processing during the 1970s revolutionized mining and made underground gold and silver mines obsolete.[citation needed] When the mine finally closed for good the snow which once tormented Telluride's miners had become the town's new gold, in the form of skiing and tourism.


A Historical Overview of the District and the Smuggler Union and Associated Mines and Veins of Marshall Basin
In 1875 Colorado was still a territory awaiting statehood, Ulysses Grant was serving his second term as president, and Benjamin Disraeli was in his second term as prime minister of Great Britain; pans of the South were still suffering under the reconstruction policies of the "Radical Republicans," Georges Bizet's Carmen opened in Paris, and the city of London completed construction of its new sewerage system. Also in that year yet another military buildup was taking place in Europe--Russia's standing army reached 3,360,000 men and Germany's 2,800,000; a period of unrest boiled over in the Balkans as Bosnia and Herzegovina rebelled against Turkish rule, and P. E. Lecoq discovered the new element gallium, The year 1875 saw the publication of Samuel Clemens's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, while impressionist artist Claude Monet completed his painting Boating at Argenteuil--and John Fallon discovered gold and silver in the high mountains near where the town of Telluride would one day be located.
Wise observers of history have called Leadville the quintessential mining camp of the frontier. If that is true--wand it probably is--then Telluride is the bridge from the frontier to the beginnings of the modern world. Nestled in a picturesque mountain valley and surrounded by cliffs and peaks sculpted to perfection, Telluride was the scene of many encounters that the mining frontier had with its own destiny. From its struggle to end its isolation and connect with the modern world to its mines' never-ending search for better ore-processing technology, Telluride was linked to the full bloom of the industrial revolution. Here the forces of capitalism and socialism clashed in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century labor disputes, while men wired up and harnessed the power of electricity to run not only the district's mines but also the town's street lights. And here, too, the goals of frontier precious-metal mining shifted in mid-twentieth century as the quest for base metals became a part of this country's struggle with several foreign powers.
Visitors come to Telluride to look at the ruins and rocks. The ruins among the peaks, resulting from 125 years of mining, are still capable of inspiring wonder at the inventiveness of the mining men and road builders, and the rocks and waterfalls demand the visitor's attention because of their beauty. The stories of the mining days intrigue us all. On top of that, the district has produced some fine mineral specimens.
This article deals with that portion of San Miguel County extending from north of Telluride beginning at Coronet Creek and then sweeping clockwise to the east-southeast toward Bridal Veil Basin at four o'clock--an area that has come to be known as the Telluride mining district. This is a geographical/political classification that has its origins in the establishment of county lines when San Miguel County was created in 1883. Geologically, the Telluride district is inseparable from both the Sneffels mining district of Ouray County and the Silverton caldera of San Juan County. It should be noted that before the creation of San Miguel County, the Telluride district was called the Upper San Miguel district, and this name is the one that appears on early maps, surveys, and documents. It should also be noted that C. W. Purington's 1898 study of the Telluride quadrangle dealt with a much larger area than that now referred to as the Telluride mining district. He also discussed the mining areas at Sawpit, Mount Wilson, and Ophir (Iron Springs district) (Purington 1898; Noel, Mahoney and Stevens 1994).

The Telluride district rises out of the San Miguel River valley, climbing up sheer cliffs of sedimentary rock, beginning with the lowermost red sandstone of the Dolores Formation (Triassic age) to the unconformity below the Telluride Conglomerate. This unconformity represents a 30-million-year episode of uplift and erosion lasting from about 75 million years ago in the Cretaceous Period to about 45 million years ago in the Eocene Epoch. The reddish-brown to reddish-gray Telluride Conglomerate is composed of rock fragments from the eroded formations. The amount of previously deposited rock that was removed during this erosion varies greatly from place to place in the southwestern San Juan Mountains, but it is always impressive. As one travels east up the valley of the San Miguel River, the conglomerate can be seen resting on progressively older strata, beginning at the Cretaceous-aged Mancos Shale west of town and finally resting on the Triassic-aged Dolores Formation at Ingram Falls. Here the erosional surface represents the removal of some 7,000 feet of rock. The Telluride Conglomerate is the most important host rock for the base-metal replacement deposits of the Telluride district (Purington 1898; Cross and Purington 1899;


Luedke and Burbank 1963; Burbank and Luedke 1966; Molenaar 1968; Fisher 1990).
Above the sedimentary cliffs lie the volcanic outpourings of another 30-million-year period--the eruptions that formed the San Juan volcanic field during the Tertiary Period. These rocks (the Oligocene- to Miocene-aged San Juan Formation and the Miocene-aged Silverton and Potosi Volcanic Groups) have been sculpted by glacial action, wind, water, and frost into an incredibly picturesque scene. Huge amphitheater-like basins have been scooped out, each topped by jagged mountain ridges. Sometimes peeking out through mists or swirling snow and at other times standing out against a brilliant blue sky, the area's mountaintops have inspired a litany of pronouncements from passable verse to the hackneyed "awesome" (Purington 1898; Cross and Purington 1899; Molenaar 1968).
The Telluride district lies at the western margin of the San Juan volcanic field. Between 30 and 40 million years ago, eruptions from a cluster of stratovolcanoes blanketed the area with ash beds and volcanic mud flows, reaching a maximum thickness of 3,000 feet. This cluster of volcanoes was located within an area that included the headwaters of the Uncompahgre River, Animas River, and Lake Fork of the Gunnison River. Today the rocks from these eruptions are called the San Juan Formation. At Telluride, they reach thicknesses of between 1,200 and 2,000 feet. It is the San Juan Formation that serves as the major host rock for the precious-metal deposits of the Telluride district (Luedke and Burbank 1963; Burbank and Luedke 1966; Steven and Lipman 1976; Fisher 1990).
Beginning about 29 million years ago, ash-flow eruptions broke out, first doming up the Silverton and Lake City areas as subsurface magma chambers filled, and then forming collapse calderas as the magma chambers emptied during large-scale ash-flow eruptions. Intrusion of more magma into the chambers renewed doming of the collapsed calderas in an episode of resurgence. Several rock units resulted from these eruptions and are collectively referred to as the Silverton Volcanic Group. The uppermost, capping volcanic rock in this part of the San Juans, is the Gilpin Peak Tuff of the Potosi Volcanic Group. It consists mostly of layers (multiple cooling units from separate eruptions) of welded volcanic tuff (Luedke and Burbank 1963; Burbank and Luedke 1966; Steven and Lipman 1976).
During these ash-flow eruptions, doming in the Silverton and Lake City areas was accomplished through faulting, leaving a series of partially overlapping structural features that resulted from different eruptions. Doming in the Silverton area was accompanied by the development of fractures radiating from the dome, with many extending northwestward into the areas now known as the Telluride and Sneffels districts. A similar set of radiating fractures developed during the intrusion of the Stony Mountain stock to the north of Telluride. All of these fractures are steeply dipping, many were occupied by dikes prior to mineralization, some do not crop out on the surface, and some have a distinct curvature while others are straight. These fractures later became the host sites for mineralized veins--the Smuggler, Ajax, Montana, Argentine, Columbia, and Dynamo veins (Burbank 1941; Dings 1941; King and Allsman 1950; Luedke and Burbank 1963; Burbank and Luedke 1966; Steven and Lipman 1976).
Beginning about 29 million years ago, ash-flow eruptions broke out, first doming up the Silverton and Lake City areas as subsurface magma chambers filled, and then forming collapse calderas as the magma chambers emptied during large-scale ash-flow eruptions. Intrusion of more magma into the chambers renewed doming of the collapsed calderas in an episode of resurgence. Several rock units resulted from these eruptions and are collectively referred to as the Silverton Volcanic Group. The uppermost, capping volcanic rock in this part of the San Juans, is the Gilpin Peak Tuff of the Potosi Volcanic Group. It consists mostly of layers (multiple cooling units from separate eruptions) of welded volcanic tuff (Luedke and Burbank 1963; Burbank and Luedke 1966; Steven and Lipman 1976).

During these ash-flow eruptions, doming in the Silverton and Lake City areas was accomplished through faulting, leaving a series of partially overlapping structural features that resulted from different eruptions. Doming in the Silverton area was accompanied by the development of fractures radiating from the dome,

with many extending northwestward into the areas now known as the Telluride and Sneffels districts. A similar set of radiating fractures developed during the intrusion of the Stony Mountain stock to the north of Telluride. All of these fractures are steeply dipping, many were occupied by dikes prior to mineralization, some do not crop out on the surface, and some have a distinct curvature while others are straight. These fractures later became the host sites for mineralized veins--the Smuggler, Ajax, Montana, Argentine, Columbia, and Dynamo veins (Burbank 1941; Dings 1941; King and Allsman 1950; Luedke and Burbank 1963; Burbank and Luedke 1966; Steven and Lipman 1976).
Purington (1898) minimizes the importance of ore shoots having localized economic values within the veins of the district, and Porter (1896) emphasizes the unusually continuous mineralization over the length and breadth of the Smuggler vein. In direct contrast, Fisher (1990) states that sites of vein intersections show increased mineralization, thus stressing the importance of the exact feature that Purington and Porter dismiss. There is no easy resolution to this controversy without field work and extensive access to mine maps with sample assay and production data. As a general rule, however, the intersection of two or more geologic structures often causes an increase in open space (porosity), with an attendant increase in mineralization. In either case, the mineral assemblages do change with both distance and depth over the course of the veins, and these changes did affect the economics of mining (Nash 1975; Doe et al. 1979). In veins radiating from the Stony Mountain stock, gold values increase, and silver values decrease, from north to south (Porter 1896; Mayor 1978; Fisher 1990).
All mining in the years prior to 1960 was carried on by mining the contents of precious-metal-bearing veins, and emphasis on the mining of gold and silver was dominant throughout the nineteenth century. During the years immediately prior to World War I, the arms race between the Central and Entente Powers began to create a market for base metals that came to fruition in the wars to follow. Accordingly, mining of the base metals grew steadily in importance for the Telluride district through the years of the twentieth century.
Zinc, copper, lead, and silver values increased with depth in the Montana-Argentine-Black Bear vein system, while gold values decreased with depth. In the Black Bear vein, gold values decreased by 45 percent between the 600 and the 1200 levels. The upper portions of the Argentine vein had gold values from one-third to several ounces per ton, while the deep portions of the vein contained 90 percent less gold. The same distribution holds true at the nearby Camp Bird mine and may be assumed to be generally true throughout the Telluride-Sneffels area.
The overall paragenetic relationships among minerals found in the upper portions of the district's veins (above the replacement orebodies) have been classified into the following four stages:
1. An early-sulfide stage. Abundant sphalerite and galena, lesser chalcopyrite and pyrite, and small amounts of quartz occur.
2. A middle-sulfide stage. Abundant gangue minerals (this stage accounts for some 75 percent of the quartz in the veins) and smaller amounts of the sulfide minerals sphalerite, galena, and pyrite occur. During this stage there was considerable structural movement along the veins, and there are examples of numerous reopenings of the veins.
3. A late-sulfide stage. Pyrite and chalcopyrite intergrown with quartz is found cutting and coating minerals of earlier stages. Gold mineralization begins toward the end of this stage.
4. A postsulfide stage. Gold mineralization continues. Also crystals of quartz, fluorite, and a tan carbonate mineral are crystallized during this time (Hillebrand 1957; Mayor 1978; Fisher 1990).
Some changes in the mineral assemblages observed in these stages may reflect separate pulses of mineralizing fluids, whereas changes over the length of a vein may reflect a changing composition of a mineralizing fluid over time and distance from its source.


Almost as if a sign of the times, the major discovery of mineralization in the district during the second half of the twentieth century was the deeply seated base-metal replacement deposits below the precious-metal-bearing veins. Most of these replacement orebodies are located in the Telluride Conglomerate, but some extend down into the underlying Paleozoic sedimentary formations (Mayor 1978). The orebodies, however, did not occur uniformly throughout the entire thickness of the conglomerate--the basal horizon of the conglomerate being the most favored site. Some replacements are simply massive, and "everything" is replaced. Others, however, appear as replacements of the cobbles and boulders, and the mineral assemblage contains 20 percent or more coarse-grained sulfides. These conglomerate replacements were obviously the sites where many of the fine crystal specimens were found. Replacement orebodies were found adjacent to the deep portions of the Ajax, Argentine, Japan, and Cross (Tomboy) veins (Mayor and Fisher 1972; Mayor 1978; Fisher 1990).
The replacement orebodies were classified into the following three forms:
1. Lateral-replacement orebodies. Orebodies consisting of a thin 1-4-foot-wide shell adjacent to the vein.
2. Swells. Swells extend out and away from the vein and may be limited to specific horizons in the conglomerate or Paleozoic sediments. This is the most common form taken by the replacement orebodies.
3. Manto orebodies. The mantos are generally quite wide with respect to their thickness. Mantos commonly form only at vein intersections (Mayor 1978).
The paragenetic relationships among minerals found in the replacement orebodies have been classified into the following three stages:
1. Calcium-silicate alteration of the Telluride Conglomerate. Limestone cobbles and boulders, as well as the carbonate and hematite that cement the conglomerate together, were altered to pink and green epidote, secondary carbonates, rhodonite, chlorite, and in some areas garnet or diopside. Pyrite was the only sulfide to crystallize during this stage.
2. Base-metal stage. Sphalerite, galena, chalcopyrite, and quartz crystallize. Lesser amounts of the gangue minerals quartz, epidote, calcite, and chlorite also crystallize at this time. Vugs to 30 cm, as sites of former limestone cobbles and boulders in the conglomerate, are filled with a replacement assemblage of these minerals.
3. Calcite and epidote stage. These minerals form a "cap" on previously crystallized minerals (Mayor and Fisher 1972; Nash 1975).
Nash's (1975) studies of fluid inclusions in gangue minerals indicate that a temperature of about 280 [degrees] to 290 [degrees] C prevailed during the first stages of mineralization. During the last stage (postsulfide stage), inclusions in quartz and fluorite indicate a temperature as low as 153 [degrees] C. It should be noted, however, that in the deeper portions of the veins where replacement orebodies occur prevailing temperatures were 50 [degrees] -- 100 [degrees] C hotter than those in the upper portions of the veins. In addition, the deep vein mining in the southeastern portion of the district encountered calcium-silicate skarn mineralization. Thus temperature plays an important role in the mineralogy of the district.
Early Discoveries and Mining History
Although the San Juans had first been prospected by trespassers on Ute lands, it was not until after the 1874 cession of the San Juans via the Brunot Treaty that serious prospecting was undertaken in what would become the Telluride area. During the summer of 1875, John Fallon examined the high country north of the upper reaches of the San Miguel River and located the Sheridan lode and several other claims (Hall 1889; Smith 1982; Nossaman 1989).
Within a year prospectors were drifting steadily into the area, staking claims, and eventually founding a small town named Columbia. The name didn't stick. The U.S. Post Office requested that the town be renamed--they were having trouble distinguishing letters addressed to "Columbia, Cal." from letters to "Columbia, Col." So the town was renamed Telluride, and today there is still controversy over how the name was chosen. Rickard (1907) says that the town was named because ora "stray occurrence of sylvanite, the telluride of gold and silver." Fetter and Fetter (1979) state that an 1888 issue of Mining Industry reported that a prospector found a chunk of gold ore in the San Miguel River and claimed that it was telluride ore. The Fetters, however, can't seem to leave well enough alone and promptly launch into a story of how the town might have received its name as a play on words taken from an admonition routinely passed on to travelers going into the area, "To Hell You Ride." This is not likely; and, while clever, it has not been helpful to serious inquiry.
For years geologists and historians claimed that the name didn't make any sense because there were no telluride minerals at Telluride. In fact, there are. Burchard (1883) reports tellurium at the N. W. H. Jr. mine. Both Burchard (1883) and Corregan and Lingane (1883) report that telluride minerals were found at the Flora mine. Bastin (1923) reports that both tellurium and selenium were found in the matte obtained by smelting concentrates from the Liberty Bell mine, but no reports were made of the minerals that contained these elements. Tom Rosemeyer personally collected gold and petzite crystals from the Argentine vein (Eckel 1997). More importantly, as far as the town's name goes, it is more important that people thought that telluride minerals had been found than whether the reports were true. Perhaps, in their eagerness to "grow" their town, they were clinging to a still-popular misconception that gold-telluride mineralization is the richest kind of gold mineralization. Moreover, as Duane Smith (pers. com., 1999) points out, the 1872 discovery of gold tellurides in Boulder County, Colorado, had caused a rush that the citizens of Columbia hoped would be repeated in their community.
Telluride did grow, slowly but steadily. It never boomed like most of the other Colorado mining camps, and it really never went bust. The Silver Panic of 1893 certainly put a damper on things and forced a great number of small mines to close, but there was enough gold in many of the veins to sustain mining. Within a decade of the silver crash, large gold production was pouring out of several properties. Between 1875 and 1990, the district produced 4,250,000 ounces of gold (Davis and Streufert 1990).
An Introduction to the Mining and Milling Operations of the District


The principal mines of the district lie near timberline in several glacially sculpted basins--the Liberty Bell in Coronet Basin, the Smuggler Union in Marshall Basin, the Tomboy and Japan-Flora in Savage Basin, and the Black Bear in Ingram Basin. By 1881 several of these lodes had been discovered. Nevertheless, a 24 September 1881 account by special correspondent "W. W." from Ouray, writing about placer claims along the San Miguel River in the Engineering and Mining Journal, is quite revealing. Four placer miners showed W. W. the following:
A cabin full of specimens, small ones on the shelves and big ones under
the bunks, one so big that it had to be rolled over to show me, instead of
lifted--not solid gold, however, but a quartz boulder full of fine gold,
and vughs [sic], or pockets, containing matted wire-gold and leaf-gold, the
fine gold being just as thick in the rock as the pyrites in the porphyry
vein stuff of our silver lodes. A few yards from the cabin they were
picking and digging out the float--for that is all it is--and shoveling
[it] into their sluice box, and then when the water had washed the quartz
clean, picking out the chunks that contained visible gold and saving them
for subsequent crushing in a mortar. There is a great deal of galena in the
gold quartz, so they were not using any quicksilver. It is commonly
reported that the four owners are taking out somewhere about $100 per diem
....

The next question is, where does this float come from? Well, if water has
brought it there, it has not come far; for in it were masses of galena that
one man could not lift, and as a brother miner who was with me said,
"That's demed poor stuff to float." No, it was... not water work... I could
see no evidences of the action of water....

[U]p a few feet above where they were washing, I could see on the bare
bed-rock the striation-marks of glacial action bearing down the gulch from
the great basin above. Now this basin is crossed by large known lodes, many
of them being visible where they cut through the... peaks... and doubtless
there are many unknown lodes .... Some day soon, the lode... that... this
float comes from... will be found, and then there will be a "hooraw" as it
is called here.
The approach to each of these basins from below has always been restricted to single routes winding up the cliffs from town, and each basin is topographically fenced in from above by the jagged cliffs rising from the basin floor. The mills of many of the mines lie along the San Miguel River, just upstream from Telluride at Pandora. Others are located above the valley floor, either at the mines in their respective basins or part way down steep side canyons. Aerial tramways running from the basins to the riverside mills mark the shortest distance between two points, at least as the crow flies.
In the early days, access to the veins was often provided through open cuts on the surface. Eventually stoping cut farther into the veins so that either shafts had to be sunk or adits driven into the hillside to make connections with the underground workings. Open stopes extending upward to grass roots are not uncommon in the area, and hikers and tourists should take note of this danger.
Mining through shafts becomes more expensive as shaft depth increases because of the increase in hoisting costs. Many San Juan mining companies used the great topographic relief to their advantage, driving long adits into the hillsides at low elevations and thereby intersecting the veins at depth and eliminating much costly hoisting. A. E. Reynolds claimed to have been the first man to access the deeper portions of mineral deposits by means of adits, but other Colorado mining men had already used deep adits--first at the Bobtail mine in the Central City district and then at the Burleigh tunnel in the Griffith district at Silver Plume (Bastin and Hill 1917; Kemp 1949; Scamehorn 1995).
Long adits were just one innovation in a list of technological innovations that characterized mining in the fast-paced world of the Industrial Revolution. While innovations promised to make mining a more efficient industrial process, most had a side effect of requiring large expenditures of upfront capital. The primitive extraction of minerals by hand, carried on by men simply trying to make a living, gave way to large-scale mining carried on by corporations and financed by the sale of stock. The corporations had the capital to develop veins and build mills, machine shops, ore-storage facilities, and housing for miners, millmen, and laborers (Storms 1911; Smith 1982).

Transportation
Large-scale mining required a relative ease of access not only to the mineral deposits, but also to the processes and markets that turned those minerals into metals and offered their sale. Additionally, secondary roads and trails were necessary to link mines and mills with primary transportation routes. The construction of these routes was usually up to the mining company. In the San Juans, as elsewhere in the nineteenth century, the problem of primary access was solved by rail transportation, but the solution came hard in these mountains.



Prior to the arrival of the railroad, all freighting was done by wagon or pack animal. By far the most important of the early San Juan freighters was Dave Wood. Wood's formula for success was to establish a connection from the Denver and Rio Grande's railhead to the outlying communities in the San Juans. What the railroad off-loaded Wood arranged to temporarily warehouse and then ship to the final destination. He also hauled back freight from the isolated mountain communities to the railhead. Because the railroad didn't begin serving Telluride until 1892, Wood provided the Telluride area with supplies for more than a decade.
In its heyday, the Dave Wood Transportation Lines had five hundred head of horses, mules, and oxen at work. Three of the best-known early-day photographs of Telluride show fifty-two of Dave Wood's mules loaded with nearly a mile of cable for the Nellie mine at the head of Bear Creek in the Iron Springs district (Wood and Wood 1977). Once when a young woman asked if Wood had "lived in these mountains very long," Wood replied, "Madame, I hauled these mountains in here." It was close to the truth (Mott 1946; Wood and Wood 1977).
The construction of the Rio Grande Southern from Durango to Ridgway was carried out by several crews simultaneously working on different sections of the route. In 1890, the northernmost section connected Ridgway first with Placerville on 10 October and then with Telluride on 23 November. This and other sections of the line operated independently of each other until everything was tied together, from Durango to Ridgway, in December 1891 (Ferrell 1973).
The first complete trip was made on 2 January 1892, but many months of labor were required to construct sidings, yards, short spurs, and depots; refine track alignment and ballasting; and construct a telegraph line. Connection was made with the mines and mills of the Telluride district via a 2.5-mile spur to Pandora, the site of the Smuggler Union mill and several terminal stations for aerial trams running down the mountain from the Marshall and Savage Basin mines. The Pandora spur was paid for by John Porter and J. H. Ernest Waters, two principals of the Smuggler Union Mining Company (Ferrell 1973).
It was 45 miles from Ridgway to Telluride and 117 miles from Telluride to Durango, for a total of 162 miles one way. At first, a trip over the length of the line included an overnight stop in Rico. Later, sleeping cars were added, and the schedule was adjusted accordingly (Crum 1942). By today's standards the trip seems to have been remarkably long. Nevertheless, the Rio Grande Southern filled a niche, and the county's total mineral production increased by almost one-third (Henderson 1926). Freight rates fell significantly during the first few years of operation. In 1892 only ore valued at $40 per ton could be profitably shipped by rail. A year later $20 ore could be shipped so as to make a profit (Canfield 1893).
Transportation to Telluride was only part of the story, and the story would be incomplete without mentioning transportation from mine to mill, which ultimately was solved by the introduction of the aerial tramway systems for which the San Juans have become so well known. Purington (1898) felt that aerial tramways had played an important role in increasing the district's production in the years between 1893 and 1898, and in retrospect these tramways define mining in this portion of the San Juans. Ore was brought down, and both the men and the easily loaded freight traveled up in buckets suspended from their wire rope cables. Before the end of the first decade of the twentieth century almost all of the major mining companies had come to depend upon aerial tramways to transport either ore or mill concentrate to its next destination.
The Smuggler Union Mining Company's mile-long Bleichert tram system running from the portal of the Bullion tunnel at a 10,915-foot elevation to its mill in the valley below at an 8,988-foot elevation, serves as an example of these systems. The tramway used 10,800 feet of heavy-weight carrying cable strung over fourteen towers between the two end points. The same length of lighter-weight pulling cable was used to propel the thirty-six buckets that ran along the carrying cable on a pair of tandem pulleys. The buckets were spaced out at 300-foot intervals, with each designed to carry 500 pounds of ore down the mountainside and lesser weights of supplies back up to the mine on the return trip. The buckets moved at a speed of 250 feet per minute, which is a little less than 3 miles per hour (Marshall 1952). Miners and managers alike sometimes rode the tram, especially in the winter and early spring when avalanche dangers made the tramways the safest route to the mines. Under almost any condition it was a spectacular trip.
Heavy, bulky freight for the mines still had to be hauled by teams of pack animals over the old, primitive zigzag trails to the mines. At the turn of the century, San Miguel County cut a 4-mile road to Savage Basin out of solid rock at a cost of $50,000. In places they couldn't cut through the rock, so they built a shelf supported with riprap timber cribbing (Storms 1911). For years burros and horse-or mule-drawn wagons followed this winding route to the mines; now passengers in four-wheel-drive vehicles simply turn their knuckles white.
Ore Processing


Early-day mining was no picnic in the San Juans, and the area acquired a dark reputation for failed mining activities. In 1881, Theodore Comstock addressed the problem of mine failures in San Juan County, citing eight significant failures for which he blamed "fraud, negligence, or inexcusable ignorance upon the part of the promoter or manager, or both." Negligence and inexcusable ignorance often involved problems with the processing of ore.
Some ores are richer than others, and some are easier to extract metals from than others. This fact dominates all ore processing the world over. The ore of most of the Telluride district's mines could be divided into two classes--high-grade and low-grade. High-grade ore could simply be shipped to the smelter. In order to do this, however, it had to be hand-sorted into two piles, a slow and costly process. The low-grade pile, left over after shipping the high-grade, could be treated via stamp milling and amalgamation, or crushed and concentrated using some method of density separation, or both. The concentrate was then shipped to the smelter. In 1910, Mining Science stated that ore shipments from Telluride ran from 2,500 to 3,000 tons per month--one-quarter as high-grade, three-quarters as mill concentrates.
New ore-processing technologies came onto the market at a very fast pace during the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s. The process or equipment that was on the cutting edge one day might become completely obsolete in a year. Additionally, the process that worked well with the ores from one mine might fail miserably with the ores from another. Storms made these points in 1911 when he said that "the ores of the San Juan mines were of good grade, but generally diverse and complex in character-their successful treatment required a great deal of metallurgical skill." Mill managers were constantly experimenting with both processes and equipment and making what were hoped to be improvements. More than once, however, newly introduced processes were abandoned soon after their introduction.
During these years, the major improvements made in ore processing were the invention of concentrating tables, the introduction of the process of cyanidization, and the development of froth flotation. Each was revolutionary, each solved specific problems in handling the district's ores, and each increased the efficiency of processing, not to mention increasing profits. With the introduction of each change, however, large-scale remodeling of the mill plants had to be undertaken.
The need to improve milling processes was pointed out in 1896 by John Porter, president of the Smuggler Union Mining Company. In a paper delivered to the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, Porter disclosed that his company's milling methods were startlingly inefficient--fully 40 percent of the silver and nearly 20 percent of the gold were lost in the process. (Porter 1896). Within a year the Smuggler Union had shut down its amalgamation plant and switched to concentration. Two years later the Liberty Bell added a 7-ton cyanide leaching plant to its mill (Henderson 1926). Telluride's mills changed processes time and again, building and rebuilding as needed--they were constantly struggling with the problem of trying to recover more metals from their ores.
Electric Power
By 1888 attorney Lucian L. Nunn owned Telluride's only bank, significant downtown real estate, and an interest in several mines. One of the mines, the Gold King in the Iron Springs district, was located above timberline and was so isolated that the cost of coal deliveries was eating up all potential profits of the operation. Nunn began to investigate the possibility of electric power at the Gold King. When his brother Paul consulted with George Westinghouse, the Nunns discovered that Westinghouse was building an alternating-current motor that would solve most of the major problems of this power source. The Nunns built a water-powered electrical-generation plant on the San Miguel River at Ames and installed the alternating-current motors furnished by Westinghouse at the Gold King. After extensive testing, the mine was switched to electric power, and the cost of operating machinery at the mine dropped from $2,500 per month to $500 per month (Lavender 1964).
Nunn established the Telluride Power Company at Ames, and soon the company was generating electric power not only for Telluride but also for most of the larger mines in the district. A couple of years later, power lines were run over Imogene Pass, and the Camp Bird mine was electrified (Henderson 1926). By 1897 the Telluride Power and Transmission Company was making the largest electrical transmission of power in the state. Eventually the company was developed into the Utah Power Company (Mott 1946; Lavender 1964).
Avalanche
In addition to the isolation that early-day mining operations faced during the winter months, each spring the avalanche season played havoc with mining operations in the district. The 1902 destruction of the Liberty Bell mine and mill buildings as well as their aerial tramway, and the 1924 destruction of the Black Bear aerial tramway, are often pointed to as the worst of these disasters. The Liberty Bell rebuilt and continued operations for more than twenty years, but the less-well-off Black Bear Company slowed to a crawl, reverted to leasing operations, and finally shut down in 1934 (Rickard 1907; Hillebrand 1957).
In truth, it was not uncommon for an avalanche to knock down a tram tower or two every year (Livermore 1928). The trams were usually out of commission for a week to a month, depending upon the extent of the damage and the cooperation of the weather with the repair parties. Some mining companies built V-shaped stone and cribbing structures in the slide pathways in an attempt to divide slides and divert them away from structures (Rickard 1907).
The Boardinghouses and the Town
Both Edward Pierce (1952) and David Lavender (1964) remember the ethnic mix of Cornish, Swedish, Finnish, and Norwegian miners in turn-of-the-century Telluride. Lavender also mentions the Italian and Irish railroad workers who came into the area to work on the Rio Grande Southern in the 1890s and then stayed on. Livermore (1928, 1968) recalled that many of the miners who worked for his leasing operation were either northern Italian, Greek, or from one of the Balkan states. Many of these men, as well as native-born American miners, depended on the mining companies for room and board. The larger companies worked around the clock and often had on-site boardinghouses, where four meals a day were served to accommodate three shifts of workers. Pierce (1952) could not recall any complaints about either the quality or quantity of food or the service. The mining companies realized that in order to hold their workers, good food was mandatory. Additionally, one of the Smuggler Union boardinghouses had a bowling alley, card tables, and a reading room with a fireplace, while another had pool tables instead of a bowling alley (Holland 1914).
Because the boarders were usually bachelors, their periodic nights on the town were a tradition that was remembered by the townsfolk years later. A grooming ritual got things started. First came a visit to W. B. Van Atta's store, the Up-to-Date Outfitter, where the celebrant purchased a new suit, shirt, tie, shoes, and hat. Then followed a trip to Harry Miller's Barber Shop, where a shave, haircut, shoe shine, shampoo, and bath set the stage for the evening to come. As more than a few establishments offered various entertainments, it would only do to take in all of them, starting with drinks at one establishment, dinner at another, more drinks and a little gambling at another, more drinks and a little dancing at yet another, and finally ending with one last drink or two and some female companionship at still another.
By one or two in the morning our once-splendent celebrant was probably in a state of complete disarray, with mud, whiskey, and chewing tobacco stains in all the wrong places. Additionally, he was probably now fully conversant with a horse beneath a lamp post, if not the lamp post itself. Somehow he got back to the boardinghouse, perhaps with Van Atta's financial assistance by advancing the fee for horse rental. The next morning arrived on time, and our now-dead-broke miner had to go back to work, swollen head or not. Life goes on. This is not to say that all miners lived such a life. Some saved their money, read good books, and eventually established themselves in their own businesses (Pierce 1952). Then, as now, such fine citizens were the backbone of the country, but life's more colorful stories usually come from the tales of the grasshopper, not the ant.
Silver Panic
In 1891 the average price of silver was $0.99 per ounce. A year later the average price was down to $0.87 per ounce. The U.S. government was subsidizing the price of silver through the Sherman Silver Purchase Act while western mines were producing more silver than the market could absorb; the railroads were overextended, and the European countries also had their financial woes. As a result, the U.S. economy was generally weak. Through the spring of 1893, the market price of silver continued its slide down to $0.82 per ounce. The British decided that they had enough silver. On 26 June they closed their mint in India, which was one of the world's largest purchasers of silver, and the price of silver dropped to $0.62 per ounce almost overnight. The United States repealed the Sherman Act and bimetallism was dead. The price of silver fluctuated for a year, but the price remained low, hitting bottom at $0.61 per ounce in March 1894 (Blair 1980).
More than one hundred mines in the Telluride, Ophir, and Mount Wilson areas shut down--their lower-grade silver-bearing galena ores could no longer be mined at a profit (Canfield 1893). Ernest Waters announced that the Sheridan-Mendota would be shut down if silver fell below $0.50 an ounce (Marshall 1952). With so many mine closures, the resources of the Rio Grande Southern were strained to the limit (Marshall 1952). Telluride survived. It was the gold mines that pulled the town through.
Labor Troubles
On 2 May 1901, miners at the Smuggler Union went on strike. At issue was the Cornish fathom contract system that had been introduced by mine manager Arthur Collins in 1899. Instead of receiving a daily wage, miners were paid according to how many "fathoms" of ore they mined. A fathom was not a fixed quantity of rock, instead it consisted of a 6-foot-high by 6-foot-long ore block that was as wide as the vein. Thus workers who were mining in portions of the mine with a greater vein width were required to produce greater tonnage than those mining a narrower vein section. The miners union requested an end to the fathom system and the adoption of an eight-hour day. Collins refused to negotiate with the union miners, published a justification of the fathom contract system as a reply to the miners (Denver Times, 14 May 1901), and then closed down the mine. After a six-week period, during which the problem simply festered, the company brought in a crew of scab miners.
Things got out of hand on 6 July when a confrontation at the mine between the union workers and the scab labor force coming off their shift erupted into a gunfight that left four dead and several wounded. Among the dead was the mine superintendent. The rest of the scabs were escorted by the union miners up to Imogene Pass and told to never return if they knew what was good for them. The governor sent State Senator Buckley to investigate. After looking things over, he sent the following tightly worded message back to Denver: "No need to send troops. The miners are in peaceful possession of the mines" (Wright 1905; Livermore 1968; Fetter and Fetter 1979; Smith 1982).
The Smuggler Union replaced the fathom system with a standard $3 wage for an eight-hour day, and things calmed to a slow simmer. Then, in November, a fire broke out at the Smuggler Union surface plant and boardinghouse, and instead of taking immediate steps to safeguard the miners in the mine, management wasted precious time removing a stash of firearms. Heat and smoke from the fire were sucked into the mine and twenty-eight miners' lives were lost from suffocation. The miners blamed the loss of life on what they believed was Collins's negligence. No corrective actions were taken by the company, and the miners' attitude worsened (Wright 1905; Fetter and Fetter 1979; Smith 1982).
A list of scabs compiled by the miners union fell into Collins's hands. In November 1902, Collins placed an ad in all of the town newspapers stating that the Smuggler Union would gladly hire any of the men on the union's scab list. The next night Collins was shot at his home near the company's mill at Pandora and died a few days later. Bulkeley Wells, son-in-law of Smuggler Union Vice President Thomas L. Livermore, was sent to Telluride to take over management of the mine (Wright 1905; Fetter and Fetter 1979; Smith 1982).
On 1 September 1903, Telluride millmen went out on strike, demanding a reduction of their twelve-hour workday to eight hours. The manager of the Tomboy mill hired scabs, and the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) walked out in sympathy with the millmen. Hired gunmen appeared on the streets and Bulkeley Wells's newly formed San Juan District Owners Association requested that Governor Peabody send troops. A troop train of the Colorado National Guard arrived on 24 November, and WFM members were deported to Montrose. A guard post was set up atop Imogene Pass to keep union sympathizers out of the district. Wells formed a Citizens Alliance in support of the mine owners. On 16 December the mine managers posted new wages for an eight-hour day. The union miners and millmen were furious that scabs were now to receive what the union had requested (Wright 1905; Fetter and Fetter 1979; Smith 1982).
Martial law was declared on 4 January 1904. More WFM members were deported. Wells took over command of the militia, replacing Major Hill. In March the governor recalled the troops. As soon as the train pulled out, the Citizens Alliance rounded up about sixty more unionists and deported them. The non-Alliance citizenry of the town requested that the governor return the troops and on 11 March they arrived back in town. Some of the deportees filed an injunction asking that they be allowed to return to Telluride, and, after a judge granted the injunction, a combination of Citizens Alliance members and the militia (outfitted with a Gatling gun) met the returning train with the unionists and held them hostage until a special train could be arranged to redeport them in defiance of the injunction. The troops left for good on 15 June. Over the summer, the Citizens Alliance continued to deport labor agitators, and, when there were no activists left to stir up trouble, things returned to "normal." The mine managers established an eight-hour day for all workers, and the WFM called off the strike (Wright 1905; Fetter and Fetter 1979; Smith 1982).
Several years later, in a final act of defiance and revenge, an attempt was made on Wells's life when a union miner named Adams placed a time bomb under Wells's bed. Wells survived the blast even though he was blown completely clear of the house. The second-story frame porch where Wells slept offered little resistance to the explosion and greatly reduced the concussion of the blast, while Wells's mattress cushioned him from the blast while serving as a vehicle for a short but thrilling ride (Livermore 1968).
In an interview published in the New York Herald, William "Big Bill" Haywood explained the political philosophy of the Western Federation of Miners, by stating the following:
We are socialists. The principles of socialism are the principles of our
organization throughout the mountains. We believe in an aggressive campaign
all along the line for uplifting of labor and the people in general. Here
is one of our cards of membership; you will see printed upon the back of it
in red ink, our creed, "Labor produces wealth, wealth belongs to the
producer thereof."

With statements like this being quoted in the professional mining journals, it's little wonder that the mine owners felt threatened by the WFM (Engineering and Mining Journal, 1 September 1904). On the other side, the intransigence of Collins, the bombast of Wells, and the overall lack of good faith displayed by management on numerous occasions explain the distrust felt by the miners.
Highgrading
Ore theft, more popularly known as highgrading, was always a problem for the gold-producing mines of the district. The mining companies tried various means to bring a halt to the practice, but many miners felt that they were entitled to some of the ore--simply because they worked long hours at a low to moderate wage under admittedly dangerous conditions. In a 1901 highgrading episode, the Smuggler Union caught three men "dead to rights" while in the act of stealing highgrade. Following the arrest of two of the highgraders, the company boardinghouse was searched and several hundred dollars of highgrade was found hidden with a small retort (Denver Times, 26 March 1901).
On 24 April 1914, Benjamin Skein, a thirty-year-old Greek immigrant with seventeen years' experience as a miner in Telluride, walked into the offices of the Cripple Creek Miners Protective Association and applied for a worker's card. The name of this organization is extraordinarily misleading, as the association had nothing to do with protecting miners. The Cripple Creek Mine Owners Association created the Miners Protective Association, making membership mandatory in order to work as a miner in the district. References were required so that union agitators and other "undesirables" could be excluded. When the association contacted the Smuggler Union Mining Company to check Skein's references, the Smuggler Union returned the following telegram:
Ben Skein has asked us to recommend him to you for employment. Cannot do
this as he was discharged for high-grading.
Highgrading
Ore theft, more popularly known as highgrading, was always a problem for the gold-producing mines of the district. The mining companies tried various means to bring a halt to the practice, but many miners felt that they were entitled to some of the ore--simply because they worked long hours at a low to moderate wage under admittedly dangerous conditions. In a 1901 highgrading episode, the Smuggler Union caught three men "dead to rights" while in the act of stealing highgrade. Following the arrest of two of the highgraders, the company boardinghouse was searched and several hundred dollars of highgrade was found hidden with a small retort (Denver Times, 26 March 1901).
On 24 April 1914, Benjamin Skein, a thirty-year-old Greek immigrant with seventeen years' experience as a miner in Telluride, walked into the offices of the Cripple Creek Miners Protective Association and applied for a worker's card. The name of this organization is extraordinarily misleading, as the association had nothing to do with protecting miners. The Cripple Creek Mine Owners Association created the Miners Protective Association, making membership mandatory in order to work as a miner in the district. References were required so that union agitators and other "undesirables" could be excluded. When the association contacted the Smuggler Union Mining Company to check Skein's references, the Smuggler Union returned the following telegram:
Ben Skein has asked us to recommend him to you for employment. Cannot do
this as he was discharged for high-grading.

This was, however, just another case of an individual having been caught helping himself to some of the company's ore. Ten years later Robert Livermore commented that highgraders were still getting away with gold from the Smuggler Union (Livermore 1968).
The ring of highgraders discovered in the 1940s was described by San Miguel County Sheriff Guy Warrick as the "most extensive ... in the state's history." The amount of gold stolen was at least $50,000 and could have been closer to $100,000. The sheriff's investigation uncovered a gold extraction plant in the basement of Telluride's Roma Bar, operated by the bar owner, Carlos Giardi, in partnership with several of his friends and relatives. Charges of fencing stolen property (the gold) were brought against a Grand Junction jeweler and his assistant, two saloon owners from Silverton, one Ophir resident, and seven Telluride citizens. Some of the gold was actually being bought by the owner of the Nellie mine, Paul Nardin. Fencing operations involved shipping the gold not only to Denver and Salt Lake City, but also as far away as Omaha, Nebraska, and St. Paul, Minnesota (Denver Post, 2 March 1940; Edgerton and Edgerton 1968).

More than one hundred miners were highgrading gold ore, especially from the 10 level of the Smuggler Union, carrying it out of the mine in their lunch buckets. After they had accumulated some 25-50 pounds, they took the ore to Giardi's Roma Bar, where he bought it at about 15 percent of bullion value. In addition to using out-of-balance scales (in his favor) to weigh the ore, Giardi often insisted that the miners take their cut in drinks from the bar (Denver Post, 2 March 1940; Edgerton and Edgerton 1968).
In one instance a couple of miners did put one over on one of the fences. They plated a steel ball with a thick layer of gold and fenced it for $15 an ounce, claiming that they should get a higher price because they had already done the extraction work. By the time the ruse was discovered, the miners had left town. The fence, unable to go to the sheriff, was simply out several hundred dollars. There were so many miners involved that the authorities decided to just let the whole thing die a quiet death (Edgerton and Edgerton 1968).
The Twentieth Century
With the closing of the Liberty Bell, Smuggler Union, and Tomboy during the 1920s, the district's production dropped precipitously. Several smaller companies acquired the old properties, and when the government boosted the price of gold during the Depression, mining activity increased for a time. It was, however, the increased need for base metals (lead, zinc, and copper) during World War II that sparked a renewal of interest in the Telluride district. The Idarado Mining Company was formed by Newmont Mining Company and Callahan Lead and Zinc Company. Through their shared interest in the Resurrection Project at Leadville, the U.S. Smelting, Refining and Mining Company and Hecla Mining Company also gained interests in the new company. Newmont took complete control of the operation in the 1940s. Idarado was formed to mine base metals, but gold and silver production from the famous old Telluride properties has been considerable. The deeper portions of the Telluride district's veins contained only a marginal grade of ore. It was profitable for Idarado to mine these veins only because their regularity allowed a systematic and efficient operation. The Idarado mine is now shut down, and the future of these historic properties is still up in the air (U.S. Bureau of Mines 1942; Hillebrand 1957; Ramsey 1973; Smith 1982; Mayor 1978; Holmes and Kennedy 1983).
Mineral Production
The three tables show mineral production for the district as compiled by Mayor (1978). It should be pointed out that Mayor's figures were derived only from properties that were ultimately consolidated into the Idarado mine. These figures do not, therefore, include all the Telluride district; however, since the Idarado Mining Company ended up controlling every mining property of significance in the Telluride district, along with a lot of the other ones, the tables are fairly accurate. Also, the tables are not carded out to the bitter end of the Idarado's production, but they come close. If one takes gold production as an example, Davis and Streufert (1990) rounded gold production to 4,250,000 ounces for the district, so Mayor's 4,209,977 ounces is within 10 percent of their figures.
As far as the production of the Idarado mine is concerned, Mayor states that more than 95 percent of its production came from the Argentine-Black Bear vein, Cross vein, and Telluride Conglomerate replacement ores. (Mayor actually includes the Cross vein in the Argentine-Black Bear system, but they simply intersect.) The replacement orebodies accounted for approximately 20 percent of the mine's production after 1960 (Mayor 1978).
THE SMUGGLER VEIN
Ownership of claims on the Smuggler vein was complicated almost from the beginning. On 1 September 1875 John Fallon staked the Sheridan lode on the Smuggler vein in Marshall Basin. According to local lore, Fallon and his partner (a man known only as "White") staked several other claims on the vein, including the Union, which was butted up to the north end of the Smuggler. Local lore has held that White's location of the Union did not hold up because he did not file the proper assessment paperwork. The Denver Republican (1 January 1907) reported that the Union lode was located on 3 May 1876 by James Walsh, James Bums, and Cornelius Bums. This date is seventy-three days prior to the location date of the Smuggler lode, with no one named White recorded. There is obviously some confusion here.
Again, according to local lore, J. B. Ingram, J. F. Gundaker, and Jacob Summa were prospecting in Marshall Basin and observed that the length of both the Sheridan and Union claims extended 500 feet beyond the 1,500-foot limits set by the 1873 Mining Law. On 15 July 1876 they fit ("smuggled") the 1,056-foot-long Smuggler claim in between what should have been the end-line boundaries of the two claims. Supposedly the Smuggler claim was declared valid because White had not filed the required assessment paperwork on the Union. This is an excellent story, but so far it is only legend (Corregan and Lingane 1883; Denver Republican, 1 January 1907; Henderson 1926; Fetter and Fetter 1979; Holmes and Kennedy 1983).
Fossett (1880) thought that the Telluride district was "an exceedingly rich and promising locality." His conclusions were largely based on these Marshall Basin mines. He reported that the Smuggler had been "preempted for a distance of a mile and a half, the locations from east to west, [sic] being the Humboldt, Mendota, Sheridan, Smuggler, Union, Cleveland and Cimarron." Fossett considered the Smuggler to be the best-developed mine on the vein, with a shaft, level, and tunnel through which a 12-24-inch-wide paystreak was being worked. He noted that the mineralization contained "some wire and brittle silver" and stated that 15 tons of ore sold in 1879 yielded 300-350 ounces in silver and 6-6 7/8 ounces of gold, or from $470 to $530 per ton. Additionally, 18.3 tons of ore from the Sheridan yielded 129-508 ounces of silver per ton and 1-3.5 ounces of gold, whereas 2.5 tons from the Cimarron averaged 100 ounces of silver and 23.5 ounces of gold. He judged the other properties to be rich in silver, showing little gold. His final conclusion was that "the Sheridan and Smuggler are among the best of the San Juan mines" (Fossett 1880).
By 1884 the two most important Marshall Basin mining operations were consolidations--Smuggler Union Consolidated and Sheridan-Mendota Consolidated. Additionally, the Cleveland, Bullion, Hidden Treasure, and Cimarron were also being worked.
Sheridan and Mendota
Fallon's development of the Sheridan was slow--the 1878 government surveyor's notes indicate the only improvements to be a tunnel and cabin (Mineral Survey No. 248). In that year he leased the property to John T. Donnellan and William R. Everette of Ouray. As they worked their claim and became more familiar with Marshall Basin, they realized the potential of some of the neighboring ground and staked the Mendota lode, which they operated along with the Sheridan (Corregan and Lingane 1883; Rockwell 1965; Mineral Survey No. 481).
Donnellan and Everette drove the Sheridan tunnel 100 feet farther along the vein and found richer ore. As exposed in their workings, the Smuggler vein was 4 feet wide with an 18-28-inch pay streak of ore, consisting of polymetallic sulfides and sulfosalts with gold and silver as native elements. Most of the values were in gold. The pay streak could be sorted into two grades of ore: (1) a very rich 6-inch portion that yielded from 100 to more than 400 ounces of silver and up to 3 ounces of gold per ton, and (2) a low-grade ore that could be milled and concentrated to assay 50 ounces of silver per ton. The high-grade ore was packed out and over the range to Ouray, then carried by wagon to the railhead at Alamosa, where it was shipped to Denver for smelting. Freight, both by pack animal and rail, combined with smelting charges, would run well in excess of $100 per ton. Still, Donnellan and Everette were able to make a good profit on hand-sorted high-grade ore carrying a value of $300-$600 per ton. The low-grade ore was segregated on the dump, awaiting the arrival of cheap rail transportation to the district. This type of operation, however, could only be carried on for six months out of the year--during the other six, deep snow made Marshall Basin inaccessible to pack animals (Corregan and Lingane 1883; Rockwell 1965; Mineral Survey No. 481).
J. E. Friend of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, bought the Sheridan from John Fallon in 1880. In 1883 F. A. Wilde of Ouray was managing the property for Friend. A 60-foot winze connected the two working levels (300 and 120 feet long). The high-grade ore carried 100-400 ounces of silver and 0.5-3 ounces of gold. After careful sorting, 275 tons of high-grade ore had been shipped. Following the sorting, some 300 tons of low-grade ore remained on the dumps. This material would have to be concentrated by milling before it could be shipped to a smelter (Corregan and Lingane 1883; Rockwell 1965). Concentration and shipment, however, would have to wait. There was no proven concentrating plant available, not to mention a lack of an economically feasible mode of transportation to handle low-grade ore. Actually, it would be inaccurate to call this very large pile of mineral matter ore because ore has an economically based definition--it is mineral material from which one can make a profit.
So far, mining at the Sheridan had utilized only the highgrade ore. The economic potential of the mine would only be realized when people with not only the knowledge of how to use all of the mine's resources but also the capital to accomplish that task were in an ownership position. After completing his 275-ton shipment, Friend put the mine up for sale (Corregan and Lingane 1883; Rockwell 1965).
Word of the availability of the Sheridan reached the ears of a former engineer at the Durango smelter, J. H. Ernest Waters--no mean feat since Waters was in Shanghai working for the Chinese government. Waters's brother Thomas, also an engineer, was probably responsible for notifying him. At any rate, Ernest Waters remembered the Sheridan well enough to present the opportunity to a group of English and Scottish bankers and merchants in Shanghai and convince them that this was a sound investment opportunity. In 1883 a syndicate was formed, the $250,000 purchase price was raised, and Waters was selected to manage the forthcoming mining operation. After resigning his post in China, Waters returned to the San Juans to take up his new duties. A few years later, in 1887, Waters's syndicate acquired the Mendota from Everette and Donnellan and consolidated the two properties as the Sheridan-Mendota Mining Company (Rockwell 1965).
Waters was a well-remembered engineer in the San Juans. One of his projects at the San Juan and New York Mining and Smelting Company in Durango had been the construction of a rail tramway. The tram was built to carry coal from the immediately adjacent coal mine to a row of beehive coking ovens and thence to the smelter furnaces. The whole operation had been nearly automatic (Marshall 1952).
Once again proving the value of experience, Waters built a spectacular ore-haulage system at the Sheridan. He drove a 3,470-foot-long adit through the hillside from an adjacent and more accessible gulch. Known as the Sheridan crosscut, it became the main underground haulage way for the mine. From the portal of the new adit, perched nearly 2,500 feet above the valley floor, Waters constructed an 8,400-foot-long inclined rail tramway down to the company's new mill on the floor of the valley. The tramway was double tracked, with an endless cable that was attached to rail cars running up and down the tracks in a continuous procession. Powered by gravity, loaded tramway cars crossed over nine bridges, the longest of which was 230 feet in length, and rumbled through four tunnels, the longest of which was 470 feet, before reaching the mill. The descent of heavier, loaded tram cars pulled empty cars back up to the portal. With a capacity for handling 800 tons of ore per day, the Sheridan incline was considered to be one of Colorado's mining wonders (Canfield 1893).
After construction of the new ore-haulage system was completed, an agreement was reached between the Smuggler and Sheridan companies to make an underground connection from the Smuggler to the crosscut. This agreement allowed the Smuggler to also use the Sheridan incline to transport its ore to its mill facility. Prior to this arrangement the Smuggler had used as many as six hundred burros to haul high-grade ore over the range to be shipped via the Silverton Railroad to the smelter (Marshall 1952).
John Canfield, the publisher and probable author of Mines and Mining Men of Colorado, thought the Sheridan-Mendota to be "one of the most typical and creditable, as well as one of the better scientifically developed mining properties in the west." He added that the Sheridan had ore in sight that would take ten years to mine with a daily production of 100 tons.
Smuggler and Union
After being staked by J. B. Ingram, J. F. Gundaker, and J. Summa in the summer of 1876, Gundaker and Summa sold out their interests in the Smuggler in 1877 for $800. The buyer was Jacob Ohlwiler's newly formed Ouray Mining Company. Ohlwiler was busy acquiring properties in the district--by 1883 the Ouray Company also owned the Bradley lode and a one-half interest in the Cimarron. Nate T. Mansfield and Richard Trezise leased the Smuggler for two years, and after paying a 38 percent royalty interest to the owners, cleared $125,000 each (Corregan and Lingane 1883; Denver Republican, 1 January 1897). An 1883 ore shipment from the Smuggler gave an average return of 800 ounces of silver and 18 ounces of gold per ton (Henderson 1926).
The Union lode was sold to the Pennsylvania-based Dolobran Mining Company in 1881. The Smuggler vein, as exposed in the Union, was 4-6 feet wide with a 10-28-inch paystreak that was similar to the vein section exposed in the Smuggler mine, containing "native silver and the ores of silver." The ore was considered milling ore and, when sorted and concentrated, carried 100-300 ounces of silver per ton with "some gold." The Union was at that time developed by 800 feet of tunnels, drifts, and shafts (Corregan and Lingane 1883; Denver Republican, 1 January 1897).
The Union lode was leased and worked by Roy Wrigley in partnership with John Porter. When Porter moved on to other projects, Wrigley went into partnership with J. H. Packard, and beginning in 1887 the two worked the property for four years (Denver Republican, 1 January 1897).
The Smuggler Union Consolidated Mining and Milling Company
In 1891 the Smuggler Union Consolidated Mining and Milling Company was organized to bring all of these properties together. John Porter assumed the role of company president. Under Porter's leadership the Smuggler Union became one of Colorado's best-known mines. The board of directors (James Grant, Nathaniel Hill, Richard Pearce, A. H. Fowler, William Bishop, W. A. Bell, Edward Eddy, and Anton Eilers) was a veritable Who's Who of the Colorado mining and smelting industries. Nate Mansfield, who had been involved with the properties since their infancy, having leased and worked the Smuggler for two years, was named the mine superintendent (Denver Republican, 29 April 1899).
John Porter and Ernest Waters, founders of the Smuggler Union Consolidated Mining and Milling Company, bought a part-interest in the Smuggler lode in 1888, but no mention is made of price. The Republican states that the Union lode was bought for $400,000, but no mention is made of a date. After other acquisitions were made, the company controlled the Bullion, Seventy-six, Union, Smuggler, J. W. Jr., Sheridan, and Mendota claims. It owned a fractional interest in the Smuggler, Seventy-six, and J. W. Jr., whereas the Sheridan and Mendota were bonded and leased (Denver Republican, 1 January 1897).
By September 1892 the Bullion (9 level) tunnel had been driven more than 2,300 feet into the hillside, opening a great length of the vein to stoping operations (Marshall 1952). Planning had begun to bring an aerial tramway to the tunnel, but the problems presented by the terrain with its high cliffs were significant--at 10,915 feet elevation, the tunnel's portal was more than 1,900 feet above and over a mile away from the mill at Pandora. In the following year a large galena orebody was discovered near the 2,000-foot mark in the tunnel on the Seventy-six claim. This discovery provided the impetus to go ahead with the tramway project.
The Smuggler Union then purchased the Pandora lode, a property located on a vein of the same name that is now thought to be the westernmost extension of the Camp Bird vein. The Pandora had been a small but steadily producing mine since the early 1880s. In 1883 Corregan and Lingane reported that the Pandora had been purchased by the French/American Pandora and Oriental Mining Company. The Smuggler Union purchase included the Pandora mill, a facility erected in 1877 under the direction of French mining engineer M. Charles Laforgue. The Pandora was an operating mine with considerable underground development work that was "yielding well," but what interested the Smuggler Union was the company's aerial tramway. It ran 2,800 feet--from the mine to the mill in the community bearing its name, Pandora--and was one of the first built in the district. As far as the Smuggler Union was concerned, the location of the Pandora mill and the path followed by the Pandora tramway were perfectly suited for adaptation to their operations at the Bullion (9 level) tunnel (Marshall 1952).
The company signed a contract with Trenton Iron Works to supply a continuous double-cable Bleichert tram system. H. M. Sackett, an engineer with aerial tramway experience in Creede, moved to Telluride to head the project. When completed, the modification of the tramway solved many of the company's ore transport problems from the Bullion tunnel to the valley below. At the same time, much of the equipment from the Sheridan mill was installed in the Pandora mill, and the capacity was enlarged to fifty stamps. When completed, Pandora became the site for the Smuggler Union's milling operations. These were but two of many capital projects undertaken during Porter's administration. During the next five years the company spent some $2.5 million on improvements (Denver Republican, 1 January 1897; Marshall 1952).
By 1893, the company employed more than five hundred men and utilized all the improved mining methods available at the time, including electrical power. At the time of the Silver Panic it was claimed that the Smuggler Union "would pay and pay well, even though silver should bring no more than fifty cents an ounce, owing to the percent of gold contained in its ore" (Canfield 1893).
At the turn of the century the mine was said to have the most extensive workings of any in Colorado, with haulage being accomplished entirely through adits. An extraordinarily uniform and continuous vein that could be traced for more than 2 miles on the surface had been developed through some 30-40 miles of workings. Mineralization was continuous (i.e., the ore was not concentrated in shoots) through the length of the vein, so the entire 2-mile length had been mined (Denver Republican, 29 April 1899).
Although the Smuggler vein was "unusually continuous," the gold-to-silver ratio did show a gradual transition through the vein's length. At the Humboldt claim on the north end of the vein, gold accounted for a meager 5 percent of the vein's total value; however, to the south at the Smuggler, gold was by far the more valuable commodity (Porter 1896; Purington 1898).
In 1897 the fifty-stamp mill at Pandora was processing 170 tons per day. The production for 1896 was 22,000 ounces of gold and 575,000 ounces of silver, for a total production of more than $770,000. In 1897 production was over $540,000, in 1898 it was over $577,000, and in 1899 it was over $604,000.
During the summer months of 1895 and 1896 the company devoted a great deal of manpower to sorting through and milling the mine dumps. The completion of the milling facilities and the aerial tramway made it profitable to process the low-grade ore that had been accumulating since the early 1880s. This low-grade ore averaged 1 ounce of gold and 30 ounces of silver per ton. After two summers' work, there were still 150,000 tons left to be processed. This work was only possible during the summer. In winter the dumps froze solid (Denver Republican, 1 January 1897).
On 29 April 1899 the Denver Republican reported that President John Porter had announced the sale of the mine to "Boston men [the Livermore-Aggassiz-Shaw syndicate] largely interested in the great Calumet and Hecla copper mine of Michigan." Rumors had been flying since the Denver Times had first reported discussions of an impending sale earlier in February. This purchaser was the New England Exploration Company, which paid $1.5 million for a 51 percent controlling interest in the Smuggler Union, according to the Times (23 April 1899). Most of the former directors continued to hold a minority interest in the new company, exchanging their old stock for that of the new company. Stepping down from the presidency, a position that he had held for nearly twenty years, John Porter returned to Durango to manage his coal and timber properties. It was a trip home for Porter, who, as manager of the San Juan smelter years before, had approved Ernest Waters's plans for a rail tramway (Denver Times, 23 April 1899; Denver Republican, 29 April 1899; Marshall 1952; Gressley 1968).
Cornish mining engineer Arthur Collins took over management of the mine for the new company. One of Collins's first acts was to supervise the construction of a new mill at a cost of $250,000. The mill was equipped with all the latest technological innovations and, when completed, was said to be among the world's best. Next the old Pandora mill was revamped; by September they were both in operation and processing about 450 tons per day (Engineering and Mining Journal, 1 September 1900). The mills were to be powered and lighted by elec tricity supplied by the company's own hydroelectricgeneration plant, using water diverted from Blue Lake above Bridal Veil Falls. Work had begun on this project in the autumn of 1900, but because of delays caused by the miners strike, it was not until several years later that a pipeline was completed to bring water down to the powerhouse at the falls, where it turned a water wheel to generate electricity for the mill and mine (Engineering and Mining Journal, 3 November 1900; Denver Times, 29 September 1901; Daily Journal, 30 December 1907; Rickard 1907).
At about this time Collins put an end to his miners' daily wage and instituted the Cornish fathom contract system. This compensation system was not popular among the miners, and the effects of its introduction have already been discussed in the section reviewing labor troubles in the district. The system may have worked well in Cornwall, but it was a disaster at Telluride. By spring 1901 the company had a strike on its hands called by a militant miners union bent on changing the economic structure of society, and this was only the beginning of the Smuggler's troubles. In November the surface plant at the Bullion tunnel burned.
Instead of profits, the company had losses and, logically enough, passed its dividend. When the labor troubles finally did calm down, Collins had been killed, and the new manager, Bulkeley Wells, had instituted a policy of leasing that did the company no financial favors. No one realized at the time that this was just the beginning. A combination of bad luck, accidents, natural disasters, and poor management would descend on the Smuggler Union and eventually bring the company to its knees. The Smuggler Union would never pay another dividend (Weed 1918; Livermore 1925, 1968; Gressley 1968).
In addition to the work on the mills, Collins began work on another important project. Prior to the purchase of the mine by the new company, the old Smuggler Union company had worked out much of the vein system above the Bullion (9 level) tunnel. If the company was going to have ore to mine in an economic manner, access would have to be gained to a deeper portion of the vein. The best access appeared to lie through the Pennsylvania mine, a property located on the neighboring Ansborough vein. Burchard (1883) had reported that the ore was "chiefly galena, copper, and iron carrying gold" in a vein that was accessed via a 61-foot-long tunnel. It was this tunnel that interested the Smuggler Union.
The portal of the tunnel that was to become the Pennsylvania (15 level) tunnel was on the cliffs along the west side of Marshall Creek at a 10,220-foot elevation, some 700 feet below the elevation of the Bullion tunnel. The tunnel had been abandoned at a length of about 2,000 feet by the prior owners. The Smuggler Union Mining Company acquired the Pennsylvania claim in order to use the tunnel to provide access to a deeper portion of the vein. In September 1900 the Smuggler Union had begun to build a new aerial tramway from the old Pandora mill to the Pennsylvania's portal. They planned to extend the tunnel to the point where the Ansborough vein cut the Smuggler vein and then connect to the Bullion tunnel via the 585 raise. Things didn't work out on schedule--the miners strike and a fire at the Bullion tunnel slowed their project down considerably.
When the company finally got back on schedule and announced plans to begin driving the extension, it was December 1904. Work began in March 1905, and an important discovery was made almost at the outset of the extension project. Miners cut a 4-foot-wide blind lead (non-outcropping, concealed vein) of "gray copper" (tetrahedrite) very near their starting point at the tunnel's 2,000-foot mark. This discovery eventually opened one of the Smuggler Union's largest and most important orebodies. Development and mining began upon completion of the tunnel and raise in 1907 (Purington 1898; Mining Reporter, 22 December 1904 and 23 March 1905; Engineering and Mining Journal, 1 September 1900 and 2 January 1926; Henderson 1926; Livermore 1925; Burbank 1941; Livermore 1968; Edgerton and Edgerton 1968).
Under Bulkeley Wells's management, leasing became standard operating procedure. Wells apparently thought that his rather conspicuous role during the strike made him less likely to be successful in dealing with miners, who most likely still considered him to be an adversary. He was probably right, but leasing had a downside of its own. It led to practices such as stripping out high-grade ore while failing to mine low-grade, thus leaving a portion of the mine's resources unused. As an example, Thomas Livermore's son, Robert, in partnership with several other men, was able to negotiate a lease in which his partnership was able to profit through improved technology in an area that other leasers as well as Bulkeley Wells had ignored. The partners leased and mined out the old stope-fills of the Union claim in the years around 1907. These stopes had been back-filled with low-grade material that was noneconomic in the days before the aerial tramway and Pandora mill. Livermore discovered that this material could now be extracted and profitably processed at the new mill, proving the old adage that yesterday's waste rock is tomorrow's ore. At one point Livermore's lease was supplying the mill with several times the amount of ore that the company's mining effort was able to furnish (Livermore 1968; Lavender 1987).
In 1913 ore reserves were 480,000 tons with an average value of $7.45 per ton. That same year the Smuggler Union was awarded $450,000 from a lawsuit that it had brought against the Liberty Bell Mining Company for "taking ore from ground belonging to the Smuggler." The payment was used to reduce debt and make improvements to the operation. By 1915 the reserves of the Smuggler vein seemed nearly exhausted, but the timely discovery of the Smuggler Union Flat vein saved the day. Ultimately this vein produced nearly 2 million tons of mill-grade ore, and Livermore (1928) reported that the Flat vein carried slightly more gold and lead but less silver than the Smuggler vein. He did not, however, comment on vein mineralogy. At their junction, the Smuggler and Flat veins do not cross, but instead run in a side-by-side orientation for some 800 feet. Along this feature the two veins formed a single, 10-foot-wide orebody, which was named the Combined vein. Between 1914 and 1920 the company made an average net operating profit of only $36,000 per year (Mining and Engineering World, 22 June 1912; Livermore 1925, 1928).

In the meantime, Grace Livermore Wells had divorced husband Bulkeley in 1918. Wells had become an embarrassment to the Livermore family because of his rumored affair with Denver socialite Mrs. Crawford Hill. Also, it was believed in many circles that Wells's extravagance may have helped to bring on the hard times that had come upon the Smuggler Union. Immediately following his daughter's filing for divorce on grounds of desertion, Thomas Livermore fired Wells, and Robert Livermore assumed the presidency of the company. Under Livermore's guidance, the company struggled through its ongoing encounter with adversity.

Fire destroyed one of the Pandora stamp mills in 1919, and in 1920 the flotation mill and many lesser buildings went up in smoke. The company built a new state-of-the-art plant designed to handle not only its production but also ores from both the Humboldt and the Black Bear mines. The new milling facility was completed in 1921 at a cost of $504,000. After preliminary crushing and sorting at the mine, the ore was transported via aerial tramway to the mill. Both the Bullion (9 level) and Pennsylvania (15 level) tunnels had preliminary crusher plants and ore-handling facilities, but the Pennsylvania-level plant had been neglected and allowed to fall into disrepair. (Livermore 1925, 1928).
A $780,000 profit for 1921-1923 went to pay debts, including the construction cost of the new mill. The passage of the Pittman Act pegged the price of silver at $1 per ounce; however, in June 1923 the Pittman Act expired, and the price of silver plummeted to $0.63 per ounce. The Smuggler Union lost almost $100,000 over the next six months. Between 1882 and 1923 the Smuggler Union Mining Company produced 486,346 ounces of gold, but now it was deeply in debt, and Livermore asked its creditors to allow it to liquidate as a going concern rather than shut down and salvage the property. Operating on a starvation budget, the company paid off all its short-term debt within a year. The long-term debt via bonds and notes stood at $229,109 (Livermore 1925, 1968; Henderson 1926; Gressley 1968).
On 31 January 1925, Livermore issued the first published report to Smuggler Union stockholders since 1912. He explained the financial status of the company and announced plans to mine the area between the Bullion and Pennsylvania levels, virtually an untouched portion of the vein. Access was to be through the Pennsylvania tunnel. Following the plans, a new surface plant was constructed at the Pennsylvania tunnel. This included a preliminary crusher, boardinghouse, ore bins, and a new aerial tramway running down to the Pandora mill. An electrically powered underground tram was constructed, and mining got underway. Economies were achieved in mining method, as the width of the Combined vein allowed use of the cost-efficient shrinkage-stope method. In a moment of supreme irony, the company reinstituted (with the miners' blessing) the old Cornish fathom contract system that had initiated the turn-of-the-century labor problems that were so disastrous for the Smuggler Union. The 2 January 1926 issue of the Engineering and Mining Journal carried an article with the headline "Smuggler Union Position Much Improved." The mine produced over 41,000 ounces of gold, over 500,000 ounces of silver, over 3,700,000 pounds of lead, and over 15,000 pounds of copper. Payments were made on the long-term debt, and it looked as though the mine was on its way to solvency (Livermore 1925, 1928, 1968; Gressley 1968; Lavender 1987).
Then, in October 1927, fire completely destroyed all of the new ore-handling surface plant at the portal of the Pennsylvania tunnel. This turned out to be the straw that broke the camel's back--Robert Livermore was not able to raise the $100,000 needed to rebuild the plant. During the winter months the company engineers tried to modify its ore-handling facilities at the Bullion (9 level) tunnel, but by late summer they found it impossible to produce the tonnage of ore required by the huge mill to allow a profitable operation. The decision was made to mine only higher-grade ores and to shut down the mine when they were exhausted. On 6 January 1928 the mine shut down. At the time of its closure the Smuggler Union had been operating for just over fifty years and had just over 50 miles of underground workings. Livermore sold the mine for $77,000 to the Denver Metal and Machinery Company, who planned to salvage track, equipment, and machinery. It later passed into the hands of the Telluride Holding Corporation (Worchester 1930; Danenbarger 1936; Telluride Journal, 19 December 1936; Hemlund 1941; Livermore 1968; Gressley 1968).
Production records for the Smuggler Union properties are a mess. Prior to consolidation, early records are incomplete because production came from many separate claims, each worked by different operators. The tendency to overestimate early production from the mines of the Smuggler vein was a problem to which even John Porter referred (Denver Times, 23 April 1899). In 1928 Robert Livermore reported a total production of $60 million, referring to "reliable hearsay" as one of his sources. Ever since, the $60-million figure has become both self-perpetuating and self-corroborating. I propose that $35 million(*) total production is a much more reasonable estimate.
For nearly a decade the Smuggler Union was mostly idle. A few leasers carried on minimal operations, and then, in December 1936, the famous old property was sold to Veta Mines, Inc., who planned an aggressive exploration program in the deep portions of the vein. After completion of a $100,000 exploration effort, Veta announced plans for deep development on the vein and began production about the time that World War II broke out. After the war, the property was leased and then purchased by Idarado Mines (Telluride Journal, 19 December 1936; Denver Mining Record, 25 June 1938; Silverton Standard, 28 October 1938)
Minerals of the Smuggler Vein([dagger])
Purington (1898) described the overall structure of the vein as typical of fissure fillings, having a comb structure of quartz crystals protruding into the vein from both walls, sometimes meeting and interlocking, sometimes leaving open vugs. After examining the 9 level, Rickard (1907) pointed out that visible gold was usually found in a white massive quartz seam in which quartz crystal-lined vugs were common. He stated that this structure resulted from crustification or crystal growth in the open spaces separating pieces of broken rock. (We would call this breccia-fill crystal growth.) The vein contained a "wonderful array of fine crystals of quartz, siderite, argentite, rhodochrosite, gold and silver." The transparency of the crystals, especially the quartz and siderite, suggested to Rickard that crystal growth had been very slow. Hurst (1922) describes the vugs as containing gold, silver, polybasite, pyrargyrite, and tetrahedrite. He noted that base-metal mineralization usually took on a banded appearance, with alternating, corrugated layers of sphalerite, pyrite, and galena interspersed between more or less irregular streaks of quartz and fragments of wall-rock breccia.
All descriptions of vein mineralogy that date prior to 1915 refer to the Smuggler vein. After the discovery of the Flat vein, some descriptions of minerals from the Smuggler Union may refer to the Flat vein without being so identified. To the best of my knowledge, this does not appear to have been a common error, but the potential for problems should always be kept in mind. Livermore does not comment on the mineralogy of the Flat vein, only reporting that it contains gold, silver, and lead values.
Acanthite, [Ag.sub.2]S. Rickard's (1907) wonderful array of fine crystals included argentite (paramorphed by acanthite). He does not describe the crystals. I have observed sectile gray growths of acanthite after argentite interstitial to quartz crystals. Where the acanthite has grown into microvugs, it takes on a lumpy rounded appearance that is probably best described as a blob. In hand specimens the quartz looks gray, but under the microscope it can be seen that the interstitial acanthite growth is responsible for the gray color. Associated with the acanthite in the gray quartz are both native silver and gold in a variety of irregular colors and forms. The gold exhibits various colors, from pale yellow, to yellow, to reddish-yellow. In some cases the gold is intergrown with the acanthite, while the silver is always intergrown with the acanthite and appears to be replacing it. Adjacent to the gray quartz with acanthite and gold is sugary white quartz with massive galena. Several other as-yet-unidentified sulfides are present in the specimen.
Ankerite, Ca([Fe.sup.+2],Mg,Mn)[([CO.sub.3]).sub.2]. Grayish-white ankerite veinlets cut quartz. Ankerite is also found with calcite in vugs (Purington 1898).
Arsenopyrite, FeAsS. Purington (1898) reported arsenopyrite at the Smuggler. Hurst (1922) observed slender crystals of arsenopyrite with pyrite as wall-rock alteration minerals in the Smuggler Union mine.
Barite, Ba[SO.sub.4]. Purington (1898) mentioned barite found at the Smuggler Union.
Calcite, Ca[CO.sub.3]. After minute amounts of gypsum, calcite is the latest gangue mineral. It is commonly seen as fine-grained films or coatings along fracture planes in the ore. Acutely terminated scalenohedral crystals coat rhodochrosite (Hurst 1922).
Hills (1917) reported on a Marshall Basin specimen of yellow calcite filling a vug in white quartz. Fine grains of gold were evenly and abundantly disseminated through the calcite.

Chalcocite, [Cu.sub.2]S. Thin sooty films of supergene chalcocite were observed coating pyrite (Hurst 1922).
Chalcopyrite, CuFe[S.sub.2]. Hurst (1922) reported that chalcopyrite is nearly always present and intimately intergrown with tetrahedrite.

Chlorite group, undivided, unspecified. Chlorite, calcite, and pyrite characterize the propylitic zone of alteration that lies beyond the narrow sericitized fringe along the Smuggler and other veins in the district (Hurst 1922).
Copper, Cu. Rarely, thin arborescent films of supergene copper occurs on fracture planes of gray quartz (Hurst 1922). Purington (1898) noted the presence of copper, stating that the mine superintendent, Nate Mansfield, showed him a small arborescent specimen.

Galena, PbS. Alternating, corrugated layers of sphalerite, pyrite, and galena are interspersed between more-or-less irregular streaks of quartz and fragments of wall-rock breccia (Hurst 1922). An ore sample from the vein showed massive galena in sugary white quartz with gold in gray quartz (my observation).

Gold, Au. In its early days the Smuggler Union was well known for high-grade gold ores and fine gold specimens, but Purington (1898) reported that the average gold assay value was "just over one-half ounce ... per ton." I observed an ore with massive galena in sugary white quartz, and gold with acanthite in gray quartz. The gold occurs in irregularly shaped grains that exhibit a remarkable variety of colors, from pale yellow, to yellow, to reddish-yellow. This specimen is discussed more fully under acanthite. Rickard (1907) reported crystalline aggregates of great beauty and also noted the presence of wire gold. The material from the 9 level was electrum, but gold from the upper levels of the mine was purer. I have observed several specimens exhibiting narrow leaves or ribbons of gold on quartz. Hurst (1922) noted that gold leaves had serrated or hackly edges. Although Porter (1896) thought that visible gold was more common than visible native silver in the Smuggler ores, he acknowledged that visible gold was uncommon.

The Boettcher collection at the Colorado School of Mines has an excellent Smuggler Union matrix specimen (CSM #73) with a complex intergrowth of gold leaves. Originally the specimen was housed in the Frank Allison collection; the Boettchers acquired it and donated it to the School of Mines (Eckel 1997).

The Denver Museum of Natural History has on exhibit the award-winning John Porter gold specimen. The president of the Smuggler Union Mining Company donated a 175.5-ounce gold-in-quartz specimen to the Colorado Scientific Society, which in turn donated the specimen to the Denver Museum. Calculations were made by the Denver Mint showing that the specific gravity of the specimen indicated that it contains 86.64 ounces of gold. The Porter specimen (DMNH #8056) was presented with awards at both the 1893 Columbian Exposition and the 1900 Paris Exposition. It has been cut and polished to show off a 4-inch vein of gold in quartz running through it and was illustrated in the December 1904 issue of Mines and Minerals (Eckel 1997).

Gypsum, Ca[SO.sub.4].2[H.sub.2]O. Hurst (1922) reported that gypsum (in minute amounts) was the last gangue mineral to form.

Pearceite, [(Ag,Cu).sub.16][As.sub.2][S.sub.11]. "Arsenical polybasite," now known as pearceite, was reported in ores from Marshall Basin (Penfield and Pearce 1892). No further locality information was given, but the Smuggler vein is the largest and most important in the basin.

Polybasite, [(Ag,Cu).sub.16][Sb.sub.2][S.sub.11]. Purington (1898) reported polybasite, with other silver minerals, in the mines of the Smuggler vein. The polybasite occurs as black, flattened, pseudohexagonal prisms with striated basal pinacoids. Occasionally such crystals are found coated with and altering to silver. I have observed several such crystals, between 15- and 20mm across, both as solitary crystals and as intergrowths of several crystals. Hurst (1922) found polybasite intergrown with tetrahedrite, sometimes surrounded by or partly enclosed in hexagonal crystals of pyrargyrite. In addition to being associated with tetrahedrite, polybasite and tetrahedrite were found in quartz vugs with gold and silver. Denver Museum of Natural History specimen #595 consists of a 1.2-cm pseudohexagonal polybasite crystal perched on clear quartz crystals. The locality given is simply Marshall Basin.

Proustite, [Ag.sub.3]As[S.sub.3]. Proustite was reported from the Smuggler mine by Purington (1898). Hurst (1922) reported that it is associated with pyrargyrite, polybasite, and the common sulfides (pyrite, galena, and sphalerite) in a calcite, quartz, and rhodochrosite gangue. Bastin (1923) reported that it formed small masses intergrown with galena and tennantite.

Pyrargyrite, [Ag.sub.3]Sb[S.sub.3]. Purington (1898) observed pyrargyrite (with other silver minerals) in the Smuggler mine, occurring with both the common sulfides (galena, sphalerite, and pyrite) and the gangue minerals (calcite, quartz, and rhodochrosite). Hurst (1922) observed pyrargyrite partly and completely enclosing polybasite crystals on tetrahedrite. Pyrargyrite replaces tetrahedrite from the center outward, while polybasite replaces tetrahedrite inward from the surrounding quartz. Also, Hurst speculated that it was the complex silver sulfosalts that were responsible for the large mill losses of silver in the early days.

Pyrite, Fe[S.sub.2]. Purington (1898) reported that pyrite was the most common sulfide mineral in the vein. Hurst (1922) reported alternating, corrugated layers of sphalerite, pyrite, and galena interspersed between more or less irregular streaks of quartz and fragments of wall-rock breccia.

Quartz Si[O.sub.2]. Quartz is the most important gangue mineral occurring in the vein. It is usually fine grained, but large crystals are not uncommon. Quartz is found throughout the vein's vertical extent. Although typically white or almost colorless, it may be dark gray when accompanied by the base-metal sulfides. An ore specimen that I observed and that showed gold and acanthite in gray quartz and massive galena in sugary white quartz is discussed under those mineral names. Purington (1898) went into great detail in his discussion of quartz-lined vugs. The crystals project from the walls of the vein into open spaces, sometimes interlocking, sometimes leaving vugs later filled with gold or polybasite. Quartz crystallized in at least two, and probably three, stages.

Rhodochrosite, Mn[CO.sub.3]. In the Smuggler Union mine, rhodochrosite is fairly common and was deposited early with the first generation of quartz. Calcite commonly coats rhodochrosite as acutely terminated scalenohedral crystals. A later generation of rhodochrosite occurs as platy aggregates or as crystals in quartz vugs (Hurst 1922). Purington (1898) reported that Porter believed that portions of the vein with a great deal of rhodochrosite were likely to lack gold and silver mineralization. Rickard (1907) reported rose-red crystals of rhodochrosite.
Rhodonite, ([Mn.sup.+2],[Fe.sup.+2],Mg,Ca)Si[O.sub.3]. Irregular bands of rhodonite typically occur in the hanging wall or in the main body of the Smuggler vein (Rickard 1907). To the best of my knowledge, this identification has not been verified by modern methods, and the mineral could be pyroxmangite.
Siderite, [Fe.sup.2+][CO.sub.3]. Rickard (1907) reported handsome yellow crystals of siderite encrusting quartz and calcite.

Silver, Ag. In one of the earliest reports made on the Smuggler vein, Fossett (1880) noted that "some wire and brittle silver" were vein components. I observed an ore sample showing massive galena in sugary white quartz and gold with acanthite in gray quartz. Silver was observed to be intergrown with and replacing some of the acanthite. The specimen is discussed more fully under acanthite. Purington (1898) reported an average assay value of 12 ounces of silver per ton, but he stated that silver was rare with most of the values coming from galena and sulfosalts. Rickard (1907) mentioned silver but did not describe the habit or associations. Hurst (1922) and Bastin (1923) reported that secondary, supergene silver is found in the vein to a depth of 1,800 feet. It is speculated that the silver formed at the expense of polybasite, first replacing it along cracks. Hurst (1922) reported matted aggregates of wire silver replacing polybasite in quartz.

Sphalerite, (Zn,Fe)S. Purington (1898) reported sphalerite to be common in the vein. The common sulfides are found in alternating, corrugated layers of sphalerite, pyrite, and galena interspersed between more-or-less irregular streaks of quartz and fragments of wall-rock breccia. Rosin-colored sphalerite is commonly coated with a black tarnish and occurs in irregular streaks or as massive intergrowths with the other common sulfides in bluish-gray quartz (Hurst 1922).
Stephanite, [Ag.sub.5]Sb[S.sub.4]. Both Fossett (1880) and Corregan and Lingane (1883) noted the presence of "brittle silver" (stephanite). Purington (1898) identified stephanite in the Smuggler and Humboldt, where it was mixed with other silver minerals and with the base-metal sulfides. In one specimen stephanite was intimately associated with pyrite in a matrix of tabular calcite crystals, all on quartz. These reports, however, are based upon his observation that some "specimens show orthorhombic crystals ... it seems probable that some stephanite occurs." To the best of my knowledge, stephanite has not been confirmed by modern methods.

Sylvanite, [(Ag,Au).sub.2][Te.sub.4]. According to Rickard (1907), in a discussion of the discovery of the Sheridan claim at the Smuggler Union mine in 1875, the name of the mining camp of Telluride originated from a stray occurrence of the mineral sylvanite. Although the presence of sylvanite has not been verified by modern methods, the presence of petzite, another gold-silver telluride mineral, has been confirmed.

Tennantite, [(Cu,Fe).sub.12][As.sub.4][S.sub.13]. Bastin (1923) reported tennantite intergrown with proustite and galena.
Tetrahedrite, [(Cu,Fe,Ag).sub.12][(Sb, As).sub.4][S.sub.13.] Rickard (1907) mentioned tetrahedrite at the Smuggler but did not describe its habit or associations. Purington (1898) thought that gray copper (tetrahedrite) was the main source of silver in many of the mines of the district. Hurst (1922) reported that tetrahedrite is fairly abundant in places but not ubiquitous, as are pyrite, chalcopyrite, sphalerite, and galena. It occurs most frequently in quartz vugs with chalcopyrite, polybasite, and silver. The tetrahedrite includes polybasite and is veined by silver. Purington (1898) reported freibergite at the Smuggler, but Hurst (1922) did not observe it, although he did observe polybasite inclusions in tetrahedrite. In addition, he noticed that fractures cutting host tetrahedrite and extending into polybasite inclusions were sites where native silver had been introduced and had begun to replace both sulfosalts. He speculated that because these two minerals occur in tetrahedrite, they could account for the high silver content that led to the identification of freibergite. I have observed euhedral tetrahedrite crystals to 1 cm on edge. The crystals are perched on quartz along with rosin-colored sphalerite showing the black tarnish reported by Hurst (1922). Modreski (1988) confirmed that 3-5-mm crystals on quartz crystals, from Marshall Basin, were tetrahedrite (DMNH #577) containing 1.5 percent silver by weight.

THE CIMARRON AND BRADLEY LODES, SMUGGLER VEIN
Located at, and just south of, the junction of Marshall and Savage Creeks, the Cimarron and Bradley lodes are the southernmost claims on the Smuggler vein. Burchard (1883) considered the Bradley to be "an extension of the Cimarron." In 1883 Jacob Ohlwiler's Ouray Mining Company owned a one-half interest in the Cimarron, a two-thirds interest in the Smuggler, and the Bradley lode, outright. Burchard (1883) reported that the Cimarron lode had about 600 feet of development, was producing from two levels, and had been shipping ore all season. Seventy-five tons of ore were reported to have been shipped, and reserves in sight were reported to be "nearly if not quite, $500,000" (Corregan and Lingane 1883).

In 1890 the Hector Mining Company was formed by A. E. Reynolds, William F. Havemeyer, J. H. Bradley, and Hubbard W. Reed to work the Cimarron. Reed managed the property for the company, and it was under his management that the operation became a significant producer. The new company built a mill at the portal to the 4 level. Reed designed the mill to operate with water power during the summer, resorting to coal-fired boilers supplying steam power in the winter when freezing temperatures put an end to running water. In order to carry out the winter power change-over, Reed negotiated an agreement with the Smuggler Union Company to have coal trammed up from the railhead at Pandora (Purington 1898; Scamehom 1995).

Stockholders in the new company included friends of the wealthy Havemeyer who expected dividends from the mining venture. When initial production was found to be insufficient to pay dividends, Havemeyer forwarded funds out of his own pocket to Reynolds, who then paid fictitious dividends to Havemeyer's friends (Scamehom 1995).
Between 1890 and 1898 the company received more than $638,000 from ore sales (Scamehom 1995). Purington (1898) reported that the mine workings totaled close to 3,000 feet of drifts on five levels. In 1900 the Hector Mining Company was combined with two other A. E. Reynolds-controlled companies, the Caroline Mining Company and the Glacier Mining Company, to form the new Revenue Tunnel Mines Company (Scamehorn 1995).
In the summer of 1911 Henry M. Adkinson and Associates took a long-term lease on the Cimarron. The staff of the Mining and Engineering World (27 January 1912) thought that the Cimarron was one of the best prospects in the district and that Adkinson and Associates were capable operators. They expressed hope that the mine might become a large producer. Evidently things did not work out in a spectacular fashion, as it did not receive comment in the press again until 1940, when Veta Mines leased the properties from George Wagner (Montrose Press, 6 January 1940). Veta intended to work the deeper levels of the mine, utilizing modern milling and flotation methods that would allow it to derive a profit from base-metal ores too lean in gold and silver to be processed in the past. A year later it was reported that much lower-grade material from the old dumps had been processed (Denver Mining Record, 25 January 1941). After the Veta-Idarado consolidation, the separate identity of the Cimarron is lost in the shuffle of the old properties.

Minerals of the Cimarron and Bradley
Calcite, Ca[CO.sub.3]. Calcite crystals were noted by Purington (1898). See rhodochrosite.
Galena, PbS. Galena was contained in the vein's "silver streak"--a zone consisting of many parallel laminae of sulfides and quartz. Quartz formed the border of each lamina around a core of sphalerite, galena, and tetrahedrite (Purington 1898).
Gold, Au. Gold occurs in distinct streaks in the vein, consisting of a slightly pinkish quartz with disseminated pyrite and small amounts of other sulfides (Purington 1898). Leaf and wire gold were reported by Corregan and Lingane (1883).
Rhodochrosite, Mn[CO.sub.3]. Purington (1898) reported rhombohedral calcite and manganese spar (rhodochrosite) crystals covering the faces of larger quartz crystals.

Silver, Ag. Leaf and wire silver were reported by Corregan and Lingane (1883).
Sphalerite, (Zn,Fe)S. Sphalerite was one of the sulfide/sulfosalt core minerals found in the parallel laminae that made up the vein's "silver streak." Quartz formed the border of each lamina around a core of sphalerite, galena, and tetrahedrite (Purington 1898).

Tetrahedrite, [(Cu,Fe,Ag).sub.12][(Sb,As).sub.4][S.sub.13]. Corregan and Lingane (1883) reported "gray copper." Argentiferous tetrahedrite was the main silver-bearing mineral of the vein's "silver streak." This streak consisted of a zone of parallel laminae, with each lamina being composed of quartz borders lying to either side of a core of the metallic minerals that included silver-bearing tetrahedrite (Purington 1898).


Table 1. Mineral production for the Telluride district 1875-1945
Ore produced Gold Silver Lead Zinc Copper
(tons) (troy oz.) (troy oz.) (tons) (tons) (tons)

13,363,866 3,747,605 35,948,799 113,592 -- --
Table 2. Mineral production for the Idarado mine, Telluride district (working the same veins represented in table 1)
1945-1976
Ore produced Gold Silver Lead Zinc Copper
(tons) (troy oz.) (troy oz.) (tons) (tons) (tons)
10,505,328 735,372 20,485,389 244,774 380,292 75,638

Table 3. Total mineral production for the Telluride district 1875-1976
Ore produced Gold Silver Lead Zinc Copper
(tons) (troy oz.) (troy oz.) (tons) (tons) (tons)

23,869,194 4,209,977 56,434,188 358,366 380,292 75,638

Telluride, CO
Elevation 8,756 feet.
RGS Mile Post 45.1
When arriving in Telluride you can not help but be awe-struck by the mountains shooting up to incredible heights right before your eyes. It seems you can just make out a little trail of burros struggling to keep a foot hold on the narrow switch back trails that go so high it makes your head swim to imagine the view down. Well, today you may see a jeep going up that trail, the burro days have long been gone.
HISTORY
Telluride was first a mining town, and things started to get interesting in the late 1870's. Veins of gold and silver were discovered and several claims began to produce in the area. John Fallon is credited with the initial discovery in 1875. Gold was discovered and true mining frenzy was born.
Prior to the arrival of the railroad in 1890, burro trains carried all the supplies into, and out of the area. Trails really did zig-zag up the sides of the near vertical mountain faces. When the railroad finally arrived in 1890 the town really needed the shipping improvements and made good use of the train. Telluride became a supply center for local mines like the Ajax, Smuggler, and later Tomboy, Gold King and Liberty Bell. Hauling ore from the Telluride area mines was a big part of the Rio Grande Southern's revenue
This was your classic boom town and boom it did. Telluride was an important mining area in its heyday and produced over well over $60 million in gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc. The town experienced most of the mining boom town personalities and at one time had ten saloons and one church. 
Even Butch Cassidy and the gang got in on the Telluride action by reportedly robbing the San Miguel County bank in 1889. The gang made off with $10,500 after bribing Marshal Jim Clark to "be out of town" the day of the robbery.
The Telluride area made even more world news when L. L. Nunn built the Ames power plant. This was the first use of alternating current to power commercial machinery. The power was used in the mines to replace the steam powered equipment. At the time, the area had been well scoured for burnable lumber, and the new AC power provided a lower cost source of energy that ran on water. The Ames plant is located south of Telluride in the Ophir Loop area.
In 1893 there were 5,000 people living in Telluride. Unfortunately, the whole world went through a silver panic that year. Times were hard but the area still produced gold with silver prices down, and that helped Telluride to carry on. But, as it did in so many boom towns, the mining economy kept fading. By 1930 the business of the area had dwindled to almost nothing and there were only about 500 residents left. Most folks just left town. 
Eventually a new spark of an industry came to life in the late 1930's. People began to realize that Telluride was a fun place to visit, especially in the winter. Skiing became popular, and in 1945 a rope tow was built to take skiers up the snow bound mountain slopes that had troubled the miners so 50 years earlier. 
Just like in the movies, a hero named Joe Zoline came to town in 1968. He planned, built and dedicated the Telluride ski area in 1971, and great skiing became associated with Telluride. However, the new future was slow in coming because the town was still just too difficult to travel into. It took construction of the regional airport in 1990 to really start the pot boiling, and now Telluride has its second great boom. Today you better be well off if you want to buy property in the area. 
The name Telluride derives from "tellurium," a sulfur compound that is sometimes found around gold deposits or even in the gold itself . Experts differ on whether the Telluride area mines contain the compound. But, reportedly the name arose in 1887 after a large piece of telluride ore was found in the San Miguel River near the site. You will still hear the tale that the name came from "to-hell-you-ride," a phrase that described the difficulties traveling to the area.

TELLURIDE TODAY
Most folks have heard of this place today. It is right up there on the Colorado hit list with Aspen and Vail. It is a wonderful place, and yes, one of the Jewels in the crown. The local residents do work hard to keep Telluride's historic look and feel. Not too many big city developers come to town throwing up condominiums and fast food stands.
Telluride is well known for the concerts and other events it throws in the summer months. Great live Jazz, Blues, etc. weekends are hosted by the town, and folks come in from all over the world to participate. 

THE RAIL YARD
The railroad in Telluride was arranged with two passing tracks and a wye for engine turnarounds. There was a wooden Depot, Section House, Bunk House, Water Tank, Coal Shed and Engine House in the yard area.

Telluride rail yard c1900

ENGINE HOUSE
A board and batten Engine House built in 1892 was used to service locomotives at Telluride. It was a single stall that was 16' x 120' and could hold two small locomotives. In the 1920's the building went the way of many railroad structures when it was destroyed by fire and never re-built.

DEPOT

Telluride Depot c1940
Telluride sported one of the largest Depots on the RGS and it still stands today. It had the classic architecture with wooden siding and shingles. This building was restored by the locals and has been a several types of restaurant in the recent past. 

WATER TANK
The was tank was like most others on the RGS, standard design, 50,000 gallons, similar to the one at Rico, CO. In 1940 the tank became unusable and was replaced by a simple water stand pipe.
Telluride Water tank c1940

OTHER STRUCTURES
A small coal platform was located near the Engine House. In 1930 a Goose barn was moved into the yard. Previously the building had been the freight house at the Tomboy mine. Other industries included Conoco bulk oil storage, electric supply, warehouses, a lumber yard, packing plants and the Telluride Iron Company.

THE MINES
Telluride mines have produced over a quarter billion dollars in revenues in the last century. Much of that was made when a dollar bought a lot more that it does today. Silver was the main ore extracted in the early days and then high quality gold deposits were found. Geologists still estimate there is a lot more metal left in the ground. 
In the early days the ore from the Pandora mine was packed on burros over the deadly high mountains to Ouray. From there it was freighted by wagons to Alamosa, shipped by D&RG rails to Denver where it was processed in the Grant smelter.
The two top producing mines in 1876 were the Sheridan and the Union. Then a fellow named J. R. Ingram took a good look at the claims and noticed they extended 500 feet more than legally allowed. So he proceeded to dig in this middle ground and called it the Smuggler. It turns out that the Smuggler was one of the best mines in the area and by 1900 it had 35 miles of tunnels.
A couple of other important mines were the Tomboy and the Liberty Bell. The Liberty Bell had been worked for many years and was thought close to useless until paydirt was finally struck in the late 1890's. On the other hand, the Tomboy struck it rich right from the beginning. In 1897 the Rothchilds of London bought the Tomboy for two million dollars.
Liberty Bell Mine
Road to Tom Boy mine

Telluride Mines mill and cable hoist