On a dry but hot Colorado June day, we drove to
Nederland, one of Boulder County’s mountain jewels, past the Barker Meadow
Reservoir with its deep blue waters.
The winding road carved between rock peaks and the
Boulder Creek eventually took us to the tiny hamlet of less than 1,500
inhabitants. I could only imagine how cold, slippery, and right down impassable
the road must be at times in wintertime.
We were on a quest to visit the Mining Museum and the
century-old carousel with its beautiful figures carved by hand by a Vietnam
veteran.
The one room museum had displays inside and out,
rusting in the elements, a close-up look at the lives and history of the miners
who lived, worked, and died in this area. Opened by the Nederland Area
Historical Society, the museum was purchased by the county in the fall of 2012.
The hard rock mining days in Boulder County during
the 19
th and the early 20
th centuries were brought home
by the huge boulders lining the modern highway, at times perched seemingly
precarious above our heads, cutting through the mountains.
Boulder County’s history for the first 75 years was
tied to mining, the leading industry in a barely populated area. The first gold
strike in 1859 on Gold Hill brought more explorers and more discoveries of gold
and silver. The boom-and-bust cycles of mining through the early 20th
century opened newly discovered strikes, followed by abandonment when the ores were
exhausted. It took one ton of rock and back breaking work to deliver one ounce
of pure gold.
Prospectors, working under unimaginably harsh conditions,
would take their ore to the assay office whose employees would determine if
individual prospectors “struck it rich.” Using heat and chemicals to test the
ore, the assayer would deliver the good or the bad news to the prospector about
the percentage of precious minerals found in the miner’s rock finds. These
miners had migrated to the Wild West to become part of the 19th
century hard rock mining boom.
Museum Archives photo
Among the rusting equipment sitting inside and outside
the building, one can see one of the few surviving Panama Canal steam shovels.
Miners used tools like helmets with lamps, bells, trams, and rare mining claim
maps to find their “gold.” But the real gold crown jewel was the steam-powered
shovel, one of the largest in the world at the time. It scooped tons of dirt
while helping canal workers in Panama to build bridges, roads, and drains close
to the waterway.
The museum displays blacksmithing tools, maps and
documents, ore samples, hand, and pneumatic drills, mine trams, maps, and
documents from the 1860s to the present.
The Mining Museum is home to a
1923 Bucyrus 50-B steam shovel whose epic move was chronicled on The History
Channel's Mega Movers. Of the 25 steam shovels that helped build the Panama
Canal, only this one survives, and it is fully operational, weighing at 130,000
pounds and rated at 75 tons. The
1923 Bucyrus Model 50-B was returned to California, then Denver, and finally
was donated to the town of Nederland in 2005. The rest were scrapped for metal
in Panama.
According
to historical records, 534 Bucyrus and Bucyrus-Erie 50-B shovels were built
between 1923 and 1939. “They were among the largest tracked steam shovels in
the world at that time. Until 1932, most were steam powered and moved on
railroad tracks. In 1923, crawler tracks were added to the 50-B model, creating
the first heavy duty, 360-degree rotation mobile shovels.”
The
shovel was donated by Steve and Laurel Higgins to the Nederland Mining Museum
on October 21, 2005. “This national treasure links a historic engineering
achievement, the industrial revolution of the United States, local history of
Colorado mining, and good old fashioned hard work by two brothers trying to achieve
the American dream. Today it is one of the largest operating shovels in the
United States.” Nederland Area
Historical Society (nederlandmuseums.org)
Transported
to Rollinsville by Roy and Russell Durand, this amazing steam shovel was used
at the Lump Gulch Placer, six miles south of Nederland, until 1978.
Hard rock mining is extremely difficult. The
rock was blasted with dynamite, the smaller pieces shoveled into buckets and
carts, hauled out of the mine, then processed by a mill, ground into a powder,
then chemicals were used to separate the valuable ore, usually gold and silver,
from the waste rock, and then smelted into bars. These chemicals were poisonous
for the environment. One troy ounce of gold was usually extracted from a ton of
rock.
The miners used single- or double-jacking
methods, holding a steel drill in one hand and a hammer in the other. After
each strike, “the miner turned the drill a quarter turn to reposition the cutting
edge.” In competitions, a miner could swing a hammer 90 times a minute, that is
how strong they were. In double-jacking, one miner would hold and turn the
drill and the other swung the hammer.
According to the Mining Museum, the following
ores were mined/found in Boulder County:
-
Galena (lead ore)
-
Chalcopyrite (copper ore)
-
Lepidolite (lithium ore)
-
Barite (barium ore)
-
Petzite/Coloradoite/Hessite
(gold/mercury/silver ore)
-
Mica
-
Sphalerite (zinc ore)
-
Gold (old ore)
-
Molybdenite (molybdenum ore)
Tungsten (“heavy
stone” in Swedish), a rare metal with the highest melting point of all metallic
elements, was mined in Nederland, at the time considered the tungsten capital
of the world in the early 1900s. Tungsten is used for lightbulbs, TV tubes,
steel alloys; tungsten carbide is used in drill bits, high-speed cutting tools,
and mining equipment.
WWI required a lot of tungsten which raised
its price from $5 per unit to $105 and the town of Tungsten grew to 3,000
people in a sparsely populated area, and it became the richest town of its size
in Colorado. According to the archives, “peak production in 1916 generated $4
million in revenue. Barker Dam had been built to provide power to the
mills. The end of WWI put a stop to the
tungsten mining.”
Gold mining in the
area took place from the mid-1800s to mid -1900s. Clear Creek was dredged with
Eleanor #1 and Eleanor #2 on the historic Arapahoe Bar between 1904 and 1907 by
the National Dredging Company (led by Herman J. Reiling); it was
environmentally disastrous as the dredges left behind ruined fertile bottom
soils forever. The dredges scooped the
rich soil from the riverbed and sifted out the “flour gold.” The “flour gold”
was too fine for the technology of that time to be able to recover all gold
from the soil of Arapahoe Bar. Golden, Colorado farmers refused to sell any
more land to the company.
Silver was found with
gold, copper, lead, or zinc and was a major operation in the Mines. But the
market crashed in 1893 and the silver boom ended. Silver is used for jewelry, electronics,
silverware, photography, finance, and investment.
The assay office took the miner’s rock finds
to determine how much precious gold and silver were mixed in with other metals.
The entire process, described by the museum archives, was quite complicated:
-
Crushing (the
rock was pulverized like salt; a “chipmunk crusher” transformed the rock to
pea-size, then a muller ground it to rock flour)
-
Splitting
(separated the sample with a riffle splitter)
-
Weighing
(a precision balance weighed exactly 29.167 grams of the sample)
-
Firing
(the sample was poured and melted at 2000 degrees into a ceramic cup called a
“crucible” to create certain chemical reactions, i.e., lead fuses with gold and
silver)
-
Pouring into a mold
(the lead dropped at the tip of the mold and the “slag” sat on top; the mold
looked like a cornbread baking tray)
-
Cupellation (the
lead button was put into a “cupel,” a small cup made of bone ash, and heated;
during heating, the molten lead oxidized back to litharge and was absorbed by
the bone ash; a small bead of molten gold and silver were left)
-
Parting (silver
was dissolved using nitric acid, and only gold was left)
-
Final weighing (gold
was weighed and converted into ounces per ton, thus determining the value of
the ore find)
Miners spent most of their days underground,
away from precious sunlight, and it was essential that they had good lighting
in the tunnels. They used oil wick cap lamps, carbide lamps (invented in 1900,
they burned acetylene gas produced by mixing water and calcium carbide),
candlesticks, safety lamps, and electric lights. Safety lamps, invented in 1815
in England, reduced gas explosions. The electric lights were the safest. Thomas
Edison invented a battery-powered electric light in 1914 which gave the miners
12 hours of lighting and could be recharged at the end of each shift.
Driving by the closed mines, one wonders what
became of the families whose livelihoods depended on such hard and dangerous
labor, devoid of sunlight, with fathers and sons toiling underground like moles
to extract metals from the rocks. We could never genuinely appreciate the
sacrifice these men made to provide society with metals like tungsten, silver,
and gold.