Valentines Special! Ghost Mine AND Ghost Town! Dixie Apex and Shem!

Well, it's been three months since I last drank deeply from the well of gainful employment. It's been an educational experience. I've learned that Taco Bell offers a wide array of relatively cheap, somewhat digestable food-like items. I have learned that medical insurance is for chumps. I have re-learned the joys of playing with Legos. I am 32 years old.

But that list is not all-inclusive. I have also been outdoors, just walking around and looking at stuff. Stuff needs to be looked at or it will start to organize and plot to overthrow you (I have also increased my paranoia). While I've seen many things in the last 3 months, I've focused a little more on rocks and mines and stuff. That's kinda my thing. Have you ever read one of these blog posts? They go on and on about rocks and mines and stuff. Heavens knows I don't read this crap. I've also grown a little more bitter lately. Everyone sucks but me. Someone give me a job.

Well, enough banter. We've got a lot of work to do (nope) and not much time to do it (nope). Today we are going to visit a decidedly different corner of Utah. Not because I ran out of thing to talk about (that happened years ago), but because I now find myself with the opportunity to take long vacations. Plus no one seems to have written all that much about todays mine/ghost town. I figure to set things right.

Allow me to introduce the Dixie Apex Mine....

That's where it used to be anyway. Or somewhere near there. It's hard to say for certain. It would be an easy matter to pinpoint its location if it were still there, but nowadays it's just sorta....that. It's under there somewhere. Here's what it looked like when it used to look like something.

But you aren't here to look at interesting pictures! You're here because for some reason this blog is a google result for the query "busty mermaids". Well this post doesn't feature any busty mermaids you pervs. Or does it? You should search this post from top to bottom. Tell me how it turns out.

The story of the Dixie Apex starts with the end of the story of the Silver Reef mining district (which has been covered with all due attention and eloquence in a previous post rich with busty mermaids). Like most people, miners prefer to have jobs. Specifically to miners, they like to have jobs that allow them to dig in stuff. But Silver Reef soon had more people who were willing to dig in stuff than it needed. This lead to an unfortunate influx of unemployed miners who were completely without a place to dig a hole. Luckily for them, a whole new mining district was about to be discovered in 1884 by a young (possibly) fellow named William Webb.

Obviously that's not him, but it's as close as Google is going to get me. I like doing crazy Google searches. Have you ever googled "incredulous"? Pretty great. Things get a bit dicey after page 2 though. Stuff that would make busty mermaids weep for the souls of those soon to be born. Anyway, Mr. Webb was wandering the Beaver Dam Mountains in Southern Utah looking for cordwood. The Beaver Dam Mountains are located hereish...

As Mr. Webb was collecting his coveted cordwood on a mountain named Jarvis Peak, he came across some blue-green rocks. As you know, most rocks range in color from grey to greyish, so blue-green is somewhat notable. These rocks proved to be rich in copper, and copper appears to be more interesting than cordwood. Mr. Webb staked a claim on the site and created the Tugsagubet Mining District in the process. Tugsagubet is a hell of a word. Probably means something too. I don't know what though.

For reasons that are equally unknown to me, Mr. Webb named his mine The Pen Mine and work began that year (1884 for reminders). Here's some old-timesy pictures of people at work in the mine! I like old-timesy pictures.

Those pictures are sideways because Blogspot is the worst program ever purposely released on humanity. Sometimes a dame would show up at the mine and it proved to be a picture-worthy occasion....

Between the years of 1884 and 1888 the mine pumped out 300 tons of ore which was shipped to Wales for some reason. Wales seems to have been the place to be if you were a chunk of rock. Anyway, Wales is far away and rocks are heavy, so shipping ate up much of the profits. In 1890 Mr. Webb missed his corkwood gathering hobby and sold the mine to a local mercantile firm named Wooley Lund and Judd. I guess they wanted to branch out from the dry goods business into the heavy underground mining business. Companies could do whatever they wanted back in the day, like how a gym coach can also be a driver's Ed teacher. I dunno.

The ore assayed at 54.2 percent copper, 4.1 percent sulfur, and 4 ounces of silver to the ton. Is this good? I guess so. It seems good anyway. Not as good as 100 percent gold though. People should open more 100 percent gold mines. Either way, it was good enough for the Wooley Lunch and Judd powerhouse. They renamed the mine the Apex Copper and built several improvements, like a nice little boarding house. It seems like your chances of getting mauled by a rattlesnake seems slightly lower if you are standing inside a boarding house, so I'm betting it was a welcome addition. There's a picture of it up above. It's one of those sideways pictures.

Now, Wooley, Lund and Judd still had a problem. In fact, it was the same problem that William Webb had. Wales. Wales is just too far away for us to be shipping things to it. We would be better off just forgetting it completely in my opinion. So WLJ decided to again branch out once again, and in 1899 they built a small smelter right in the heart of St. George. The bugger lasted about a year and produced about 20 tons of copper before everyone seems to have lost interest in it. I tried to take a picture of the spot where this smelter used to be, but the site is now occupied by an irritable elderly gentleman who just wants to crack his cashews in peace.

The ore wasn't going to smelt itself, so in 1900 a hugetastic new smelter was built a few miles closer to the mine, near the town of Gunlock (which is perhaps the very definition of a cool town name. Take some notes Sulphurdale). This new fang-dangled smelter was powered by a dam that was built over the Santa Clara River. Well, they must have built that dam with super dam powers, because it's still there today....

And here is some other part of the smelter. The, uh, round part.

The rest of the smelter is out in the weeds somewhere. I can't be bothered to go look for them though.

Now, rivers and dams are all well and good, but smelters still need poorly educated immigrants to work it! So soon a town was built around the smelter, and was named Shem after a particularly friendly chief in the nearby tribe. The town was built on the hillside to the west (or possibly east or north, I'm bad with directions) of the smelter. There's not a whole lot to see anymore. EXCEPT THIS AWESOME WALL!!

Not good enough you say? Well, HERE'S ANOTHER WALL!!!

They are kinda hard to see there, but trust me, there are two walls in those pictures and they are fantastic. But if neither of those pictures are very interesting to you, then I don't recommend you go out of your way to see Shem. Because that's about it. Also you have to pull over on the side of the road and everyone slows down to look at the person who has pulled over to the side of the road and they start to judge them. Like they were some sort of freak tramping around in the bushes looking at old walls.Anyway, the population of Shem was never very large. Probably around a few hundred folks at its peak. And because the only work in town was a smelter, I'm betting the chick to dude ratio was horrible.

Here's a thing. These buildings are located pretty close to the old Shem townsite...

and although they weren't technically part of the town, they do have an interesting history that will fill out this otherwise short post nicely. Here's the thing. With the exception of the mine, everything we have seen is located pretty much right in the middle of the Shivwits Indian Reservation. I have never met a Shivwit, but based on the number of no trespassing signs, I'm guessing they don't want you poking your nose about in their business. So I recommend that you don't. The rest of this story will only serve to validate my recommendation. The structure in the upper picture was, not surprisingly, a prison built by the mormon settlers in an attempt to establish friendly relations with the native people. Why they chose something as unfriendly as a prison, I couldn't say. I would have gone with a candy cane teddy bear shop, but those were different times. The second picture is of an old chapel, located just a few feet away from the prison. Well, things were going along swimmingly until one night when a mob of angry braves broke into the prison and made off with a prisoner who had committed a crime of some sort. The mob took the prisoner over to the church and gave him the ol' hangy hangy from a rafter. After that, people didn't really want to go to church there anymore so it was abandoned. The end.

Let's get back to the mine. From 1900 to 1907 several other mines in the Tutsagwhatever Mining District started to ship ore to the Shem smelter. These include the Black Warrior Mine, The Westside Mine, as well as others that I feel no need to climb to. Here's a secret just between you and me. All mines look like this...

All of them. Just a big old hole. Now, there may be a few slight variations, but that's basically the idea. So if you ever feel like you need to waste an entire Wednesday climbing up some horrible, mountain lion infested peak to see a mine, I just saved you a ton of time. With that being said, here's another mine near the Dixie Apex that I wasted my entire Wednesday climbing to!

That there is the Paymaster Mine, but despite the illustrious name, it never actually paid much of anything. It produced a little lead and silver, but nothing to write home about (which would be a weird thing to do anyway). What is amazing about this mine is that it is still very well preserved.

This is the old steam hoist that would bring the miners up from their little vacation to Hades. The lever on the left is the operating action, and the chair on the far left is where the operator would sit their butt. I shouldn't have to explain what the chair is for.

Here's a few old oil cans still sitting on the shelf waiting to....oil...things. Neat. So, bad mine, neat piece of history. Not a bad trade-off. For us anyway. I bet the mine owners would have differing opinions. Or would if they weren't long dead.

Let's move it along. The Dixie Apex (as it finally became known) was worked until 1909 when dropping copper prices made digging holes cost-prohibative. I don't know who had to give the news to Shem, but I bet it wasn't met with much enthusiasm. Without ore to smelt, there is no need for a smelter. And without a smelter there is no need for a smelting town. So off Shem went. See you around Shem.

The prices of copper would rise and fall, and thus the Dixie Apex was re-opened several times between 1911 and 1960. At some point a shaft was dug in the hill above the tunnel for some reason. Here's a picture of what we're looking at.

I don't know if that clears anything up. At least the road is well labeled. See the dashed line labeled Apex Fault? See the part that has question marks all over it? That means that the fault is "inferred" which actually mean "maybe it does this" which in turn means "we don't know what the hell is going on". Much of geology should have those question marks.

Here's a picture of that shaft from far away...

Can you see it? Lets see if I can't make it stand out a little more....

Well, neither of those are really great. But the idea I'm trying to make is that you would have to be extremely stupid to climb all the way up there.

Here's some pictures of the shaft after I climbed all the way up there...

See? What did I tell you?

But look what I did find all the way up there!

What the devil is this thing? It didn't seem to understand english, so I tried to threaten it away by throwing sticks and leaves into the air. Then I fell down the hill. Nice views of the nearby valley though.

Plus I was able to capture this shot of me getting a workout. This one is for the ladies.

As a side note, I don't care whos head you put on He-Man's body, they will always look constipated. You could put FDR's head up there and you would end up with our nations only 4 term and most constipated president. Bah. Anyway, ore from this shaft (and from a second tunnel that I haven't mentioned) was driven along this little mining road.....

To an assay house that was located near the mine opening. Remember, there really isn't a whole lot left out there, so you have to use your imagination a lot.

See the rocks stacked up near the left-middle portion of the picture? This would have been the foundation of said assay house. Or possibly something else. I wasn't there. But I suspect it was an assay house due to a little detective work. See this??????

What we have here is a decorative piece of furnace surrounded by red furnace brick pieces. These, my friends, are the calling cards of an assay house. Or possibly any number of other things. But I'm sticking with assay house.

So, what did we end up with? Well, personally I ended up throwing up my lunch because I climbed up a really steep hill and had an imaginary fight with some weird plant. But if you mean the mine, well, the numbers are actually pretty good. 7,000 million tons of copper, 400 million tons of lead, 180,000 ounces of silver, and a slight dusting of gold. More than I've ever produced anyway. By the mid 1960's the mine ran dry, and everyone closed up shop. But something else was lurking in the depths of Jarvis Peak. Let's take a look at that 7th grade science thing.

That's the periodic table. It's full of stuff we use for other stuff. I've gone ahead and labeled our old friends copper and silver (as well as the made up elements down below). But have you ever seen these two fiesty little fellows?

Ga and Ge? What madness is this? Apparently science found them quite a few years ago, and named them Germanium and Gallium. It turns out that these metals are quite useful in the manufacture of futuristic things, like flux capacitors and catamarans. They are called "rare earth metals" because they are....rare earth metals. Or at least they are everywhere else other than the Dixie Apex Mine. You see, these two little buggers were hiding out in the low-grade ore that was ignored by the earlier miners and left down in the ground. But once they were discovered (and I'm not quite sure how they were), the mine soon had a new purpose. Enough Germanium and Gallium to make us all rich and sterile! And so, in 1985, the mine was again fired up with the intention of becoming the world's first Germanium and Gallium mine.

Now, the rest of the story gets a bit foggy. From what I understand, there is one other location in the world where Germanium and Gallwhatever can be found in useful quantities, and the folks who own that mine didn't care for the competition that the Dixie Apex was bringing along. So they did what anyone who has a Scrooge McDuck-like money big sitting around. They bought the mine and closed it down. Then you reclaim it. A-like so.

Then you stick a big fat "Stay the heck out" sign up and go on your way.

So, will the Dixie Apex stay shut? Probably not. I'm betting that at some point in the future, the allure of those two elements that I'm not going to type again will drag people back down into the hole. But I'm tired of thinking about this mine. Good day.

Ghost Town Tuesday! - Silver City, Utah

I started this post on tuesday, so that title is somewhat correct. If this sort of thing is a problem for you, then I'm betting you aren't the super-popular type. I've got 99 problems, and people who have a hard time figuring out poorly-titled posts aren't one. Neither is tetanus (I got my booster!)

You know what I like most about ghost towns? It's not the history or the inspiring stories or any of that crap. It's that no matter how badly you are doing in life, the ghost town is most certainly doing worse. I mean, they're all dead and I'm still here! I may not have a job or a girlfriend, but at least I'm not a moldering corpse! Sometimes it's fun to walk to the center of town and dare someone to judge you. They can't! They wore crazy pantaloons and bonnets! Also there's no one there. This paragraph reflects very poorly on me.

Silver City is as desolate as any ghost town you will ever see. Time, weather, misapproapriation of funds, lack of effective city planning/population have all taken their toll on the moldering remains. Nowadays all that awaits you is a field. This field, in fact....

Also sheep. Lots of sheep. Here's a fun fact about sheep dogs. They are a really mean. Like 8th grade english teacher mean. Maybe YOU aren't applying yourself Mrs Stevenson! Bah.

The rise and fall of Silver City mirrors the rise and fall of the Tintic Mining District (in which it is located). Let's take a closer look at our trusty map so we have some idea of where we are. Remember, by trusty I mean that I'm going to draw it using my memory.

That's a good start. If I had bothered to make a map for the post on Diamond, you would see that the two towns were neighbors at one time. They probably had deragatory names for each other! Towns do that sometimes. Anyway, here's a close-up....

There. Now we have some bearings. Or we are just as lost as ever. Either way let's get on with this. Much like the ghost town of Diamond, Silver City was founded as the result of several rich mines being identified in 1869. The Grand-daddy mine of them all (not quite, but it was a pretty nifty find) was the Sunbeam, discovered by a fella named George Rust. Here he is now!




What's that, Mr. Rust? You have something to say?

Legend has it that the Sunbeam claim was identified when Mr. Rust saw the sunlight shining off an outcrop of ore. The story seems to be missing a few pieces as to what happened next, but apparently a group of mormon cowboys filed the claim (where Mr. Rust went, I couldn't say) and were promptly booted from the mormon church as mining was somewhat frowned upon in early Utah. Here's where the Sunbeam Mine is located....

It's pretty close to town, which is convient considering that the bus system was probably pretty bad. Here's the Sunbeam Mine nowadays!

Not much to look at. That was reclaimed in 2010, so now it looks like even less. Dust to dust and all that I suppose. Shortly after the Sunbeam Mine was staked, several other promising mines were staked in and around Silver City. These include the Swansea....

The South Swansea....

The Four Aces and Picnic Mines...

All of which were also located very convenently near town....

And so, here we are. We have miners, we have mines, we have ticks, and we have people who were willing to bleed them all dry. These are the ingredients a person needs for a town. And sure enough, in 1870 the town of Silver City was officially born.

Like all good towns, it started out being little more than tents and mud, but this wasn't to be the case for long. The mines were booming, and as a result the miners were ready for some prostitutes and whiskey, both of which require a somewhat more perminant building (not really, but I suppose it's preferred). As one observer put it....

"A billiard saloon, balcksmith shop, grog hole, some tents, several drunks, a free fight, water some miles off, a hold down 90 feet hunting a spring without success, and any number of rich or imaginary rich lodes in the neighborhood. The owners are all poor and poor men work for them. By next spring the poor with be poorer."

That doesn't sound so great I guess. But it doesn't matter. That observer was wrong and as such he doesn't even get his named mentioned in this post (also I don't know it). Silver City soon was the early center of the Tintic District, with the Mammoth claims to the north, and Diamond to the south. The name "Silver City" came from the rich silver mines that were basically in the middle of town. Silver City is a cool name. By 1883, the Salt Lake and Western and Tintic Range railroads had been extended into Silver City, and the mines were free to really take off.

As these things typically go, things didn't last very long. At a depth of 250 feet, the rich silver bodies that had everyone willing to live in that sheep-infested valley pinched-out into thick beds of worthless pyrite. One by one the mines closed down and the miners moved to the recent strikes at Alta and Park City. Silver City didn't disappear, but I bet land values were very affordable at that point. Gangs of wild sheep controlled the streets, and nobody went out at night for fear of being "sheared" clean by ill-tempered sheep crime-lords.

That could have been the end of our story if it wasn't for one brave soul who was determined to stick it out. He dug and dug into the pyrite and in July of 1896 he was rewarded! At a depth of 350 feet, a silver-rich galena body was found! Galena is valuable! Silver is valuable! The sheep were temporarialy shooed away, and Silver City exploded (figuratively). By 1899 the population was at 800 people, and all the mines were advanced into the rich ore bodies below the devilish pyrite that had at one time tormented them so. This is considered the golden-age of silver city.

It is a worthwhile exercise at this juncture to step back and make a mental list of the things miners hate. Step into the body of a turn of the century miner (mind the syphallis!) and take a look around. As a miner, you probably find that you dislike corrupt mine bosses, poor safety records, and other miners. You also hate watered-down whiskey and the chinese (you're a tad bit racist). But what about the very substance of life? I speak of water. Now, water is great in managabile quantities. Hell, it's not only great, it necessary. But what if it gets out of hand?

That is a flooded mine. Water floods mines. Miners can't breathe in water. This is a problem. Groundwater near the mines in the vicinity of Silver City showed up at a depths ranging from 300 to 650 feet below the current ground level. No matter how rich a mine is, it means nothing if you can't get at the ore. The mines that weren't dripping with valuable minerals had to close, as they couldn't afford to battle the constant flow of water that took over the mines. The major mines initiated an expensive pumping system and continued to plunge into the earth to find more of the good stuff. Look at how much digging the Swansea Mine did!

But, alas, even they weren't immune to the ravages of water and water-related troubles. Eventually the water over-powered their pumps and the mine had to close. The town began to shrink again. Then in 1902 the whole place burned to the ground. That shrunk it up real fast.

The town was somewhat rebuilt a third time, although it was no longer particularly important (like the postmaster general). It limped on, probably filling up with the less social folks (get off my land!) and sheep. But Silver City was to get one more chance to make it to the big leagues.

Allow me to introduce Jesse Knight.

Mr. Knight is a monumental figure in the Utah Mining world and was at one point owned most of the Tintic District, but I'm not going to get into that here. Or anywhere in this post. And probably never at all. All you need to know is that if he asked you to eat a pinecone, you ate as many as you could as fast as you could. Unless you had some self-respect.

Mr. Knight had a problem. Smelter rates were too high, and it made it hard to make a profit off all the ore his mines were producing. So he did what rich people do and decided to simply build his own smelter (and then charge himself much more reasonable rates I imagine). In 1907 he selected a nice flat spot outside of the decaying remains of Silver City and built the Utah Ore Sampling Company Smelter. Need proof? Here you go!

With the nearby smelter hard at work, Silver City boomed once again, reaching a population of 1500 in 1908. Buildings were constructed as fast as the lumber could get there, with most of hte population being employed in one of Jesse Knights many ventures in the area. The smelter was such a success that it got its own holiday. On July 24th, 1908, the good people celebrated "Smelter Day", complete with free food, free transport to the event, and even a marrage. It was probably the only time you will ever see a mine smelter at the center of a positive event, but those were different times. But what did they care? Things were good again! And they were going to last this time! Right?

Nope. Shipping rates dropped, and suddenly it became more economical to just ship your ore to Salt Lake City than it was to ship it to your smelters in the mountains and let the hill people deal with it. So Mr. Knight took down his fantastic, wonder-astic smelter and moved it to Salt Lake City one year later (October of 1909). Now instead of producing silver and copper, the smelter produces a large amount of concrete debris.

And so, we (again) reach a rather gloomy part of our post. You see, without mines or any sort of mine-related income, the town of Silver City once again found itself without purpose. But, like a rich elderly relative, it refused to die. Silver City lingered around, feeding on whatever scraps the town of Eureka didn't want. The remaining inhabitants didn't care much for outsiders. Or foreigners. Two Croat smelter workers who had decided to hang around the smelter closed were involved in a killing, which resulted in the following statement from a Silver City resident -

"Before the smelter was completed a boat load of Turkish people (Greeks) was imported for cheap labor which of course caused contention among the working people, these Turks were housed in large rooming and boarding houses near the smelter and much of them selves. and a good thing because these people were considered very dangerous and most of them carried long knives in the wide sash around their waist and we kids were admonished to stay away from that part of town or we would be butchered and eaten."

There were no reports of cannablism, so I guess the two parties stayed away from each other. Life puttered on through the 1920's with the population holding steady at 650 folks. Look! Here's the graduating class of 1927!

By 1930, the population had dropped to 278 people, and by 1933 the town was deserted and left to the elements (who showed no mercy). Various fires encouraged the wooden structures to move towards the white light, and the ever present sheep romped about like they owned the place. That leads us to this.....

(That is the old waste-water pond from the smelter. The people of Silver City used to love to swim in it. It probably wouldn't have been as popular if they had known that lead and arsenic also loved to swim in it. But who knows? All the swimmers are dead, so we can't ask them).

A few crumbling concrete foundations, a few rusty tools, and lots of sheep. Seriously, the sheep are endless out here. And so we end our visit to Silver City. Because it's boring out there nowadays and I'm sick of talking about it.