Ghost Town Tuesday - Silver Reef, Utah (Part I)

First and foremost, I'm aware that I've already covered Silver Reef in a blog post. I am also aware that it was an incredible post, and it probably rocked your world. But something got to bothering me. While it was an incredible post and world-rocking likely took place, much of it isn't true. Either that or much of the history simply wasn't there in the first place. So in the spirit of self-internet-improvement, I vote we revisit Silver Reef.

The modern town of Silver Reef has no residents except for jack rabbits, dust, and sagebrush. And also a couple dozen residents. But don't let the fact that Silver Reef has technically been re-peopled take away from the incredible amount of history that once stood on that same spot. A little over one hundred and twenty years ago you would have been standing in a bustling town filled with intrigue, cussing, sand, spitting, some more intrigue, women, guns, women with guns, and other such things.

Silver Reef is located down near the southwestern corner of Utah, about 16 miles north of St. George, a city that is filled with retired folks with HUGE blind spots. Here's a map.

To be more specific, take exit 23 off I-15 and there you are, standing right in the middle of a rather unique mining ghost town. Not much to look at nowadays, although the town does still have a surprisingly modern-looking town sign...

I'm not sure who has maintained the town sign down through the years, but they are doing a great job even though they must be a zombie by now. I never saw the sign zombie, but kudos to them and their amazing work ethic.

The story of Silver Reef begins in the year 1866. The state of Utah was but a dream. A dry, hot, parched dream filled with scorpions and odd liquor laws. Several areas of the state had been populated by Mormon pioneers who went about their business which included farming, praying, and generally trying to not catch any number of horrible diseases. One thing that did not get included in the pioneer's business was mining. Miners tend to be a bit loose morally, (or so the stereotype says. I've technically never met one), and as a result mining towns tended to have more whores than a religious people are comfortable with. So the LDS church generally advised against taking up the rockpick and just stick to growing crops, building highly organized street systems and, like I've mentioned, generally trying not to die. In Southern Utah, near the cities of Leeds and St. George, this wasn't a problem at all, as no one had any idea that there were good things underfoot anyway.

And so things went, until a wandering prospector named John Kemple spotted black spots in a block of sandstone that he had picked up. He did what prospectors do, and had the sample assayed. Much to his surprise, the results came back showing upwards of $17,000 worth of silver to the ton. This is unusual, as the sample was a block of sandstone which to that point had never been an ore-bearing material. So he figured that something was screwy with the assaying results and moved far away away. As a side note, the name of the assayer who investigated the sample was named "Metaliferous Murphy", so named because he seemed to have a knack for finding unusually high concentrations of minerals in whatever he assayed. Anyway, the miners were so sure that he was lying to them about the sandstone sample that they chased him out of town and hung him. Neat little story.

I’m not sure what happened to Mr. Kemple during the five years he was away from his black-speckled sandstone, but apparently he never truly believed that the assay results were bogus. Maybe he spent the time ignoring his guilt over getting Metaliferous Murphy hung. In 1871 he came storming back to Silver Reef and decided to bite the bullet by setting up the Union Mining District (the Silver Reef area). This was all well and good, but remember that the LDS Church and mining went together like two storks fighting over a wheel of cheddar. A man who was mining was a man who wasn't growing food, and everyone needed food back then. So the Church put the kibosh on the site, and things were abandoned and poor Mr. Kemple took off again for a couple of years and thought about things. Not to be defeated, Kemple came back yet again three years later determined to mine his little guts out, but the joke was on him. You see, it was too late! Some other dude named William Tecumseh Barbee found some sweet, sweet silver at the site when he discovered an outcrop of high grade silver that had been gouged out by Joe and Alex McCleave's wagon wheel on Tecumseh Hill. This hill, to be exact....





So Mr. Barbee gets all the credit for developing the site and Mr. Kemple gets a brief mention in an obscure blog entry. Regardless of who set it up, the wheels were already in motion, and by December of 1875, nearly 10.5 tons of ore running at approximately $502 of silver per ton had been shipped to the smelters in Salt Lake City. This is the Tecumseh Mine nowadays.....







Soon other mines sprung up in the Techumseh area, such as the Silver Flat Mine....



The Stormy King Mine...



And finally, the Manhatton Mine....

All of these mines were interconnected, and none of them exceeded 300 feet in depth. The average ore zones in this area were only 10 to 18 inches thick, but were chuck-full of silver, so it still managed to pay the bills. Most of the ore consisted of this little guy...

That dull little bugger is named cerargyrite, and while it may not look like it, it is jammed-packed with silver. The truly odd part of this whole mining area is that this little guy is present at all. Like I said at the start, it is unusual for sandstone to have any sort of mineralization going on it it, as sand doesn't like to play with other minerals. The secret here is that the sand happens to be stuffed with things that DO like to play with other minerals, namely petrified logs, reeds, shrubs and other planty goodness. As time went by, the carbon inside the plants took off, and silver, copper and other minerals were there to take its place. See!



Those greenish-grayish lines in that rock are 250 million year old tree branches and bits of reeds! It just so happened that the Silver Reef Sandstone was deposited as part of a wandering stream system filled with trees! The miners weren't very interested in the copper, but it's neat to look at anyway. Let's all go look at it again!

The premise with the silver is largely the same, although it ended up not being fully limited to plant remains. The silver ore bodies would form in 200 to 300 foot long squished cylinders, and were known for being incredibly rich in one place, then being barren a foot later. Miners hate that. It was noticed that the silver content would increase as the miners got closer to petrified trees. One tree in the Tecumseh Hill area produced $14,000 worth of ore, and was apparently nearly completely preserved in silver. Other legends say that a chamber filled with silver trees was found, but sent to be ground up to make whatever we make out of silver. I don't know if this is true, but it would have been a neat thing to see.

THIS ENDS PART I!