credit: Denver Public Library Western History Photography Collection
credit: Denver Public Library Western History Photography Collection
credit: Denver Public Library Western History Photography Collection
credit: Steve Suller
credit: John Fowler
credit: “Happy Glampers”
credit: Colorado Past
credit: Colorado Past
credit: Colorado Past
Oh way to cool
I’ve been there many times, and actually have “The Yankee Girl Mine” as my Screen Saver. The Silverton Railroad ran just behind it and serviced the mine and mill. It was one of the bigger mines and one of the last to be running.
Very nice, I have wanted to make it up there on my annual Colorado trip, this will move it up the list!
Jerry
So Jerry, are you going to build this in the contest?
Dennis
Dennis Rayon said:
So Jerry, are you going to build this in the contest?
Dennis
He already entered it with this thread!
Yow, better get going! Actually I built the Atlantic Cable Mine (Rico, CO) for a hill on the back of the layout a few years ago. No more room for mines. I am working on a foundry to do something with the ore.
Jerry
Foundery? What about a stamp mill, or blast furnace?
Yankee Girl Mine, Poughkeepsie Gulch, Red Mountain District, San Juan Co., Colorado, USA
Latitude & Longitude (WGS84): 37° 53’ North , 107° 39’ West
Latitude & Longitude (Decimal Degrees): 37.8833333333 , -107.65
Latitude & Longitude (Degrees plus Decimal Minutes): 37° 53’, -107° 39’
credit: U.S. Geological Survey
On Aug. 14, 1882, prospector John Robinson, out hunting in the rarefied air, exhausted from climbing up the steep slopes of Red Mountain, sat down to rest. He spotted a piece of rock. When he picked it up, he noticed that it was unusually heavy, a sure sign that it was mineralized. Robinson broke the piece in half and saw a silver-gray metallic mineral called galena, typically composed of a mixture of lead, silver, and other metals. Realizing this was a rich find, Robinson began to search for the source of the galena. He soon found an exposed vein and claimed it in his name and those of his partners, Andrew Meldrum, A. E. “Gus” Lang, and August Dietlef.
Robinson returned with his partners to determine the extent of the claim and the men dug a shallow shaft a dozen feet deep. Much to their delight, they dug through solid metallic ore extending the width of the shaft. As a precaution, they staked claims on all four sides, as the ore body seemed to have no limit. Of these claims, the Orphan Boy and the Robinson became major silver producers, but their original discovery, the Yankee Girl, drew the greatest attention to the Red Mountain district.
It turned out that the men had hit the top of a vertical shaft, a chimney, of solid ore, a rare occurrence in the mining world. The prospectors dug out 4,500 pounds of ore, placed it in sacks, and sent a long pack train down to a smelter in Ouray. The mill produced an average of 88 ounces of silver per ton. More than half of the ore was lead, which was valuable to smelters for use as flux.
The Yankee Girl shaft house above the mine has a bull wheel and wire for getting out ore. The mine produced silver, copper, and gold, about $8,000,000 worth in its time. There were problems; digging caused water to fill the shafts. They bought a $30,000 pump to keep the water out, but corrosive water eroded the pump in just one month.
In 1883, the Yankee Girl was joined with the Robinson and Orphan Boy mines by interconnecting tunnels. Eventually, these tunnels reached a length of 25 miles. A boarding house was constructed at the Yankee Girl for the miners. The mine was sold for $125,000 (worth about $2.5 million in today’s dollars), giving the men enough money to finance development of their other mines.
credit: Kenneth Jessen (edited)
Mining created the need for a town. Gusto, Colorado, located at the foot of Champion Gulch on the Silverton Railroad line, formed around the workings of three large mines; the Guston-Robinson, the Yankee Girl, and the Genessee-Vanderbilt. The Guston post office was established on January 26th, 1892, and closed on November 16th, 1898. An English preacher, a Rev. William Davis, succeeded in establishing a church in Guston in 1892. (He had been unsuccessful in establishing one in Red Mountain Town.) The day the church was dedicated in Guston, a fire in Red Mountain destroyed the town’s commercial district. More than one resident of Red Mountain questioned the connection to divine intervention. The church at Guston not only had a bell, it also had a steam whistle to signal miners that services were about to start.
Guston declined rapidly after the Silver Panic of 1893. The effects of later sporadic workings and recent environmental cleanup have removed any traces of residences, although the shaft house of the Yankee Girl, and a few remains of the Guston-Robinson mine still stand.
credit: Jerry Clark (edited)
Yankee Girl mine. — The Yankee Girl ore body was discovered in the autumn of 1881 by John Robinson. In 1882 it was being opened by two shafts, each about 50 feet deep. At that depth the ore is. said to have been about 9 feet wide, consisting chiefly of galena with bunches of chalcopyrite, and carrying as much as 80 ounces of silver and 6o per cent of lead. The ore body was rapidly opened up and proved large and rich. In 1883, with a thousand feet of drifts and shafts, about 3,000 tons of ore were extracted, with an average value of nearly $150 per ton. The product for this year is given in the Mint report as $400,000, and the ore is said to have carried a high percentage of lead. In 1884, according to the same authority, the mine was producing about 40 tons a day, which, at $150 per ton, would be something over $2,000,000 for the year. This, however, is obviously an excessive estimate. In 1887 the output is not known, but was probably much less than $200,000. In 1890 it is credited with $1,352,994, the silver, as usual, being given at its coinage value and no return being made for copper or lead. In 1891 the product is given as $601,465 in gold and silver, and in 1892 it had fallen to $95,445. Of this amount $5,200 was in gold, $48,333 in silver (coinage value), $3,632 in lead, and $38,280 in copper. Thus these fragmentary records show that in the course of ten years’ working the ore changed, within a vertical distance of 1,000 feet, from one carrying chiefly galena to one rich in copper. This has probably been the most widely known and most productive mine in the Red Mountain district, although closely rivaled by the Guston. But it was an expensive mine to operate on account of the irregular form of its large ore bodies, the abundance and corrosive activity of its waters, and the necessity of hoisting and pumping through deep shafts. These adverse conditions, in conjunction with a falling off in the value of the ore caused the mine to shut down about 1896. …
At present the Yankee Girl shaft is about 1,050 feet in depth. A plan of the extensive levels shows an intricate maze of workings in which no linear system is discernible. The mass of the workings lie just west of the shaft, and in plan may be roughly inclosed in an irregular triangle. A smaller extent of workings lies just east of the shaft. Inspection of the dump, as well as inquiry, shows that there was never much vein quartz associated with the ore. The “quartz” of the miners is very largely the bleached and silicifled country rock adjacent to the nearly solid bodies of ore. Where vein quartz occurs it usually carries iron pyrite. Barite, in small masses and crystals, occurs embedded in the bornite. The chalcocite is generally inti mately associated with small amounts of chalcopyrite. Some speci mens show that the ore has been fractured and recemented by veinlets of calcite. The ore minerals observed on the dump were galena, sphalerite, chalcocite (stromeyerite), bornite, chalcopyrite, and pyrite. Cosalite was recognized in 1884, therefore, in the upper part of the deposit…Proustite and polybasite also occurred occasionally in the Yankee Girl ore bodies. All accounts of the Yankee Girl mine unite in emphasizing the chemical activity of the underground waters encountered in the workings. According to Schwarz they contained “24 grains per gallon of sulphuric acid (SO3).” Candlesticks, picks, or other iron or steel tools left in this water become quickly coated with copper. Iron pipes and rails were rapidly destroyed, and the constant replacement of the piping and pumps necessary to handle the abundant water was a large item in the working expenses. All agree in stating that the water entered far less abundantly below the sixth level. Some who worked in the mine express it as being " not so bad" below that level. But closer inquiry usually elicits the information that it was less abundant but as much or even more corrosive than at the upper levels.
The product of the Yankee Girl is roughly estimated at about $3,000,000.
credit: report pictured above, 1901
The 1901 Survey information above is direct from the survey itself, but the rest of the information turns out to be from Kenneth Jensen. I wrote to him and in the process discovered a really nice set of books:
Dear Mr. Jessen…I’m from Denver, born and raised, and I’m modelling the Yankee Girl Mine for my model railroad, and as part of a friendly railroad modeller competition, and I have unearthed the following information on the mine. My question is this: are you the source for this research and information? I want to use the information, but I would like to credit the proper source. Thanks.
He replied:
Yes this is out of Ghost Towns, Colorado Style Volume Three. However, my sources of information are listed at the end of this section on page 387. But you certainly have my permission to use the way I presented this story.
Kenneth Jessen - author, lecturer, tour guide
Just got my tin today…thanks to DAVE!
I’m trying to figure out scale…in the 7th picture, third from the bottom, you see an opening under the corrugated roof that I would say has to be about six foot. The section of boards above the signs, then, would appear to be 8-foot boards. Maybe they are ten foot. If I were to use eight foot as my measurement, then the height of the mine would be 32 feet up to the bottom of the window under the roof, and adding another four foot above that would make it 36 foot tall. If I went nine foot instead of ten or eight, that makes it about 42 foot tall.
So at 1:24 that means if I’m estimating right, I would have a build that’s between 18 inches to 21 inches tall. I think this all looks and sounds about right? At 18 inches it wouldn’t dwarf anything else on my layout either; even 20 wouldn’t.
John, FYI. The Yankee Girl Mine head was not to long ago “Stabilized” and partially restored, and modified from it’s original design as part of the stabilization.
Whats there now is a bit different then it use to be. Might look at older pictures, I believe that a number of "window openings"and doors, were decked over to provide weather proofing and security.
Thanks, Dave, I thought maybe something like that was going on, good to have it confirmed. You can see in the second picture from the Denver Public Library the way the mine head originally looked. I’ll build a combination of the two…not so decrepit as what’s there now, but not all built out like the original. For instance, the left half of the building under the slanting roof, well I like it better with just the beams on an angle showing. But I’ll put all the original windows and openings back in.
By the way, I know you were kidding, but I would be game for shipping builds to that show for our own exhibit. I think it might cost too much though!
John. Heres a view from a latter date of the O’l Gal. Must have been taken at a latter date, as they have a “Shed” attached to the West side, and It covered up a couple of the lower windows at that time. Unk date.
And a better view of the East side
Hope these help out.
Uh oh…it appears that I’ve made a bad assumption. I assumed the mechanism for dropping and lifting the car with men and ore into the mineshaft was housed in the minehead structure itself. Looking at your pictures, especially the second one, it seems the pulley was operated from outside the minehead from that scaffold-like bracing contraption supporting the axle and wheel which can be seen to the right of the minehead with cables going from its clearly-visible pulley wheel into the top of the minehead. Now the small opening jutting out of the corrugate roof of the minehead (seen in my fifth and seventh pictures) makes sense: that is where the cables entered the roof to connect to the pulley wheel inside. I was wondering what the heck that apparently useless roof opening was for.
So thanks a lot Dave! You just made more work for me!
p.s. If anybody can explain what I’m looking at better than I have here, I would appreciate it.
John, No… The cables for the shaft cars ran within the diag. beams. The hoist motors were lociated within the diag. brace beams. The building with the two stacks in the background was the power house. I believe what you are mistaking for hoist cables are elect. cables. In the first two pics, the white house on the right side was either the owners house or the mine foremans. He would have the privilage of having elect. from the mine and that pole rigging was to get power over to the house.
While i know nothing about what this, I am flying purely off observation, I can see sort of where John is questioning. The power cable idea sounds great and I certainly can not argue it, but that rig is intriguing. It clearly has a pulley at the top of the rig and what appears to be a large drum at the bottom. can’t tell for sure. it does certainly look like a hoist of some sort. If not the main hoist then a secondary for something else? It is prominent in every picture of it, whatever it is, it should be modeled in my humble opinion.
Great, Devon, thanks a bunch. Dave lets me off the hook and then you chime in to insist I model it. I’ll go with “secondary hoist.”
And maybe this weekend I’ll get started building. That would be a good idea.
I don’t buy the secondary hoist idea neither. If you notice, those “Cables” are slack, and they are closer together at the mine then they are are at the secondary structure. On top of the secondary structure there is another cable (wire) taking off frame right. So I think Dave is right. Now for the pulley and drum, that I do not know.
If you look close at the secondary structure, its not square, like a hoist, its flat with diagonal beams on each of the main upright beams. And with the cross bracing between the main upright beams, it can’t be a hoist, since the hoist cable would have to pass through the diagonal bracing. If it were built square, then I would agree its a secondary hoist.
After looking at the OP pics, the wheel is gone, but the structure remains and wires can be seen strung from the top. The pic looking up. I suggest the wheel was used to hold the wire as it was pulled out and removed when empty.
Another shape suggested maybe a bell or horn, but there wasn’t much support for that.
Rule #1.
John