| Difficulty: | Number: | Miles: | Altitude: | Obstacles: | Time: |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Easy 3 | FR 285 | 0.82 | 12,800 ft. | Ledge Road | 1/2 hour |
South Park Ranger District
Fairplay, CO 80440
Closure
July - Best
August - Best
September - Best
Accessed:
From Fairplay, CO. head northwest on CO-9 N/Main Street toward 4th Street and continue to follow CO-9 N for 5.5 miles. Turn left onto County Road 8/Buckskin Street and go 2.1 miles. Turn right onto County Road 785/787 and go 3.0 miles. Turn left on to the Switchback, FR857, road and go 0.15 miles and turn sharp right. Go 1.0 mile climbing through switchbacks. At the intersection go left to start Privateer.
To determine the value of the silver, Plummer and Myers mined 100 pounds of ore from the Dwight and sent it to Newark, New Jersey, for an assay that proved the silver at 265 ounces to 400 ounces per ton, making the Dwight a rich silver mine. Without funds to develop the mine, no activity took place at the Dwight. In the early summer of 1871 Plummer and Myers climbed back up Mount Bross to the Dwight and found more indications of silver higher up at 13,700 feet. Using their prospecting knowledge they traced the silver outcrops horizontally across Mount Bross. They took another 100 pound ore sample and sent it to Newark to be assayed. After the results came back the Moose Mine was filed on August 5, 1871. The assay had come back with ore as high as 879 ounces of silver per ton, making it very rich ore. Two new partners were added to help finance the mine work, Judson H. Dudley and Andrew W. Gill. By September of 1871 the Moose Mine had been surface-stripped for 250 feet uncovering ore from sixteen to twenty inches wide assaying at 400 ounces of silver per ton. Taking 30 tons of ore from the Moose and 10 tons from the Dwight the owners pack trained the ore to Denver, shipped it to New York, then on to Swansea, Wales, one of the most advanced smelters in the world, for processing. Even with the huge shipping cost the Moose Mine ore still produced a large profit.
Following the limestone outcrops from Mount Bross onto Mount Lincoln, Addison M. Janes laid claim to the first mine on Mount Lincoln in July of 1871, the Wilson lode. More mines were claimed on Mount Lincoln, including the Lincoln lode at 13,200 feet, the Russia Mine at 13,880 feet, and the Present Help at 14,157 feet. Janes and William E. Musgrove located the Present Help on September 3, 1871, which included the summit of Mount Lincoln, making it the highest mine claim ever filed in Colorado. Back on Mount Bross, in early 1872 George W. Brunk and Assyria Hall discovered Dolly Varden Mine, below the Moose Mine, another of the few mines staked that actually produced wealth for the owners.
Quartzville is an old mining community on the east side of Mount Lincoln and Mount Bross. It was first settled in the early 1860s. By 1870 there were fifty cabins spread out around a sunken meadow below the mines high up on the mountains. The silver ore produced by the mines was shipped out to Denver and then back up to Black Hawk to a smelter, or overseas to Swansea, Wales for smeltering. Only the highest grade ore could be sent. Low grade ore was stockpiled at the mines. The main mines were the Moose just below the summit of Mount Bross, the Dolly Varden below the Moose, and the Russia on Mount Lincoln. The combined output of these mines was worth over three million dollars. By 1872 Quartzville had a small crushing and sampling works. But what was needed was a smelter in the Fairplay area. The owners of the Moose Mine created the Mount Lincoln Smelting Works Company and built a smelter, known as the Dudley Works, which fired up on December 1, 1872. The Dudley Works was south and east of Mount Bross along the Middle Fork of the South Platte River, a mile above the confluence of the South Platte River and Mosquito Creek.
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| Boston and Colorado Smelter at Alma, 1875. Right of center with smoke stacks. |
Through the mild winter of 1872-73 the Moose Mine continued working and struck a 13 foot thick deposit of solid mineral. The Baker mine also worked through the winter hitting good ore. By May of 1873 the Dolly Varden Mine hit a vein 6 feet thick and 4 to 15 feet deep. As the snow melted off, the Park Pool Association built the first wagon road up Mount Bross to their Hiawatha and Baker Mine. In June of 1873 Sullivan D. Breece, known as Captain Breece, and his associates graded a road from the Moose and Baker Mines around Mount Cameron to the Present Help Mine, at 14,157 feet, on the south side of Mount Lincoln. The Present Help Mine was the highest producing mine ever worked in Colorado. Another wagon road was also built up Mount Lincoln from Quartzville. By the fall the Moose had produced $200,000 and sent a 4,700 pound piece of solid silver ore to the annual Territorial Fair in Denver. During the dry summer of 1873 the town of Fairplay grew from a few cabins to a small town of 900 residents and all the buildings and businesses associated with a boom town. On September 26, 1873 the dry summer caught up with Fairplay when a defective stove pipe passing through the roof of the Fairplay House caught fire. With no fire fighting equipment all the towns wood business builds caught fire. Being late in the year there was no chance to recover and people had to move to other smaller towns or leave Park County.
By the fall of 1873, with all the mines producing ore, the two smelters were competing with each other for ore. The Dudley Works blast furnace was the more expensive smelter compared to the Boston and Colorado Alma smelter, which used a reverberatory process. This forced the Dudley Works to retrofit their smelter to a reverberatory system, allowing the Alma to monopolize the local ore. Even after retrofitting the Dudley had to compete with the better capitalized Boston and Colorado Alma smelter. In the end Edward Peters gave up the struggle and closed the Dudley Wroks and left Park County in January of 1874. Ironically, with technological advancements, the blast furnace would later out perform the reverberatroy process. With the Moose Mine, Russia Mine, and Dolly Varden Mine producing high grade ore, the Dudley Works upgraded its machinery and reopened in September 1875. Through the winter of 1875-76 both the Dudley Works and the Boston and Colorado Alma smelter ran at full capacity to handle the 20 percent increase in silver mined, equating to over $500,000 in silver, and almost as much for the 1876 season.
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| Moose Mine in 1880 photo by: T.C. Miller |
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| Moose Mine in 1880 photo by: T.C. Miller |
William H. Stevens had a falling out with the Park Pool Association. He and Sullivan D. Breece, who had done placer mining in California Gulch on the west side of the Mosquito Range near Oro City, joined forces to solve the water issue of the gold placer mining in California Gulch. They purchased all of the old placer mines in California Gulch and built a 12 mile ditch to bring water to the gulch. In the summer of 1874 Stevens invited Alvinus B. Wood, a mining metallurgist, to California Gulch. At one of the mines being worked Wood's found a crystalized carbinate of lead rock and showed it to Stevens, who knew right away what it was. The heavy black material that had plagued the California Gulch sluices contained lead and silver. It turned out that the silver along the blue limestone on the east side of the Mosquito Range, that had been pushed up high on Mount Bross and Mount Lincoln, was lower and horizontal on the west side of the range, laying like a carpet below what would become Breece Hill. This was the start of the boom that created Leadville. Through 1877 and 1878 Leadville drew the miners and capital out of Park County, all but halting mining in that county. By the end of 1878 the Boston and Colorado Alma smelter was shut down. The company built the Argo to process ore from the surrounding areas, using coal from Denver. The Dudley Works was also shut down. By the summer of 1882 the great Moose Mine, having gone through many stock manipulations and not finding more ore pockets, sold off its remaining equipment. The Dolly Varden also went through the same decline, minus the stock issues, making large discoveries of low grade ore. With a limited ore market to sell the ore to, the Dolly Varden paid its miners in September of 1882 and settled into leasing some of its claims. By the time the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed in 1893, by which the U.S. Government was no longer obligated to buy silver at a set price, the great silver mines on Mount Bross and Mount Lincoln were ghosts, like some of the towns surrounding these mountains.
Jessen, Kenneth Ghost Towns Colorado Style, Volumn 2, 1st ed. Loveland, Colorado: J.V. Publications, 1999. Print.
Gardiner, Harvey N. Mining Among the Clouds The Colorado Historical Society, 2002. Print.
Starting from the intersection of Switchback, FR857, and Mount Bross, FR288, Privateer is a faint two track 4WD road that cuts across the south flank of Mount Bross. After a quarter mile you will pass above some tailings. The road will continue south across the tundra until you come to a switchback that will bring you up on top of the south ridge below Mount Bross. From here the road is no longer drivable, but use to go down to an outcrop that had the Buffalo Head Mine on it. Some lumber is still visible. You will have a great view down into the valley formed by Buckskin Creek.