Winter Quarters Utah lost treasure.

Hello All

There is a sleepy little grassy valley in Utah That once had a town called Winter Quarters.

Coal was once mined at Winter Quarters. It was the first coal mine in Utah in 1875.

 May Day, 1900, started out with a clear sun shinning up the valley into the town as 303 miners headed up to the mine portal. This mine was considered one of the safest in the country and had been inspected by Gomer Thomas, state mine inspector, on March 8.

 But at 10:15 a.m. everyone in the mountain town felt the ground shake. Some people thought someone had set off some dynamite, however the horrible truth spread through the town like wildfire. A giant explosion had occurred in the mine.

 Mothers and daughters were seen hurrying toward the mine portal, "faces blanched with fear, hoping against hope that their loved ones in some way had escaped. Soon the bitter realization came that the miners were caught ? caught like rats in a trap with no chance of escape,? reported Charles Madsen in his account of the disaster.

When rescue and recovery teams were finally able to enter the horizontal shafts, they found "men piled in heaps, burned beyond recognition. The bodies were removed as fast as possible and the school, the church and other available buildings were requisitioned as morgues.

When the accounting was done, 104 had escaped, seven of them seriously injured, and 199 killed in the mine blast. Later when Pleasant Valley Coal Company opened mines at Castle Gate, far below Pleasant Valley, it spelled the end of the long-haul operations at Winter Quarters. Production decreased steadily and in 1928 the mine was closed and the town abandoned.

Speculation over the years about buried gold has frequently come into conversations about the mining town?

There is no question about the miners being paid in gold and silver coins. Just three years earlier, Butch Cassidy and Elza Lay had robbed the Pleasant Valley payroll when the money arrived by train. Their loot was $7,000 in gold double eagles. They dropped $700 in silver.

Couple that payroll with the fact that there was no bank at Winter Quarters and it is easy to see how many believe some of those miners had cached gold coins among the rocks or under fence posts behind their homes on the valley side. If they had not told wives of the cache, knowledge of it died with the miners in the disaster.

Perhaps among the grassed over hills where houses once stood lay a small fortune in caches of the long dead miners who perished on that dreadful day in 1900.

Hardluck 

 

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