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Offline Eugene52Topic starter
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« on: October 20, 2013, 10:21:13 am »
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Nice Article !! Any forum members in Montana ?

Here is the paste and Link:

Buried treasure: Once-rich Bear Gulch may again produce gold !!
»
Dick Komberec of Bearmouth found this old whiskey bottle in one of his many excavations in the Garnet Mountains. William A. Clark’s wealth and connections with Deer Lodge banker S. E. Larabie enabled him to dig this 320-foot tunnel in Bear Gulch to remove overburden from narrow bedrock sluices.

October 12, 2013 9:30 pm  •  By Kim Briggeman, Michael Gallacher


BEAR GULCH – Rocks, rubble and what might be bat guano plug half the mouth of a tunnel three miles up this canyon in Granite County.

The skunky smell of packrat and who knows what all emanate from the other half, assuring that at least on one balmy day last week, whatever lurked back there in the darkness would remain a mystery.

“This is totally fresh history. You won’t see it anywhere,” said Dick Komberec, a modern-day gold miner from way back, as he peered into the depths.

He’s owned these properties for most of the past decade, and in the spring of 2011 used an earthmover to open this end of the tunnel. He did it mostly out of curiosity, to puzzle why it was blasted through a mountain of rock in the first place.

Komberec discovered not just a 320-foot-long hole too large to be a mining shaft, but a past that smelled of Victorian-age bankers, flashed of neon and money, and echoed to the curses of stooped miners known as Beartown Toughs.

It’s with an appropriate degree of whimsy that Komberec calls it “the tunnel that built Las Vegas.”

There’s a chance William Andrews Clark never saw this hole. Busy elsewhere, he may have left its construction and operation to the legions of others who worked for him over a lifetime that lasted 86 years and ended in 1925.

The polarizing Copper King of Montana raked in millions in the race to mine Butte in the late 19th century. Clark turned another pretty penny in 1905 when he, his brother J. Ross Clark and W.H. Bancroft auctioned off lots of a ranch on their new railroad line for what became the city of Las Vegas in Clark County, Nev.

Clark and his family had palatial homes in Butte, on both coasts and in Europe. When he died in 1925, he was Rockefeller wealthy. The fortune is still being sorted through. The story of the $300 million estate his daughter, Huguette, left when she died in 2011 at the age of 104 danced through newspapers as recently as last month.

“Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune,” started hitting bookstores at about the same time. Bill Dedman, an investigative reporter for NBC News and co-author of the book, was in Missoula this weekend for the Montana Festival of the Book.

But no one – journalist, historian, archaeologist or geologist – has detailed the massive extent of Clark’s gold mining operations in this gulch just 40 miles up the Clark (no relation) Fork River.

“It’s part of the Bear Gulch history that’s never talked about,” Komberec said as he stood at the tunnel opening. “But this actually is the main event.”

He makes the case that Clark and his Deer Lodge banking partner, Ed Larabie, financed construction of the tunnel as part of larger sluicing operation following the initial surge of mining here in the 1860s.

“Until then it was just individuals out prospecting who had their little shafts and whatever and had to try to share water and get rid of the tailings,” said Komberec, who lives below at Bearmouth and holds title to most of the Clark and Larabie properties of the 1800s.

“They had enough capital that they consolidated several miles of Bear Gulch and they put in a ground sluice, which means they dug down a long way to bedrock so they could drain it,” he said. “Then they made a big million-gallon reservoir and ditches and flumes. It took a lot of money to do that, and a lot of organization.”

***

The diggings from Beartown down to the river are narrow and deep, but rich when you get down to them.

“Deep is right,” Dan Cushman wrote in “Montana – The Gold Frontier” in 1973. “Miners reached bedrock after digging 50 feet in Bear Gulch, just below the juncture of Deep Creek and First Chance Gulch.”

Fifty feet sounds small enough, Cushman said, until you peer down a 50-foot hole, or stand at the bottom and look up.

“The distance increased slowly down the creek and became 70 near the mouth, but there it met the water level of the Clark Fork Valley and could not be drained by methods then available,” he wrote.

The paystreak was so narrow, Cushman claimed, that in the old days shafts and horizontal drifts bumped up against the next ones. Traveling up Bear Gulch today, you’re driving over the top of a continuous network of old underground shafts.

It’s said it was possible in the 1860s, before Clark and Larabie dug their bedrock sluice, to walk 10 miles up or down the Bear without coming to the surface.

“There are accounts of the bottom of Bear Gulch serving as a thoroughfare during periods of deep snow,” Cushman wrote, “men going below with a candle in the morning and walking steadily all day, down the rock bottom in a constant 40 degrees of warmth while the blizzard howled above, emerging at last in the winter evening almost at the Clark Fork.”

The way Komberec figures it, even as Clark was turning his attention to the fledgling silver quartz mines of Butte in the early 1870s that would lead to the fabulously rich copper deposits, he and Larabie were amping up operations on Bear Creek.

They, or rather their workers, cleared 30 feet of earth down to bedrock to put in a ground sluice that stretched the equivalent of six football fields.

***

As he drove the modern-day road north last week, Komberec imagined the scene from 140 years ago.

“You would have seen all those guys standing shoveling into sluice boxes,” he said.

There were probably crew bosses and maintenance men to keep the 4-foot-wide wooden sluices running. On the banks above others fed a steady diet of ore. Someone must have been regulating the flow of water from the acre pond at the top, signs of which Komberec can still point out a mile above the tunnel.

Then there was the tunnel itself.

The mines of Bear Creek as high up as Garnet have always been short of water. The stream itself is seasonal, which simplified digging and sinking shafts but presented a challenge for panning and sluicing gold.

“In this case, they didn’t have enough water to wash the big stuff separately or any room at that oxbow to stack it,” Komberec said. “They had to take the oversize through the tunnel to the downhill side, and the rest of it, the fines, went down around the corner of the oxbow with the water.”

Mining tunnels were maybe 5 feet wide with rounded tops and a downward slope for drainage. This one, when the blasting was done, was a dozen feet high, eight feet wide, with squared sides and top, said Komberec.

The floor was lined with boards to accommodate mules that dragged the boulders through the tunnel on carts, wagons or sleds.

Komberec said he’s come across lots of donkey shoes at the other end, as well as other curiosities – Smith minie balls, of the kind favored for Confederate firearms in the Civil War, and hundreds of chunks of iron ore, rare in this country, that were obviously sorted from the rest of the rubble but never hauled away.

“His (Clark’s) foresight was unique. Nobody else would think of putting a tunnel through the mountain,” Komberec said. And Clark, keen businessman that he was, wouldn’t have gone to the expense of having such a tunnel built unless he knew it would be worth it.

***

Long before his massive sluicing operation of the 1870s, Clark had a history in the Garnets. In 1865 he capitalized on the remoteness of the new mining camp of Reynolds City near the head of Elk Creek by opening a store and mining the miners.

One of them, Col. G.W. Morse, told of being among a group of four men who snowshoed to Reynolds City from their mines a few miles away, dropping between $600 and $700, and hauling all the goods home on their backs. Clark got $38 a pair for gum boots, $18 for a pick, $12 for a shovel, and $4 for an ax.

When things heated up at Beartown, on the other side of the mountain, he picked up and moved his merchandise there. His mercantile partner was Spanish-born Joaquin Abascal, who a decade later would marry Clark’s younger sister, Lizzie, in Deer Lodge.

Komberec has an old survey map that shows consolidated patented mining claims in the seven miles of Bear Gulch from Beartown down to Bearmouth. Abascal’s name is on holdings above the “Oxbo Placer,” which reaches to the top of the tunneled oxbow ridge. On the other (south) side of the oxbow is the Larabie placer.

The name of the administrator on an 1894 plat of the Oxbo Placer is hard to distinguish, but it’s followed by “et al.” That’s common on plats, Komberec said. “Et al” means the financiers behind it who don’t want their identities known.

He’s sure the “et al” in this case was Clark. Komberec, a retired commercial airline pilot, was just a teenager in Drummond in the early 1960s when a miner took him under his wing. Charlie Bonham instilled in him the lifelong passions of mining and flying, and helped Komberec pan his first gold in a gulch just above old Bear Town.

“Old Charlie started mining up here in 1917, and he told me I don’t know how many times that this was William Clark the Copper King’s claim here” at the tunnel, Komberec said.

The scars that a dredging operation left starting in the late 1930s in the lower Bear are readily apparent from Interstate 90. They’re in the form of tremendous mounds of rocks that line the gulch. Komberec said the dredge would have made it all the way up to the oxbow tunnel if World War II hadn’t intervened.

“Some mining methods have a way of leaving the land topsy-turvy, especially when a powerful dredge digs below a creek to an unearthed gold wash downstream from the motherlode,” reads a Bureau of Land Management interpretive panel overlooking the tailing heaps.

***

The sign goes on to say that from 1939 to 1942, the Star Pointer Exploration Co. unearthed nearly 14,000 ounces of gold here.

“We know it was a little bit better than that,” Komberec said.

A report by the U.S. Assay Office in Helena in 1885 included the dwindling returns of the Bear Gulch diggings from “Messrs Clark & Larabie,” who purchased more than $100,000 in gold dust “which was mainly shipped east.”

But the author, Spruille Braden, admitted, “It is difficult to obtain accurate information of the production of precious metals in a territory so extensive as Montana, especially in the absence of any legal requirements to compel mine owners to make reports of their product.”

It’s a problem that, for many reasons, has dogged mining regulators into the 21st century.

“Mind you these big companies had to give a certain percentage to the landowners,” Komberec said. “They were pretty shrewd about what they called net smelter return.”

He’s working with another Canadian company and the BLM on plans to rework these diggings with modern mining techniques. He’ll remove the pilings and reclaim a stretch of the gulch starting at the first mile marker

“From here on up, based just on (Star Pointer’s) test drilling records, there’s $50 million bucks worth of that placer gold in the next mile,” he said.

It’s gold that not even William Clark had the wherewithal to recover. Another layer in the history of the Bear is about to begin.

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HH..................Eugene


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