This conference was in Gunnison, CO this year and turnout was pretty good, with a very large number from Colorado.
There were some interesting presentations including one by Rick Trujillo on the Camp Bird Mine. Rick is a geologist who actually worked at the Camp Bird early in his career. He said that Tom Walsh originally scouted the old mine looking for a flux for his (largely unsuccessful) smelter in Silverton. That certainly has a ring of truth as fluxes were critical and he made a lot of money selling a pyritic silver ore from his Rico mine to a Durango smelter which in turn he used to fund construction of Camp Bird mine and mill.
Rick also noted some interesting inverse ‘V’ formations carved into the rock face above the mine adit. He believes this was an avalanche deflector designed to direct the main flow away from the mine adit. Camp Bird is at an elevation above 11,000′ in an area with many avalanches.
There was a presentation by Richard Lippoth about Bulkeley Wells. Wells had a Harvard education and connection via marriage with many of the Boston investors in the Calumet Hecla Copper Co. He came to Colorado around the turn of the century as the investors tried their hand in western gold and silver. His first major job was to replace Arthur Collins at the (very marginal) Telluride Smuggler Union Mine. Collins was one of a family of esteemed Cornish mining engineers, who had worked in Spain, Norway and Afghanistan before coming to the US. The Smuggler Union was a not a profitable operation and Collins set about reducing costs, putting all the miners on contract work. That led to a Western Federation strike in which a Finnish miner was killed by company guards. After the strike was settled, with the elimination of the fireboss position, a fire in the mine killed 24 miners, which the union blamed on Collins and in 1902, Collins was murdered by persons unknown with a shotgun blast.
After Wells replaced Collins, he went after local union leader Vincent St John, accusing him of murder and had him arrested and charged. But the man St John was accused of killing was still alive and he was acquitted.
Wells had a very checkered career as a manager, technologist and advocate for the mining industry . He built a new Denver laboratory to develop technology for zinc smelting that could not be considered successful although it was used widely in company properties in Colorado. He waged a career long battle against organized labor, hiring Pinkertons and supporting the prosecution of WFM officers in the 1906-08 Idaho trials (they were acquitted). He bemoaned the passing (by union supported statewide plebiscite) of the 8 hour working day law in Colorado. But his personal life was a mess, with affairs, a nasty divorce, and a repudiation and sale of the properties he managed by his investor backers. He eventually faced bankruptcy and in 1931, took his own life.
I think the best presentation of the conference was by by Mark Hanson about placer gold mining in the Tarryall Creek area near Fairplay in Park County , CO. Rick relocated to the area after retirement and has done wonderful work relocating all the old placers and the pioneers who ran them, He has a new book titled ‘Tarryall Gold: from Rush to Hush’.
The conference will be in Pittsburg, KS in late May next year.