Mining, Prospecting, Abandonment

There were hundreds of miners living downriver, most crowded into boarding houses near the mines, others tucked into log cabins built on the strips of bench land.[1] The only way out of the canyon was on foot or horseback—either over Tower Rock to the south or up Pine Creek to Big Creek[2] that led to Leesburg.

Behind Charley Spayds’ log cabin loomed a massive rock thrust from the earth ages ago, known as Tourist Bluff. Below it stretched rolling hills and scattered flats. Charley was generous to a fault—the sort of man who would hand you his last biscuit without a second thought. Annie and I made our first home at his camp, just a few miles east of Shoup where the river swept wide and the view was unmatched. Charles Hiram Spayds, who hailed from the Pennsylvania coal fields had been in Lemhi County since before 1880. His partner, Tom Wend was a German emigrant who left Wisconsin for Montana, then followed word of gold strikes into the canyon. We weren’t far from the Merritts and Sweeneys—neighbors who were a comfort in that rugged place.

It wasn’t long before we found ourselves in this company of a colorful cast of characters. The best prospector of the lot was Sam James, who was uncovering most of the quartz now being mined between Shoup and Pine Creek.

William E. Taylor, born and raised in Plumas County, California arrived in Shoup a few months before us. A gifted mechanic and millman, he could coax more gold from ore than most, and found steady work at the Kentuck mine. Taylor was also a violinist, carpenter and master storyteller.

William Wallace Slavin packed supplies for the mines alongside Charles Spinney. In winter the two men cut ice from the Salmon so Shoup could boast cold drinks through the long, hot summers.

Not long after our arrival, came Thomas Palmer and his wife Sarah—Welsh emigrants who had hopped and skipped their way west until they ended up in Shoup. Unlike Annie and me, they brought four children in tow, a welcome addition to our rough community.

I could write pages about the people who made their homes in that peculiar canyon, but fortunately Annie herself began to immortalize them in the columns she wrote for the Idaho Recorder.[3]

When water ran too low to operate the stamps the smaller mining outfits relied on an arrastra—nothing fancy—just a round pit lined with flat stones with a couple of big drag rocks tied to a post in the middle. You hitched a mule or a horse to the sweep and those rocks went around in circles grinding the ore to sand. Slow work but it did the job.

Amalgamation was the next step. The ore sand was spread over copper plates covered with quicksilver.[4] The gold stuck to the quicksilver and made a heavy paste called amalgam. You scraped that off the plates, heated it and the quicksilver boiled away leaving pure gold behind.

Mine owners could come up with enough bars to warrant an early spring trek to the bank in Salmon City. The spring haul had to cover the wages of the crew if they had one, purchase equipment and supplies for the coming season, hopefully making enough profit to put into hearth and home.

That first winter crept down the mountains and into the canyon with a vengeance not long after we got there. Snow fell early and often and cold settled deep. The river froze so solid you could walk or sleigh your way to Northfork[5]

Our daughter Alta Hawthorne Callahan came into the world on February 4, 1887—the first child born in the downriver mining camp. I spent my days working in any mine that would have me and prospecting the hills in search of the next Comstock.[6]

Our second winter in Shoup was brutal. The river froze solid from Salmon City to Shoup—something no one could remember seeing before. In the spring snowmelt swelled the river washing out the trail between Northfork and Shoup. Charley Spayds now serving as county commissioner took on a contract to build a higher trail above town to prevent future washouts. The freight boats encountered extra dangers with a river running wilder and choked with downed trees.

By 1887 the town of Shoup boasted a post office, hotel, boarding houses, saloons, a billiard hall, restaurants and an opera house that kept us entertained from summer through fall. The well-known Western photographer William H. Pillner had a studio in Salmon City and opened a second in Shoup. Annie and I moved into town.

Charley Spayds’ brother Eli arrived from Pennsylvania. Charley added a saloon in Shoup to his enterprises and brown bears began crowding the trail between Northfork and Shoup. We kept a watchful eye and everyone ate a lot of bear.

Annie remained hopeful about the downriver mines, but in May of 1888 I left Annie and Alta in Shoup heading toward Bayhorse, another far-flung mining camp fifteen miles west of Challis. Bayhorse had a silver and lead mine and a smelter. I was an experienced smelter, needed steady work and a town less isolated.

I stopped overnight in Salmon City and told folks that I was moving there permanently and my family would follow later.[7]

Bayhorse sat about 7,000 feet in elevation. One hotel, one restaurant and five saloons, stores, boarding house, wash house, stables and homes crowded into the narrow canyon. The Bayhorse Smelting and Mining Company employed 200 men in the works. The mines included the Post Boy, Utah Boy, River View, Beardsley and Ramshorn. The smelter was powered by steam and operated year round. Kilns made charcoal from wood that was supplied by flume.[8] All entire it was quite an operation.

Not long after I left, Annie moved up to Pine Creek and settled herself in a cabin she decided needed building. I headed to Salmon City at the beginning of autumn, bought supplies, clothing for Annie and the children then loaded my freight at the riverside. When I stepped off the boat at the Pine Creek landing we loaded pack mules and headed up the trail to the valley.

When I got to Annie’s cabin, I wrestled the box of new clothing aside and began to unload the freight. Annie stepped out of the door and looked surprised to see me. Alta took a little coaxing but after offering her a stick of candy she let me pick her up. I stepped inside the cabin, walked over and peered at the sleeping newborn. He looked familiar. Reaching down to pet his head I found Annie’s eyes and stared at her for a long time. She smiled, picked up the baby in one fell swoop and put him in my arms. I sat in Annie’s rocking chair, laid him across my lap and watched him wake—stretching and squeaking. Then he opened his eyes and I said, “What’s your name little fella?”

Annie said, “Edward Graves Callahan.”

The baby looked at me eye to eye, scowled, puckered and squirmed. It wasn’t long before he began to wail, that newborn noise a person can’t ignore. Annie took the babe in her arms and I gave up the rocking chair. Only then did I look about the cabin. Annie never prioritized housework but she’d made a place to call home.

Eddy wasn’t yet a month old. Alta not quite two stood next to her mother, wary of the stranger in the cabin.

With the baby satisfied Annie began to warm dinner leftovers. Then she pointed to a pan of apple dumplings and grinned. I smiled back, moved my chair to the table and ate. We talked, laughed and said more than we could in a letter. When both children were asleep, we went outside and began sorting supplies.

I partnered with Alexander McLeod, James McCullough and Thomas Palmer on the Spring Lode mine on Pine Creek.[9] When spring came Annie gardened, tended chickens, wrangled horses and milked the cow. She made time to ride the hills, collecting the news of downriver while selling eggs, butter and produce to camp cooks.

There were more married women, more neighbors, more friends. We hosted gatherings at Pine Creek and showed up for every celebration held in Shoup. The canyon was isolated but it certainly wasn’t empty.

In spring we went camping at the hot springs, horseback riding, prospecting and visited new ranches springing up in the hills along Big Creek and those along the way to Northfork. Mostly though, I blasted rock, hauled ore to waiting wagons and prospected.

By that time, Tom Wend was homesteading over 200 acres on the widest place between Shoup and Northfork. He kept the county trails in shape, grew vegetables, watermelons, strawberries and planted an orchard that in time would furnish enough fruit to sell to all the camps. Wend was a man of quiet brilliance, tireless energy and no finer summer evening was to be had as those when we sat on Tom’s porch to talk half the night. Dances downriver rivaled any parties we had in Butte and we never made it home until morning.

By the summer of ’89 I left Annie and the children at Pine Creek. Folks will say I was restless and that’s true enough but Annie had her part in it. She wanted me nailed down to a cabin and a milk cow, neighbors and garden rows while I was looking to the hills. We had words about it more than once. She could be sharp when she chose and she chose it often, especially after I’d had a bout of heavy drink.

I had the itch to move on before I came back to Shoup from Bayhorse. Annie was set on making a home that would last while I was set on finding the next strike. You can’t keep a man like me tied to a cookstove and you can’t make a homesteader sleep easy with a man always talking about leaving. So I packed my gear on the pretense of going prospecting by way of Yellow Jacket and never went back to Shoup—figured once a year passed the law would call it abandonment and she’d be free of me. She was better off finding a man who wanted the same things she did. I told myself that plenty of times, even if it never sat right. Annie was rooted while I was drifting.[10]

The Idaho Recorder found its way to every mining camp in Idaho and I read Annie’s columns in the paper. By the sound of things she was getting along fine without me. In a winter issue early in 1891, I saw the Summons to Appear—she’d filed for divorce. By that time I was in Boise working as head clerk at the Grand Central Hotel,[11]] but last Annie heard of me I was mining in Custer. Some months later, I got wind of her marriage to Billy Taylor.

When the Panic of 1893[12] disrupted the economy, people traveled less and I lost my job. Copper kept a steady price and offered steady work for a man willing to do it, so I headed back to Montana.

On my way north I stopped in Idaho to see my children and visit my friends. Billy and Annie were living in Gibbonsville with a son between them. My children had sure grown, were attending school and seemed happy enough. I stayed long enough for us to get to know each other and told them I’d be back for a visit as soon as I could.

In Anaconda I worked the converters[13]—the department where the real heat was. The converter floor was the roughest job in the works. Everything ran hot—two thousand degrees or better—and you stood close enough to feel it in your teeth. Molten matte went into big barrel furnaces and kept hot air blowing through it until the sulfur and iron burned off. That’s how you made blister copper.[14]

It was dangerous work. If slag splashed it took your skin off. If water got in the barrel the whole thing could blow. The bricks inside wore out fast and if one gave way while the blast was on you didn’t stand a chance. Mistakes in maintenance or production could be fatal. The air was thick with sulfur smoke, enough to choke a mule, and you had to breathe it whether you wanted to or not.

The noise was constant—the roar of the blast, tilting steel barrels, the rattle of metal wheels, men grunting and sweating. You worked tired and half-blind from the heat. One wrong step and you were done. And they didn’t pay you extra for converters. You got the same wages as any furnace man, two-fifty, maybe three dollars a day if you were lucky in those hard times. It didn’t matter if you were choking on smoke or standing close enough to blister your boots. The Company figured one man was as good as another. What you got out of converters wasn’t more money—it was men knowing you’d lasted where plenty couldn’t.

The departments were just the different parts of the works: roasting, blast furnaces, converters, refinery, casting house.[15] A man could be sent anywhere labor was needed. I spent time in more than one department, but converters is the one folks remember because it was the roughest work.

Toward the end of the decade copper demand was climbing but prices were volatile. The Copper Kings shut down their mines when prices dipped too low, throwing the city out of work.[12]

NOTES

[1] Population estimates for Shoup range from three to six hundred people living downriver at the height of the mining boom of the early to mid-1880s.

[2] For obvious reason, Big Creek was renamed Panther Creek before 1900.

[3] A fuller history of James Callahan’s years downriver can be found in Down the Salmon River: The Life of Annie Callahan Taylor and Early Mining Camps.

[4] Quicksilver is mercury (chemical symbol Hg), a liquid metal once widely used in gold and silver processing. The term “quicksilver” was the miners’ vernacular, derived from Old English cwicseolfor, meaning “living silver.” When heated, the mercury vaporizes, leaving the gold behind—but its fumes were deadly, and many amalgamators paid for their work with their health.

[5] The modern spelling of Northfork is North Fork.

[6] The Comstock Lode discovered in 1859 in Nevada’s Virginia Range was the first major silver strike in the United States. It produced vast quantities of silver and gold fueling a boom that transformed Virginia City almost overnight. The Comstock became legendary as both a bonanza and a cautionary tale, fortunes made and lost, its name shorthand among miners for the ultimate strike.

[7] Idaho Recorder, May 12, 1888

[8] Details about the Bayhorse kilns appear in the 1976 nomination data sheet for the National Register of Historic Places.

[9] Idaho Recorder, January 1, 1899.

[10] No surviving record explains why James left for good. Family recollections and local gossip don’t survive in writing but the timing suggests both financial pressures and personal differences.

[11] The only details of James A. Callahan’s life appear in the Anaconda Standard, April 28, 1899, p. 1.

[12] The Panic of 1893 was a severe national depression sparked by railroad failures and the collapse of silver prices.

[13] Converters were large barrel-shaped furnaces used in copper smelting. Molten matte—a mix of copper, sulfur and iron—was poured in and blasted with air until the sulfur and iron burned off, leaving blister copper about 99% pure. The name came from the blistered surface of the cooled metal.

[14] Roasting was the first stage in copper smelting. Crushed ore was spread on hearths or in stalls and heated in open furnaces to drive off moisture and much of the sulfur before the ore went to the blast furnace.

[15] The refinery was where blister copper was melted again and further purified, sometimes by re-blowing with air or later by electrolytic refining, to raise the purity closer to 99.9 percent.