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welcome to another day here at Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains and we're
here with Jack San Felice he's gonna tell us why the Silver King when it was so
popular so busy and still had a lot to be mine there as far as the silver goes
why did it close down now that's that's an interesting subject and you had
Pinal City you had Silver King and all of a sudden boof it's all gone
and he's gonna tell us what happened
Now because of this mine settlers came in
miners flocks here they drove the Apaches out and made it safe for other
miners and other mines so I have I have a map of 1882 showing where the Silver
King was in the Silver Queen and then it shows all the other mines that took
place around here like the Rogers Canyon mines like the Martinez Canyon mines
like the Reamert mines like the Miami Globe mines all of that was made
possible by one thing the Silver King mine it was the catalyst for mining
In these 1870s and 1880s because it was so valuable because it employed so many
people and could sustain two towns you think about it at Pinal City they had
two breweries two breweries they had a hundred men working into mine and then
there was about a hundred work in the mills it's 200 and a support system for
them was almost 4,000 people do you think about it the mine supported almost
4,000 people and these two towns as well as all the freight that was coming back
and forth and a hundred wood cutters that went up the Montana mountain would
come down here because everything in those days run by steam
and it was a corral up here also and there was a stagecoach stop up here
there was a turn around and this is a real little town and then the core
Pinal City was a bigger town and at Pinal City I was telling you about the
ore and how they processed it down there by the stamp mills they had all of these
people up here they had engineers they had assayer up here they had a doctor
here and they had course I pointed out to where the schoolhouse was the mining
they mined this mined for 12 straight years and why the mine closed was not
for lack of silver and gold not material the mine closed because silver dropped
they put a bill in to change the standard from silver to gold see Europe
was using a silver standard the Spanish had always used the silver standard and
the standards changed from silver in Europe to gold and that the price of
silver in America dropped from as high as $4 an ounce all way down to 20 cents
an ounce so was nothing it wasn't worth it was not worth mining the high-grade
the real high-grade got four down there generally they generally got about a
dollar fifty to two dollars maybe for the foremost of the what they called
high-grade but the real high-grade was about four guys that knew what the gold
looked like that they didn't say it see never in any of the reports they mention
any gold I've got all the reports from the years when they made reports here at
the Silver King official reports all they talked about was all they paid on
was silver that's the silver so that's the way it went
so ran twelve years and then silver collapsed and all mining in the West
collapsed the only thing that stood was the gold mines or mines that were making
gold and then a few years later copper came in well you know actually sometimes
we solve these mysteries and don't leave you with one
so today talking about the Silver King it's one of those solved mysteries of
the Superstition Mountains
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you