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welcome to another great episode of
Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains we're going to continue today with Jack
San Felice he tells us more about the Silver King mine and how the town began
Jack they were out in the middle of nowhere so how did they get all this
silver and gold processed they would bring that ore out and it was so rich
and they would they had to get mule trains to get it to where they could
send it by boat to Wales and because that's where the smelter was after the
first year there was a smelter built in San Francisco okay and the mint built in
San Francisco so then they started transferring ore to San Francisco and
they said no the third year they said this is too costly and to travel that
far they tried camels well the camels could go through the
desert fine but they spooked the mules and they spooked the horses and they
spooked the people because they were strange-looking creatures so that didn't
work and their feet got sore from walking over on the rocks they were used
to walking on sand they were great because they didn't eat they could make
it with the water in their bellies so they they decided that they're gonna
have to build a trail and that's what they did they built the trail from
Florence they followed a trail to where they followed an old stagecoach trail
and they got down to where they would then get to a place where then they
could ship the ore. 1875 they could actually ship it then. Alright so another
big question is where do they get the labor force and besides that where did
they live while they were building this the infrastructure up here it's it
started to grow people started to come here miners they built log, not log
cabins with stone cabins Cabins made out of stones and then some brush
on the top then they started hauling wood in and tend to make actual real
living places the Silver King eventually had five hundred people living in it
now let me jump back down to the mills they built three mills down below and
one was the Silver King and one was the 76 and I'm trying to remember the name I
can't remember the name of the third but it's in the book I found all three of
those remnants of those Mills down there but like I say it is five miles because
you got a zigzag and I found the old trail through the mountains all the way
down the old trail actually led past the old cemetery down there
The Superior cemetery but before that it was the old Silver King cemetery and Pinal
cemetery now they would take it down to Pinal to these mills and then they had
20 stamp mills down there they had 3 5 stamp no they had three five stamp mills
and then they had another small mill another five stamps so they had 20
stamps all together now stamp mill is a great big piece of metal on the bottom
and they haul it up by in the early days by mules they would pull pull it up by
ropes and then would go across a circular device like are you talking
about a pulley or a cam? a cam that would bring it around so that the ropes would
go through it and and then they eventually got cable and then they got
steam but originally there was mules and there was man and there was mules
and then they would bid it up about 15 20 feet and they would drop it on the ore
down below Splatt and it would just crush it and they kept dropping it till
was good enough to to turn into ore that could be cooked and I say ore was cooked
and the mills there there was a process which they had to heat up and they had
the wet the ore and then they had to run it over some some steam heaters and it
would actually cook the ore so that you could you could then
re process the ore with chemicals without that process you couldn't get
the gold and the max silver out of it because there was there were compounds
in it like sulfur that you had to get out of that ore then when that process
is done and I talked about those boiler type devices I even have the names and
the process in the in the book explains all of that and explain the whole
process of making silver and gold anyhow you get down to that process and
they use different process sometimes they use cyanide sometimes they use
mercury vats and then after they cook this they would get this or and and then
it would be amenable to cyanide which could then break down to compounds and
then would get rid of the rock and the dirt part of it and it would turn it
into a mass of material that they would take into a smelter and and then was
melted at 2,000 degrees first they ran about 1,500 they tried to get the gold
off first because gold softer than silver so they tried to get the gold off
well then they tried to get both gold and silver 2,000 degrees then that that
would go into a cooling form made out of cast iron and in that that would turn
into a hard piece of metal on the top what would happen they would take they
would take salt silica and something like borax and they would then heat that
to 2,000 degrees mix it with the what's called the concentrates they
concentrated or in a very tight fashion in other words they've reduced the ore
from this size down to the this size where what's the silver and the gold and
the other metals are in a copper so they would then smelt that down to
a bar that was about 40 pounds sometimes they were even 20 pound bars and then it
would take these bars then they could be shipped by Wells Fargo
covered stages they weren't Wells Fargo stages
Wells Fargo himself I owned that many stagecoaches the name Wells Fargo would
be on there but Wells Fargo guaranteed that the mail
would go through and that the the whatever letters and whatever bullion it
that the mines were sending would go through to the to the refineries and
they turned it and then into coins, they turn of course the the in San Francisco
they turn at the mint they turn the silver and the silver dollars and then
they turned the gold into five dollars or $20 gold pieces which was about that
big about the same size as a silver dollar only it was worth sixteen as much
today gold is worth about two hundred times more than silver and the old days
silver was four dollars an ounce okay and it stayed that at four dollars an
ounce for years and years like I say the mine that grew up here around the town
was called Silver King most people just called it the King
we're on our way to the King and everybody knew what the king was we'd
like to thank Jack San Felice for once again joining us and telling us about
history of the area it's hard to believe all that happened out here but it's gone
now it's all part of the Mysteries of
the Superstition Mountains
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