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hey thanks for joining us for a special edition of mysteries of the Superstition
Mountains and right here you'll see this beautiful Vista behind me above us we
have Goldfield and below us the WASP Mine and well today we're we're going to
be talking to a special person on the show here Clay Worst who knows all about
this area as a matter of fact he is the owner of the WASP mine and he's going to
tell us about the Goldfield mining district Clay well Goldfield actually
came on kind of late you know there was a quite a bit of mining exploration in
the Arizona Territory in the 60s 70s 80s it was about 1890 before anything really
happened out here at GoldField and initially it was a group of Mormons
Merril Hake Cozner filed on a bunch of claims here at Goldfield and they
had some gold but they didn't have the means really to develop it so they gave
a purchase option to Charles Hall and Dennis Sullivan out of Denver
experienced mining men and this was weird they had no sooner given that
purchase option than they had a club burst up Goldfield wash and a huge
flash flood came down the wash and where it crossed the mammoth fault contact if
scoured the gravel out of the down to bedrock and the bedrock was laced with
beautiful wire gold and they had already optioned it to Hall and Sullivan who
exercised the option immediately well the first thing they had to do to mine
it it was built a diversion dam to divert gold field wash to the west
around the mining operation and they sunk a shaft on it
they got down about a hundred feet and hit a tremendously rich ore deposit that
they started to work out they called it the Mormon scope and they had taken out
Oh about 28,000 ounces of gold now gold
back in those days that was $20.67 an ounce and the sixty-seven cents used
up in in refining fees so call it $20 gold that 28 thousand ounces today would
be worth thirty five million dollars well the same fate that created the
mammoth mine destroyed it there was another flash
flood it washed out the dam it flooded gold field it collapsed the Mormon stope
and they lost probably five million dollars that they had blocked out in the
Mormon stope when it collapsed so they shut that down they moved south down the
everything here at Goldfield is on the Mammoth fault contact its runs about
four thousand feet here they moved south on the mammoth claim to what they called
the glory hole and they pulled quite a bit of gold out of that and one of the
the so-called records is that they all told pulled out a hundred and five
thousand ounces of gold out of the mammoth that's a hundred and thirty
million dollars today today's market well they shut it down
Goldfield became a ghost town until nineteen nine when George Hugh Young who was the
territorial secretary for Arizona Territory bought out Hall had died
bought out the mammoth group from Hall's heirs but Young had a different approach
to it Hall and Sullivan were simply following extremely
high-grade veins Young had the idea of rather than doing that but exploring a
large body of lower grade or that could be worked open-pit and take everything
blood guts and feathers and do a heap leach well in the process of trying to
block out this or body young put ended up with over three miles of underground
workings down to the thousand foot level and this was basically between 1913 and
1923 well just an exploration by today's prices they took out two and a half
million and there was more than just what they had on the mammoth from the
mammoth claim running north you've got the Mammoth the Tom Thumb and the Black
Queen there was quite a bit of work done on the black Queen in fact they had a
huge power plant steam power generating plant here at the Mammoth they actually
ran a high voltage transmission line up to the Black Queen put in a substation
up there for the work done on the Black Queen and there was a number of shafts
put down there but the black Queen never developed a large major ore deposit like
the Mammoth did it was smaller veins of extremely high-grade ore but very small
veins and the black Queen never really amounted to that much in the Pioneer era
now there's development work going up on the black Queen today and I certainly
wish them well they may be able to do something with it but at any rate when
George Hugh Young failed to develop a big open pit here and it could never be done
today you'd never get a cyanide leach pit 3 miles up
stream from Apache Junction Arizona it's out of the question but they shut it
down and Goldfield became a ghost town 1,500 people number of fine businesses
everything gone. Clay as the legend goes the mammoth mind closed because it got
flooded but you you had the real story could you share with us there is a story
that's been told so many times it's achieved a life of its own that the last
shift at the mammoth mine the miners drilled loaded the holes spit the fuse
left the mine and blasted and we'll make aim to work the next morning they had
blasted into an underground river three miles of underground workings were
filled with water and water was running out the portal the story gets even
bigger they put six six-inch steam pumps on it pumped for 30 days and couldn't
lower the water level now that's a beautiful story except for one thing it
never happened the written record shows four years
after they had shut down the mammoth mine it had filled up to the 400 foot
level that never happened but you hear it on the the mine tour over at Goldfield
it has been repeated so many times it's got a mine of it's own
mind of its own but it never happened so where does Goldfield ghost town come
into all of this so Goldfield became a ghost town and
what's left of gold field today is Goldfield ghost town which is developed
as a tourist attraction and to me that's interesting because of all the western
themed towns in Arizona Goldfield ghost town is the only one that's an actual
reconstruction on the original site Apacheland, Calico, Old Tucson they're
all built at random locations but here at Goldfield we've got some actual
history so between Goldfield Ghost Town, Bluebird mine and the gift shop and
snack bar there that's really Goldfield today but those of us that live here you
know we take our mail out of Apache Junction we lost our post office once in
1897 got it back lost it again in 1927 but and we take our mail out of
Apache Junction and we're proud of Apache Junction really we're proud of it
but dang it this to us is gold field this is not Apache Junction this is
Goldfield Arizona we're kind of proud of it well thanks for joining us for
another special episode of Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains and we'd like
to thank Clay Worst the owner of the WASP mine who knows everything about
this area he's gonna be sharing more stories with us sharing more of the
mysteries of the Superstition Mountains
[Nusic]
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