Items which have sold or are otherwise no longer available have been moved to the Sold Items Archive
UTAH
Salt Lake City
RFG-913. American Smelting & Refining Company, Salt Lake City, UT 8-May 1908
Lot No. 10 Statement: Assay of Samples. This assay receipt is for ore or bullion of the Mazuma Hills Mining Co. at Mazuma, Nevada during the height of the Gold Rush there. The company shipped their ore directly to ASARCO in Utah. The average grade of these samples is about 10.7 ounces per ton gold and 6.5 ounces per ton silver. Very Fine. $100.
RFG-917. Assay Office of J. McVicker, Salt Lake City, UT 14-Jul 1879
Certificate of assay. $350.
RFG-918. Assay Office of J. McVicker, Salt Lake City, UT 11-Mar 1889
Certificate of assay of ore for King of the West. $100.
RFG-919. Assay Office of J. McVicker, Salt Lake City, UT 6-May 1879
Certificate of assay of ore for Charley Reed. $100.
RFG-921. Assay Office of J. B. Meader, Salt Lake City, UT 14-Oct 1876
Certificate of assay for 257 sacks/20378 lbs ore. $100.
RFG-922. Assay Office of J. B. Meader, Salt Lake City, UT 9-Mar 1878
Printed two page weekly circular: ore and metal market prices. Very Fine. $550.
RFG-923. Utah Sampling Mill, Salt Lake City, UT 14-Oct 1876
No. 584 Receipt for 243 Sacks/20,325 lbs of ore from the Pease Mine, signed by J.C. Conklin, Assayer. Fine. $200.
RFG-925. Rare Early View of Vermont Gold Mine. c 1860
Gold Digging in Vermont
Very early and extremely rare stereo view of several gold miners working on one of Vermont’s gold-bearing creeks. The miners are pictured with their sluice box or long tom and shovels. There is a label on the reverse of the card with the following: “Hills and Dales of New England, No. 466, Gold Digging at Smith’s Claim, Gold Miner’s Glen, Plymouth, VT. F.B. Gage, Photo. Published by E. Anthony, 501 Broadway, New York.”
Two miners can be seen in this stereo view standing atop an improvised dam made, one could assume, from stones and boulders gathered in the immediate vicinity. Typically a small dam of this type would have been constructed by miners to divert the creek water out of its channel, thus draining the creek bed so that they could shovel rocks and gravel into the sluice box.
On a very slow flowing creek such as the one pictured, a dam also would enable them to build up and hold back a head of water. When released, the water behind the small dam would then provide an adequate volume and flow of water sufficient to operate their sluice boxes efficiently.
Three other miners are also pictured hard at work. One fellow is below the long tom clearly standing in the creek bottom and shoveling gravel up to another miner who is standing alongside the head of the long tom.
The other miner would then have shoveled the relayed material from the creek bottom into the head of the sluice box. Finally a fifth miner can be seen standing atop the sluice using his shovel to scoop out and remove larger non-gold bearing rocks and gravel, which if allowed to go unchecked would cause rock jams in the sluice box . . . especially so if slow moving water flow was an issue.
At the top left of the photo is a section of a farmer’s fence. What makes the fence note worthy is that it illustrate that by the time gold was discovered in Vermont much of the country had already been settled and farmed for perhaps a century or more. However, as fate would have, it took a gold rush in California to create the circumstances that would eventually lead to the discovery of gold in Vermont.
By 1855 some of the Vermonters who had traveled west to strike it rich during early years of the California Gold Rush had returned to their home state to pick up and continue living their everyday lives. As legend would have it one of these Vermonters was fishing in a creek located in the Plymouth Hills when a glimmer beneath the water caught his eye. Of course that glimmer turned out to be a gold nugget. Vermont’s Gold Rush was on!
Quantities of high-grade placer gold were soon discovered in many of Vermont’s rivers and creeks including Rock, Williams, Ottauquechee, White, Rochester, Mad, Waitsfield, Lamoille, Gihon, Missisquoi Rivers, as well as Buffalo and Sandy Rill Brooks. Buffalo Brook would later be renamed Gold Brook. [Geology of Vermont, state website].
Between the 1855 and 1884 gold miners sought their fortunes in Vermont, but few if any ever found the pot at the end of the rainbow they were looking for. The Rooks Mine was probably the most successful of all producing only about 13,000 ounces during a thirty year period; which was hardly a drop in the bucket by California standards. None-the-less it was Vermont . . . and it was gold! [Ref: Online web sit for State of Vermont, Agency of Natural Resources].
The photographer who recorded the mining scenes captured in this stereo view was F.B. Gage. Gage was the first American photographer to publish stories about picture making, and beginning in 1858 several of his articles appeared in Humphrey’s. Gage was a prolific photographer often traveling extensively and developing his work in the field. In 1857-8 Edward Anthony commissioned gage to do a series called “Hills and Dales of New England.” The stereo view offered in this lot was one of those commissioned photographs. [Ref: Vermonter Magazine, Sep 1966]. This is an Excessively Rare 1860’s stereo view of gold mining in Vermont. $1,200.