We came across Homestakes mines when looking at an 1891 Bureau of Mines report where Fairbanks and Creighton Gold finds were involved.
The report stated that a gold expert with extensive USA gold mining experience had visited the northern Ontario sites at Vermillion Lake and Gordon Lake and had compared the finds to those he'd seen at the Homestakes mines in Black Hills country.
It is no wonder that the area experienced a minor gold rush if people truly interested in finding the next gold mother lode were reading such reports.
Homestakes mines according to David Anderson in Ethnographies of Conservation was built in Sioux Indian country. He puts it this way.......
1848 - Marshall finds Gold at Sutter's mill in California - California Gold Rush is on
1851 The Treaty of Fort Laramie is signed which gives white men, Europeans, safety as they venture across the Oregon trail into the west and northwest to settle. Same treaty allows for roads and forts to be built in their lands. Same treaty is basically a precursor to the reservation land of the Native American tribes and nations.
1857 Lieutenant G. K Warren is moving troops across the northwest when he mentions gold in those mountains.
1858 The Pike's peak gold rush is on as miners and settlers rush into Kansas and Nebraska..........but wait...this is against the rules of the 1851 treaty which stated that the US would prevent the mass immigration of settlers and miners. Plenty of Spanish speaking gold miners and prospectors enter this area - probably one of them set up the Spanish Mines that are later bought by F W Bradley.
1868 - Fort Laramie Treaty basically protected the Sioux in the Blackhills from invasion by white settlers.
1874 - Blackhills Gold Rush begins and the Fort Laramie Treaty is broken when gold in discovered. General G. A. Custer moves in with his troops
1875 - mining towns are everywhere - Deadwood, Central City, Lead...
1876 - April 9 - Fred and Moses Manuel, Hank Harney and Alex Engh discover gold near Lead....
1877 - Amendment of 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty pushes the Sioux onto reservation land
2002 - Homestake mine closes after producing some 40 million ounces of gold
Lead is where Homestake mine set up shop. Lead is in North Dakota. Their gold mine was special and not like the other ore bodies in the area.
Homestake mines in Black Hills country is explained on Wikipedia this way :
The workers crushed the rock to release the gold, concentrated the gold by gravity methods, and then exposed the concentrate to mercury that would amalgamate with the gold. Miners call this kind of gold ore free milling. Gold existed elsewhere in the Black Hills, but it was not in the free milling state. In these conditions, gold was chemically bound to the rock, and very difficult to remove. It was called refractory gold ore. For many years, the Homestake operated as the only major gold mine in the Black Hills. Chlorization and smelting were seen as two methods that could remove gold from the refractory ore in the 1890s. More rock mining regions opened up around Lead and Deadwood because of this discovery.
It closed down in 2002 but it produced not only gold. It produced gold mining experts. Some of those experts were in the Vermillion Lake and Gordon Lake area of Creighton and Fairbanks townships when Colonel James R Gordon was also there.
Who exactly was J R Gordon ? We are looking hard to find that out. We know that wherever there is a coal mine or any type of mine, be it in England or in Canada or the US there is bound to be a Stobie, a Bradley, a Gordon, a Loftus, a Coyne or an Hargreaves nearby.
It is extremely interesting to note that Homestake mine was dealing with solar neutrino observations way before the Sudbury, Ontario mines got involved with this type of atomic research. Just a few years back there was an entire conspiracy theory going around that research like this, also done through the large hadron collider in Switzerland, could lead to the ultimate destruction of mankind by create black holes. But that is certainly all conspiracy....
It is also interesting to note that O B Gordon was a Nevada banker working the placer gold prospectors in the same era when Homestake was being founded and that F W Bradley was coming of age with his Spanish mine special knowledge of how to mine gold on the cheap. Meanwhile a guy named Violet Stobie was at the end of the rail line playing the role of Factor almost exactly where the explorers Lewis and Clark had ended their trek across the US.
Pause for the cause.....Why does it always seem like conspiracy at work ?
Schliemann was in the US in the mid 1800's. He was buying gold from miners and selling it to the big players. They were the Morgan's and Rothschild etc.... Schliemann went back to Europe, screwballed the Russians then went and discovered the ancient city of Troy.........WOW!!!
Meanwhile the Rothschild's are financing Treadwell in Alaska while F W Bradley takes on increasingly more important positions with Bunker Hill and Sullivan and with Treadwell Alaska. Then he forms Treadwell Yukon and ends up in the backyard of J R Gordon who in 1924 seems to disappear from the Chelmsford scene just when Errington and Bradley start playing in the sandbox. In 1931 everybody exits the area.
Where did they go ? They went hunting for more gold and more mines.
How ironic........in 1856 Salter's compass went haywire in Creighton.
Joseph Salter, like Colonel James R Gordon was a surveyor. However the Gordon family name is so much bigger in the mining industry. Salter was a no one except for probably being an apprentice to the wizard US military dude named Colborne.
So mysterious !!!!
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