Existing comment:
The Leasers
"From everywhere came hardy spirits..."
A great mystery of the desert is how quickly word travels of a rich mineral strike! The discovery started America's last great mining rush.
Belle and Jim devised a plan to handle the rush. They leased parts of their claim, the richest of all, to enthusiastic prospectors, who measured the areas they chose to excavate at three feet per step, and marked them with rocks.
The Butlers never signed a contract with any of them- simply a verbal agreement for 25% of the profits the lease produced in a one year period. The Butlers entered the names into a notebook and the deal was done.
The deep hole in front of you is called a stope and was dug out by those early miners in 1900-1901. They dug down 100 feet to dig out the ore. The timbers were placed to keep the holes from collapsing. Later mining took the stopes down to 500 feet, the total depth of the ore body - the depth of the stopes you see.
"Leasers took four million dollars worth of ore from Tonopah without so much as a scrap of writing to prove their claims." - Historian Carl Glasscock |