CARBONATE CAMP

CARBONATE CAMP

CARBONATE CAMP by

Mildred Fielder

We found Carbonate Camp on a series of summer days, and walked straight into history. The old mining town was dead as far as activity was concerned—nobody breathed there, DO mine was operating—but everywhere we looked we saw the evidence of a living enthusiasm that could not be BURIED.

We had known it was there, of course. Most people who have lived in the Black Hills any length of time know where old Carbonate was, but there is not much of a road leading to it any more and they just do not bother to go that deep in the woods. To find it, you must take the highway through Central City from D dwood to Lead rather than highway 8& as marked .. the map, turn up the roed to Maitland at the low edge of Central City, and follow that dirt road a:..as far – . Maitland Mine. Just before y’: ach Maitiand ine, turn left on a two-rutted trail. ‘ou will know yo ill on the tight road when you reach a smalid «| -igher up the trail, called Columbia Dam or the Hom; e Dam. Keep going pest the dam, even thought thé road doesen’t look too good.

The trail is kept open only because it leads to electric power

Eventually, if you drive long enough, you will come to the top of a hill marked by a high wooden skeleton of a mine head frame. This is the first evidence that you have veeched Carbonate, lf you want to explore Carbonate you must abandon the grand-trunk trail then, and take to the weoda on barely perceptible . gea, difficult to traverse,

Is it necessary to mention that modern cars are not the proper vehicle for such a jaunt? If you would go to carbonate, then use a pick-up truck, a jeep, or a car at least twenty years old with considerable clearance. We went there, anyway, and paused on top of the hill

where the bare skeleton of a mine headframe marked an empty shaft.

A rusty wheel lay idle in the crusher building, exposed to the elements. A few crumbling cabins nearby flapped pieces of tar paper in the breeze. Near one of the homes we kicked an old shoe and stopped to examine it more minutely. It was small, but not a child’s shoe because it was too graceful for a child’s boot. Buttons closed the side, ankle high, and the black of the cloth shoe top and leather lower portion was faded to a rusty gray. It must have been a woman’s shoe. What woman wore it? What miner’s wife had new shoes and tossed this one away?

Down the hill and around a couple of corners were more sections of the biggest silver boom in the Black Hills. In one protected valley several cabins were in fairly good state of repair. One was built sturdily from whole logs trimmed and squared. Others collapsed in the eaves, windowless, doors swinging from broken hinges or no doors at all. These cabins looked new compared to the ones farther down the road where the wind and the snow had more of a sweep. We found a cabin there that had fallen in a heap in the middle of itself, a beautiful hideaway for chipmunks. Not too far from the heap was a shed still standing upright to protect the remains of an old blacksmith forge. The bellows were rotten and useless, but parts of them showed what they had been.

Down in the gulch a bit farther was an open meadow which must have been the center of the town, but here the wind swept unmolested from the west and the storms of winter and summer had demolished everything but the foundations of the old homes. Even here where so little remained, the ghosts spoke. In the shade of an aspen grove an old well held clear water, spring fed and mountain pure. Nearby was the broken floor of a home partially protected by the trees. An iron stove of ancient vintage lay rusting on its side. We wandered curiously, and one of us pointed to an empty bottle. On its side, pressed into the glass, were the words ‘Mustang Liniment.

We laughed. Horse liniment was something very strong but how powerful must mustang liniment have been?

Then we found the graveyard. Mankind had forgotten that it was there, but nature was treating it with a living hand. Bright purple shooting stars grew around the graves. Modest blue violets snuggled close by. Scattered around the terrain were the dark blue.of larkspurs and the sunshine yellow of oregon grape blossoms. The pines loomed high over all, lending their quiet peace to the scene. The headboards were of wood carved in cathedral-window shape weathered gray by time and leaning haphazardly to do their memorable duty as well as they could. Sore of the graves were sunken, others mounded by rocks. One could tell that this one was short, a child’s grave; this one was larger, a man’s. The heart catching part was that of of the eleven graves still marked, several were children’s.

Weeks later we found the smelter in Rubicon Gulch. The black slag along the creek bed marked it as a onetime smelter, but the remains of ore chutes and otherbuilding were nothing but crumbling kindling. Skirting around the edge of the hill was a narrow gauge railway, the old rails partially there, the hand-forged square railway spikes lying loose along the little incline or waiting to be pulled out of their sockets by the merest child that might come along.

It had been a long time since the smelter in Rubicon Gulch had processed ore from Carbonate Camp. Sixty five years, to be exact.

In sixty-five years a ghost town either must vanish like smoke or its history must be written, because time does not wait any longer.

To know Carbonate, one must know where it is and something of what led to its beginnings.

The Black Hills are on the far western edge of South Dakota with a small portion of them lapping into Wyoming. Carbonate Camp was in the greater South Dakota part. These hills be in a great plains area, an island of pine clad mountams completely surrounded by prairies. They

are old, geologists say and for that reason offer geology students a field day of rare interest, but in the matter of white man’s invasion they are fairly young.

All the great Dakota Territory, including North and South Dakota, Montana and a large part of Wyoming, had known white men roaming through its lands ever since Lewis and Clark went up the Missouri river in 1804. A few were there earlier, but the explorers opened the way to the fur-traders. Military posts followed as a matter of course, and time brought settlers and ranchers and farmers. The Black Hills was still an isolated island. It was Indian country. The government was trying to keep it Indian country.

Gold miners rushed past the mountainous area in frantic hords to reach the California ‘49’er gold rush, and they whipped by again in 1864 to swarm toward the Idaho gold fields, but they did not stop at the Black Hills.

Men had wandered into the piney forests of the hills, though. As early as 1823, Jedediah Smith and a small group of men were in the southern edge, but they found ‘ the going rough and not much to be accomplished, and left. The Ezra Kind party of seven men rode into the deep valleys in 1833, filled their packs with gold, and were killed before they could get out again. Ezra Kind scratched his story on a sandstone slab before an Indian arrow got him, and nobody outside knew the gold was there.

A scientific survey headed by Dr. F. V. Hayden got as far as the edge of the Hill in 1855, and he reported to the Dakota Historical Society in 1866 that he thought gold might be there.

General George A. Custer, the fair haired boy, was the man who finally convinced the world that the Black Hills was worth invading. On an official military expedition to explore the Black Hills, he led a fantastic collection of wagons, military men, cattle, a marching musical band and two practical prospectors into the heart of the hills, during the summer of 1874. Custer stopped the cavalcade at the edge of the hills while he climbed a high

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mountain with the impossible name of Inyan Kara and gazed over the land he meant to conquer. As far as he could see, the hills rolled pine darkened against the sky. They marched through Floral Valley, where flowers were so thick that they twined them around their horses’ ears and stopped to play a musical air for the benefit of the sol. diers. They climbed granite-topped Harney Peak, the highest spot between the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenies on the east coast, and while Custer and his picked group of officers were doing that, the two prospectors found gold on French Creek in the heart of the hills.

Back by the Missouri River, the Collins-Russell party was already planning to enter the forbidden Indian hills, and when the Custer expedition returned to Fort Abraham Lincoln in North Dakota with the first verified news of gold in ‘them thar hill’s the Collins-Russell party headed for the Black Hills. They traveled by a circuitous route to avoid the soldiers because they knew they were evading the law that said ‘Keep Out’, but they made it. Annie D. Tallen’s book. LAST HUNTING GROUND OF THE DAKOTAS, tells their story in as entrancing a fashion as any could wish. But they were against the law, and when word leaked out that the Collins-Russell party was in the hill and prospecting for gold, soldiers followed them in and escorted them out. The damage was done. The world knew that there was the makings of another gold rush in the Black Hills, and no treaty with Indians nor government soldiers could stop them.

The anxious ones walked into the hills in 1875, group by group or singly. When the area was declared open to the white men in 1876, the gold rush really began. They came from everywhere and built their houses and sluiced the streams. Custer, Hill City, and then booming Deadwood.

Carbonate was born of the gold rush to the Black Hills, and the strange part of the whole thing is that Carbonate boomed as big as the rest of the Hills towns, but Carbonate was silver. One other village in the Black Hills, Galena, grew around silver, but gold was the mineral that built

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the Black Hills towns of today. Carbonate and Galena are the two stepchildred of the Black Hills, and Carbonate is dead.

Sleeping? Not dead? Maybe.

It is difficult to get the whole history of Carbonate Camp, but from scattered references we can assemble a rather clear picture. It began with a trickle, then became a boom in silver mines which was cut so sharply that the bulk of the town just packed up and left. There was a recurring interest by a few old prospectors, one lonely man living long after the rest were gone, and then nothing but the wind and the rain and the decaying wood.

Names color its history. It is hard to say who was there first. One historian says Rasberry Brown came in 1874 and lived there the rest of his life until he died in 1939…but there was no Carbonate Camp in 1874. Credit for its beginnings is given to James Ridpath and his son, L. B. Ridpath, of Virginia, horticulturists who came to plant apples. They settled around the Carbonate district. When everybody down Deadwood way grew wild with gold frenzy, Ridpath and son staked out a gold claim alongside their apples. They called it the Virginia Mine, or WEST Virginia Mine, and registered it right and proper.

That started it.

No matter where some prospector found gold, others followed him and did a little prospecting beside him. When summer rolled around again, R. D. Porter climbed the hill to investigate its possibilities. January 11, 1878, he located a silver mine and named it the Red Cloud Mine. In a way then, maybe Porter started Carbonate Camp because the district is built on silver, not gold, though some of the mines yielded both metals and others besides the Virginia were gold. But you can’t give the credit to Porter, by evidence of the old timers themselves. In those first early years the settlement was known as West Virginia

after Ridpath’s mine. The name appeared on old records and deeds. Later we find it referred to as ‘West Virginia

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or Carbonate’, and then the final name of ‘Carbonate,’ alone. There can be no doubt. Ridpath was there first

Josiah Craig came next. Joe Craig was one of the breed of prospectors in whom the search was the thing of importance. He had located the Badger Mine near Bald Mountain a few miles south of Carbonate, September 28, 1879, then moved east and claimed the Silver King mine on November 21, only three months later. Either he was just following his prospector’s nose or he might have heard about Porter’s mine. He worked north until he reached Porter’s Red Cloud, walked just beyond and started to prospect. He located the Iron Hill Mine that summer of 1880, the biggest of them all. He should have been satisfied, or maybe he didn’t know the ‘extent of the Iron Hill, but he kept looking.

., Somebody must have talked. Suddenly they began coming from every where.

Miners dug in every small cranny of Carbonate district, their picks and sHovels busy and the gleam in their eyes searching the ground as. they worked. Everywhere one looked in 1881 were claims, locations, booted and shiskered men. That year was the first big year for Carbonate Camp. Between June 22, 1881, when Frank Bryant located the Spanish R mine and August 1 of the same summer, at least nine mines were found and claimed one after the other. Bryant was another prospéctor typical of the day. Like Craig, he looked for a “rich strike and having found if, looked again. © ‘+ ‘

phe record doesn’t say whether Josiah Craig sold the Iron Hill at once or later (the Calkins Brothers owned it in 1883) but at any rate Craig was joyfully hunting for a strike again, as was Frank Bryant. The South Dakota Place Names say that Craig found the Greenland Mine on July 6, named Greenland because it was the only claim in the nearby areea with green trees growing on it. An old fire had stripped the forest around the diggings. The

Bryants (Frank B, and Mary Walton are just as certain

that the Greenland was their father’s claim, with no assistance from Craig.

The next day Charles Miller and A. Danielson located the Adelphi Mine,-and found: both: gold and silver in it.Three days later the Jefferson Mine (silver), was claimed by Selomon Jefferson, Andy. Johnson and Thomas Milligan.

Jeffergon ‘stock was being sold six years later, and the mine was still being worked in 1891 by Sol Jefferson, but it may not have been in continuous operation. Frank Bryant’s son, Frank B Bryant, a mining engineer at Landusky, Montana at the -present time, remembers that the Jefferson wab about fourth in production during the boom years of Cat