Five pioneers join U.S. Hall of Fame

The U.S. National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum will induct five mining pioneers at a ceremony scheduled for Sept. 17, at the Museum Convention Center in Leadville, Colo.

The five inductees are Nathaniel Peter Hill, John Munro Longyear, John McDonald, Julius Eckhardt Raht, and John Dennis Ryan. The five new members will bring to 189 the number of mining greats whose engraved photographs and biographical sketches adorn the National Mining Hall of Fame.

The keynote speaker will be Wayne Murdy, chairman and CEO of Newmont Mining, the world’s largest gold producer.

Guests are encouraged to dress in Victorian attire.

On Sept. 18, those who attended the ceremony will ride the rails of the Leadville, Colorado & Southern Railroad on a 2.5-hour trip from Leadville to Fremont Pass. The route originally served the area’s booming mineral belt and the Climax mine of Climax Molybdenum Co.

For further information, contact Sam McGeorge at the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum at (719) 486-1229.

Nathaniel Peter Hill (1832-1900)

Nathaniel Peter Hill, a young chemistry professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I., first visited Colorado in 1864. That year, he examined mining properties in Central City, Colo., optioned several, and returned to Rhode Island. He sold all but two of the options, and quickly resigned his position at Brown. In February 1865, Hill returned to Central City and opened mines on his two properties. He installed a stamp mill and had some early success, but by the summer of 1865 the free milling ores on the properties were exhausted. Below lay many tons of sulphides (complex copper and iron pyrites with high gold and silver values).

No successful pyrite smelter had been built in the Rocky Mountains but Hill formed a list of possible smelting methods. After several failures, he was convinced that the Welsh Swansea Process held the greatest potential. He went to Wales to observe it, returned to Colorado to purchase 70 tons of Central City ore for shipment to Swansea for testing. It proved successful. Hill and four investors organized the Boston and Colorado Smelting Co., with Hill as general manager.

The smelter would be located at Black Hawk. Since there were still no railroads in Colorado, the smelter had to be near the mines to keep shipping costs down. Hill started up the Black Hawk smelter in January 1868, signed ore purchase contracts with Gilpin County mines, and, in June, shipped a 50%-copper matte averaging 50 oz. gold and 100-200 oz. silver per ton to Swansea for refining. Success followed. Capacity was rapidly expanded at Black Hawk, and in 1872 a second smelter was built at Alma, Colo.

The Swansea refining contract expired in 1873 and new production from Alma made refining in Colorado economically viable. Hill hired Richard Pearce, a Cornishman, to develop a refining process and supervise the plant. Pearce’s process proved to be the best separation technique for gold and copper until electrolytic refining was introduced towards the end of the century.

To further expand capacity, Hill built a new smelter at Argo, near Denver, and started it up in 1879. The Argo smelter processed ore from throughout the western U.S. and northern Mexico and remained in production for 30 years.

From 1879 to 1885, Hill represented Colorado in the U.S. Senate. In his later years, he taught courses at the Colorado School of Mines.

John Longyear (1850-1922)

In 1873, still a young man, John Longyear established his home in Marquette, Mich. Then, over a period of more than 20 years, working both for himself and others, Longyear compiled a solid record in identifying iron ore properties that went on to become producing mines.

In the 1870s, Longyear had his first success on the Menominee Iron Range on Michigan’s upper peninsula. Acting as an agent for the Lake Superior Ship Canal, Railway and Iron Co., Longyear selected mineral lands for development of what became the Curry, West Vulcan, Norway, Cyclops, Ludington, and Chapin mines. The famous Chapin mine at Iron Mountain became one of the largest underground mines in the U.S. In 1879, Longyear published the first map of the Menominee Range.

Moving west in the 1880s to Michigan’s Gogebic Iron Range, Longyear and his partners developed and leased what became the Norrie, Aurora, East Norrie and Ashland mines. The Ashland mine, opened in 1884, shipped a million tons of ore by 1890. Also during the 1880s, Longyear is thought to be the first to use leasing rights in return for royalties. Instead of selling the lands or getting into the actual business of mining, he retained ownership and leased the lands to mining companies, which mined the ore and shipped it to steel mills. This arrangement worked so well that it became the predominant arrangement for opening iron mines in the Lake Superior region.

In the early 1890s on Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range, as a partner with R. M. Bennett, Longyear explored timberlands owned by the Pillsbury family of Minneapolis, best known as producers of flour. The agreement with the Pillsburys was that if Longyear and Bennett could identify 100,000 tons of ore, they could have 50% of the mineral rights. They found more than l00 million tons, and for years, the mines near Nashwauk paid huge royalties to both the Pillsbury estate and the Longyear-Bennett partnership.

Under Longyear’s direction, his cousin, E. J. Longyear, was the first to perform diamond drilling for mineral exploration on the Mesabi Range.

Late in has career, Longyear developed the first commercial coal mines on the Spitsbergen group of islands above the Arctic Circle, north of Norway. His company, Arctic Coal Co., was in production from 1906 to 1916, when it was sold to Store Norske Kulcompagni, a Norwegian company that still operates the mines.

Longyearbyen, named for John Longyear, remains the capital of these islands, which are now known as Svalbard.

John McDonald (1848-1918)

John McDonald began his mining career at the age of 12 in the iron mines of Cumberland and Lancashire, U.K. By 1886, when he emigrated to the United States, he had a quarter-century of mining experience under his belt, and had become an expert in the use of the block-caving mining methods used in English mines.

Block caving systems make use of gravity to extract large amounts of ore from underground mines at a very low cost. To initiate a block cave, a thin, horizontal layer of rock is first mined beneath an ore column by conventional drill-and-blast mining. The unsupported ore column then breaks and caves under its own weight into this undercut, where it is extracted from drawpoints.

As the mass of ore caves downward, pressure and attrition reduce it to small chunks. Extraction proceeds without the interruption of drilling and blasting that characterizes other mining methods. Block caving thus permits very large ore tonnages to be extracted daily and allows extraction of low grade ores that would be uneconomic to mine using other methods.

When McDonald first arrived, he worked in coal mines of Pennsylvania. However, he soon transferred to the underground iron mining district at Ironwood on Michigan’s upper peninsula, where he introduced block caving. He next introduced the system to mines at Iron Belt, Wisc.

In 1897, McDonald moved west to become superintendent of the Delamar, and later, the Golden Gate gold mines at Mercur, Utah. He introduced block caving into both mines. During McDonald’s time at Mercur, he became acquainted with Daniel Jackling of the Utah Copper Co., and in 1903 Jackling invited him to introduce block caving at the company’ s Commercial mine in Bingham Canyon, Utah. He later became Superintendent.

In 1912, when the Bingham Canyon mines were converted to open-pit operations, John McDonald moved on to Ray, Ariz., still employed by Utah Copper, and adapted block caving to the Ray Consolidated underground orebody.

The following year, he was in the Ely-Rut
h district of Nevada, where, as superintendent, he applied caving methods to the company’s Veteran mine.

When he retired in 1916, he had devoted more than half a century to mining underground ores, and had won the respect of all who were privileged to work with him.

Julius Eckhardt Raht (1826-1879)

Julius Eckhardt Raht Julius Raht was born in Germany and studied chemistry and mineralogy at universities in Bonn and Berlin. In 1850, he emigrated to the United States, initially working in mines in Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin. He also managed mines in Virginia and North Carolina, and he became a U.S. citizen in 1853.

In 1854, Raht transferred to the Ducktown district, in the far southeastern corner of Tennessee, and became mine captain for the Polk County and Mary mines. In 1857, Raht led a consolidation into three companies: Union Consolidated, Burra Burra Copper, and Polk County Copper. By 1860, Raht was chief of operations of all mines and smelters at Ducktown.

Early in the Civil War, the Confederate government seized the Ducktown mines, and used the copper for its military efforts. Initially, Raht continued operating the mines, trying to protect the companies’ investments. However, when Union troops captured the railroad and copper rolling mill at Cleveland, Tenn., in late 1863, Raht moved to Cincinnati to wait out the war.

After the war, Raht returned to restore the Ducktown copper mining industry, personally financing much of the recovery work. He founded the Cleveland National Bank, and as manager of the Ocoee Turnpike and Plank Road Co., he rebuilt the transportation route needed to ship copper from Ducktown. New smelters were constructed using innovative methods developed by Raht’s talented brothers, Carl, August, and William. Steam engines, diamond and compressed air drills, and other modern mining techniques were adopted.

However, falling copper prices, declining ore grades, and transportation difficulties forced the Ducktown mines to shut down in 1878. Another 12 years passed before a railroad reached the district and allowed mining to resume.

In addition to his leadership of Ducktown mining operations, Raht was known for his philanthropy, erecting schools and churches in both Ducktown and Cleveland. He accumulated a fortune and may have become the richest man in Tennessee.

John Dennis Ryan (1864-1933)

Born in the copper country of Michigan’s upper peninsula, John Ryan arrived in Denver in 1890 and for several years sold lubricating oils. He soon gained first-hand knowledge of the western mining industry and in 1901 acquired an interest in the Daly Bank and Trust Co. in Anaconda, Mont.

Within a year, Ryan was president of the bank and the chief banker for the Amalgamated Copper Mining Co. In 1904, Amalgamated hired him as its managing director. Two years later, Ryan negotiated the company’s buyout of disputatious mine owner Augustus Heinze, gaining Anaconda essential control of the Butte mines. Also in 1906, in a personal venture with Thomas Cole, Ryan acquired the rich Cananea copper mine in northern Mexico. In 1909, he became president of Amalgamated Copper.

Although controlled by Amalgamated Copper, the Butte mines were still owned by several corporations and run separately and often inefficiently. Ryan and his team pushed through further consolidation under the banner of the Anaconda Co., thereby eliminating conflicts over mining rights and aiding in the establishment of lower-cost operations.

At the same time, Ryan consolidated several local power companies to form Montana Power in 1913. It provided Anaconda with low-cost electricity for its mines in Butte and smelters in Great Falls and Anaconda, Mont. As president of Montana Power, Ryan fostered the electrification of the Butte mines which led to the installation of a centralized compressed-air hoisting system, introduction of underground locomotives and pumps, and better lighting and ventilation. The new technology supported safer, deeper operations and reduced production costs.

Ryan remained Anaconda’s chairman until his death in 1933.