In 2015, a failed attempt by the EPA to contain polluted contents of the Gold King Mine released millions of gallons of water heavily polluted with sulfuric acid and toxic heavy metals into the San Juan River. This environmental disaster took a century to create. It is easy to believe that our ancestors didn’t understand the problems they left for us to solve. Such belief is unwarranted and completely incorrect.
Careful study of the century-long political and economic history of the Gold King Mine in Silverton demonstrates astonishing indifference. Colorado government officials, mine owners, and operators ignored the environmental damage done by the mineral extraction technology of 19th and 20th century. The Gold King Mine is a perfect example of the political debate over the importance of jobs versus public health. The issue is as old as the mining industry itself. Remarkably, the essence of the argument hasn’t changed in 120 years ago.
As far back as 1556, a German mining expert, George Bauer, wrote of the Roman empire that “the [Italian] fields are devastated by mining operations . . . further, when the ores are washed the water which has been used poisons the brooks and streams.” But to really understand Colorado’s mineral extraction industrial development and its resulting problems, one must go back tens of millions of years in time. This is when the gold veins were formed. This was when the stage was set for both the mineral wealth of Colorado and also how that wealth was to be located and extracted.
There is a good scientific reason why the British colonists and other gold seekers did not find gold in Virginia or the Carolinas, or anywhere on the East Coast. It’s not that gold doesn’t exist there. It’s that the gold is buried under millions of years of sediments. To find gold that is easy to locate and extract, one must go to the mountains and their drainage systems. The geologic history of North America includes many extinct and active volcanoes, as well as mountains formed by batholiths. These large bubbles of molten rock rise up from the mantle and contain most of the elements found on Earth, including gold, silver, and other metals.
As these bubbles rose, their heat transformed existing rocks, turning them into metamorphic formations. This created folds and cracks as the pressure and heat pushed the rock up. In time, the magma cooled and formed compounds like granite from the melted matter. Gold, silver, and zinc remained separate from the granite compounds that were pushed into cracks and folds of the older metamorphic formations. These veins of valuable elements and compounds formed a rich mineral belt running north and south in what is now central Colorado.
The Silverton Caldera is the collapsed rim of an extinct volcano. This is where the Gold King Mine is located, and it’s a perfect example of such a deposit. After the volcano cooled, the expansion of freezing water exposed mineral veins that had been pushed into the surrounding rocks, subjecting them to more weathering by wind and water. Gravity and snow melt carried the gold downstream and onto the plains.
The discovery of gold in one of these streams, Cherry Creek, eventually led to over 50,000 gold seekers coming to Colorado in 1859-1860. Extraction of gold and silver was easy at first and required little equipment or processing. It is called placer mining and involves using something as simple as a shallow pan and water to wash away the sand and mud, leaving the heavier gold behind.
More complex systems called “sluice boxes” were built later. Still, they only need one or two people and very little capital to build and operate. With all of the gold seekers, the easy gold in the streams was soon exhausted. Gold hunters went elsewhere looking for the metal. Those who headed east and north found nothing. But those who followed the streams west up into the mountains found the outcroppings that were the source of the placer gold.
At first, these exposed veins did not require heavy equipment or processing in order to be profitable. Dynamite, picks, shovels and mules were all that was necessary to remove the high grade ore. High grade ore has a high percentage of gold molecules in it. Therefore, processing was simple and only required heat to smelt the gold out. But once again the easy, highly profitable ore was quickly exhausted. Mines had to be dug deeper into the solid granite of these high mountain areas to follow the veins of gold ore.
This type of mining is called “hard rock mining,” logically enough. Hard rock mining requires more equipment to collect the ore, transport it, and then process it. Investors from the East Coast and Europe, looking to cash in on the gold rush, built railroads that made access to the high mountain areas easier and profitable. These railroads made it possible to bring in heavy equipment to drill deeper and deeper into the mountains and transport the ore out. But there was still the problem of getting the gold out of the rock.
Enter two German engineers. These brothers, named Edward and Gustav Stoiber, were among the immigrants from Europe seeking to get rich off of the Colorado mines. They invented a technique to make the processing of lower grade ore profitable. It required milling the ore first, which is essentially grinding the rocks into very small particles. This demanded heavy steel equipment. Then the ore was mixed with water, run through shaker tables so the heavier gold was deposited, and exposed to mercury coated plates for amalgamation.
The combination of gravity and mercury removed the gold from the rock. Deeper mines, ore transportation, milling, and amalgamation required greater amounts of equipment and capital. These new processes also created crushed waste rock called “tailings” that were often just dumped into the surrounding creeks and rivers. Because the rock was smashed into fine particles, other less desirable elements like zinc, arsenic, and sulfur were exposed to water and air.
During the Colorado Gold Rush of the late 1800s, Olaf Arvid Nelson, a Swedish miner in Silverton, followed his instincts that a richer vein of gold existed high above the mine he was employed in. In 1887 the “Big Swede” staked a claim at what became the Gold King Mine. He worked it by hand until his death in 1891. He died before profiting from his discovery. Nor did he know that the Gold King Mine would become a prime example of how short-sighted political and economic decisions concerning mineral extraction lead to public health disasters.
Nelson’s widow, Louisa, soon remarried and sold the Gold King Mine in 1894 for $15,000 to Willis Kinney, who was backed by Cyrus Davis and Henry Soule of New England. The new owners formed the Gold King Mining and Milling Company and quickly made good on their investment. The Gold King began grossing $4,000,000 per year. The success of the mine brought in many investors from the East Coast and Europe, but the company suffered from mismanagement. A series of disasters such as fires, cave-ins, and theft caused the mine to close, change ownership, and reopen several times. It finally closed for good in 1922 after producing 711,144 tons of gold and silver ore.
Modern students of history might think that the miners and politicians of the time were ignorant of the environmental damage being done. But Exhibit A against this idea is a USGS report in 1901 documenting the corrosive nature of runoff from the tailings of the Gold King Mine and other sites. “[A]ll of the waters met with in the mines of the Silverton quadrangle are . . . modified by the materials through which they have passed,” noted Frederick Ransome in a USGS report. “The descent of the meteoric water through the masses of pyrite and other ore materials is sufficient to give it a strong acid reaction and render it highly ferruginous.”
The Gold King tailings had large amounts of iron pyrite and sulfur. Exposed to the air, the finely ground rock reacted to the oxygen easily and in great quantities. Sulfur plus oxygen plus water creates sulfuric acid. The newly created sulfuric acid then leaches out other metals like arsenic, zinc, lead, and cadmium from the mine and the tailings.
Ransome noted that the water was so acidic that “candlesticks, picks, or other iron or steel tools left in this water became quickly coated with coppers (sulfate salts). Iron pipes and rails were rapidly destroyed and the constant replacement of piping and pumps necessary to handle the abundant water was a large item in the working expenses.” The combination of metals and acids from the Gold King and other mines flowed into Cement Creek and ended up in the Animas and San Juan Rivers, destroying riparian habitat and rendering the water useless for drinking, irrigation, or livestock.
Some people fought back. David F. Day, a Civil War hero, became editor of the Durango Democrat. The town of Durango, downstream from the Gold King and other mines in Silverton, saw its water source, the Animas River, become increasingly undrinkable. In 1902, Day wrote, “We are violently antagonistic to allowing the Animas River to be destroyed by mill tailings and polluting agencies.” This is proof that the people of Colorado were aware of the pollution problem posed by the mines.
In 1882, the farmers of Jefferson County complained to the legislature about the pollution of Clear Creek. Then in 1887, the legislature passed a weak law making it illegal to kill food fish. In the same year, the Ames hydroelectric plant successfully sued mine owners in Telluride for damage to their electric plant from pollution. The Colorado Supreme Court upheld their victory in 1897. But the mine owners did nothing to address the problem. In June 1897, the Fort Collins Courier complained that “Owners of the stamp mills concentrating works and placer mines situated along the Roaring Fork have defied the authority of Commissioner Swan . . . in his efforts to purify the waters of that stream.”
The executive branch of government, which consisted mostly of Republicans, refused to enforce the weak laws that did exist. The editor of the Silverton Standard summed up the business community and therefore the government’s view best in May 1902: “We do not deny the proposition that mill tailings in a stream to a certain extent pollute it. They (the mills) are public benefactors to the extent that perhaps 5000 people are and have been depending on their operation for a living. To compel the owners to build settling tanks and handle the settlings would at best be a costly experiment and would result in the ruining the mining industry of the San Juan County. . . .” And so nothing changed due to lack of enforcement. State and local Republicans argued that jobs and the economy were more important than clean water.
Durango gave up fighting for clean river water and built an expensive dam and a water delivery system on the Florida River. But the politicians were wrong about mining jobs. They disappeared anyway. Falling metal prices, competition from other parts of the globe, and mismanagement shut down one mine after another. By 1922, mining in the Silverton Caldera was effectively over, and mining towns fought (some of them unsuccessfully) to survive the loss of jobs.
The Gold King, closed for good in 1922, would go on to become the source of one of the worst mine spills in 2015. The Gold King Mine is not an isolated case. Colorado harbors 23,000 abandoned mines. Each is a lethal legacy in some way. Republicans both past and present are right; we need industry and the jobs it provides. But protection of the environment through government regulation is not, as is still being argued, a zero-sum game. It is not a question of having jobs OR protecting the environment.
Many of the tailings from the mines in Silverton were reprocessed after WWI to extract zinc once that metal became important due to advances in technology. It may have cost the Gold King Mining and Milling Company to have stored the tailings properly, but they still got very wealthy, and the zinc market would have helped them recoup their expenses eventually. Currently, the gold mine in Cripple Creek is operating in an environmentally safe but still profitable manner by reprocessing the tailings that were once a source of pollution. It was possible to do the same back in 1900 if people had invested the time and energy into figuring it out.
In 2017, an unmapped gas pipe caused an explosion in Firestone that destroyed several houses, causing death and injuries. This disaster, like the Gold King Mine spill, could have been avoided if government did its primary job of protecting the citizens. Democrats and Republicans would do well to heed Ben Franklin’s words of wisdom: “The best reason for doing the right thing today is tomorrow.”
