New Mexico Mineral Symposium — Abstracts

Cripple Creek, with its legendary geology, mines, and minerals, is Colorado’s famous gold camp and holds a special place in the mining history of America. One of the stories of the gold camp that stays largely in the shadows is high-grading, or theft of ore containing high values of gold by miners who worked in Cripple Creek’s gold mines. These miners were called “high-graders,” and they sneaked out small pieces of rich ore in their hair, clothes, boots, and lunch pails. Their efforts were as constant as a lighthouse.

High-grading emerged as a large part of the economy of Cripple Creek during the boom years. Although knowledge of this practice was common, high-grading remained hidden and was seldom talked about in public. The gold miners, working in rich, underground gold veins, yielded to the intense temptation to carry out some of the ore in what they called “lunch bucket shipments” (Hunter, 2006).

By taking out a few small pieces of ore each day, a miner doubled or tripled his daily wage by selling it for half the price of gold at $20.67 per ounce. Some miners stole only enough ore to pay their bar tabs. Others considered it a “fringe benefit” of a dangerous job and carried out as much ore as they could conceal (Hunter, 2006).

There is no way to estimate the amount of gold leaving in the endless rain of larceny, but one estimate places the dollar amount of the plunder around one to two million dollars in gold annually (Sprague, 1953). Everyone was involved—delivery boys, assayers, merchants, and bank tellers.

High-grading required several accomplices for it to work. First, there was the miner, who squirreled the gold out of the mine. Second, saloon bartenders and other merchants accepted the high-graded ore as payment, which became an important source of income. Third, most of the stolen ore ultimately ended up in the offices of assayers, who separated the gold from the rock in their small labs.

High-grading was a regular business with a network of collection routes. Miners delivered ore to pick-up points that spanned the Cripple Creek Mining District, which included saloons, laundries, grocery stores, cigar stores, haberdashers, and boardinghouses (Hunter, 2006). Runners, hired by the fence assay offices, made scheduled rounds to pick up the bags of high grade. Gold ore even showed up in church collection plates (Taylor, 1966). Assayers processed the high-graded ore and sold it to a smelter. The assayers kept 50 percent of the gold value of the purloined ore for their part.

Since most mines had internal assay services, the substantial number of private assayers was unreasonable. The considerable number of assayers, some say as high as 50 of them, is a testament to the degree of high-grading going on in the district. Their primary purpose was to buy high grade from the miners, process it, and ship it to a smelter. Most of these assayers made significant profits acting as fences for the stolen ore.

Miners in the district were a five-fingered, resourceful lot and had worked high-grading into an art. Taking a chunk of gold ore home in a lunch bucket was the standard method. The metal lunch bucket handle was strengthened with a shoulder strap to keep its handle from pulling off the bucket from the weight of the ore (Sprague, 1953). Some miners had hollowed out sections in the wooden handles of their picks where they concealed ore. Miners also ground ore to a powder, and in the dark recesses of the mine, they rolled around on it and then left at the end of their shift covered with gold-bearing dust. Miners stuffed their clothes and boots with ore or used a pocket belt from six to ten inches wide, made of canvas lined with claxton flannel, to stash ore (Ore Stealing in Cripple Creek, 1903). These belts, usually provided by assayers, allowed the miner to bring out a good amount of high-grade ore without it showing.
High-grading, through the early 1900s, was not considered a crime and there was no law against it, and seemed tolerable if it was not done openly or in large quantities. The risk of jail was minimal if a miner was caught and taken to court. Juries were composed of miners (who were high-graders) and merchants who traded with high-graders for the additional business high-grading brought in (Taylor, 1966). These juries were reluctant to convict (Brown, 1991).
Mine owners realized their losses through high-grading were growing. Stung by high-grading, mine owners were forced to act and hired Pinkerton detectives to check on men suspected of high-grading. In September 1900, the Independence Mine started the “change room” policy. This order required the miners coming out of the mine to strip off their clothes in one room, hand their lunch bucket to a guard to inspect, and then walk naked, while a guard observed, into another room where they put on their street clothes (Newton, 1928). The change room policy at the Independence Mine spread to other mines in the district.
Despite the efforts of the mine owners, high-grading continued. The cost of stolen ore to the mines was mounting, and there were more than 50 assayers in the district whose sole business was buying stolen ore (Teller County Assay Offices, 1902). These dishonest assayers made powerful enemies, and on February 24, 1902, at two o’clock in the morning eight of these crooked assayers were targeted with powerful blasts from dynamite (Grimstad and Drake, 1893). It is commonly believed that the attacks on the assay office were an effort by the mine owners to send a message to all those who were purchasing high-graded ore.
Mine owners took additional steps to stop the flow of stolen ore out of the mines. Owners protected discoveries of rich ore by posting armed guards and by allowing only the most reliable miners to work the area. Some mines used employment cards that a shift boss would void if he suspected high-grading, making the miner no longer employable in the district (Hunter, 2006).

Miners reacted with inventive counter methods for sneaking out ore through electricians and maintenance workers who brought ore to the surface with their tools and materials (Hunter, 2006). These workers did not undergo searches. Workers, when coming to the surface for support timbers, would secretly bring ore up with them and hide it somewhere on the surface, and then take it home after their shift or come back at night to get it (Ore Stealing in Cripple Creek, 1903).

As the years passed and Cripple Creek’s mines went deeper, and the veins narrowed, the gold values decreased. High-grade ore became scarce. Although this reduced the high-grading of ore, it continued (Hunter, 2006). In 2006, law enforcement officers arrested three employees of the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mining Company for stealing more than $1.7 million in unprocessed gold and silver over a six-year period (Rappold, 2007). Starting in 1999, these employees used a homemade recovery device to extract gold from a gold-saturated fluid in the gold recovery plant of the mine (Emery, 2006). An investigation revealed two additional employees participated in the theft ring.

Cripple Creek’s gold is seemingly inexhaustible and its veins are still mined today. Pieces of stolen ore survived the smelter and the passage of ten decades or more, and are found today as prized specimens in museum and private collections.

References:

1. Brown, R.L., 1991, Cripple Creek then and now, Denver, Sundance Books.
2. Emery, E., 2006, September 21, Massive theft of gold claimed; 3 held. Retrieved from The Denver Post:
   http://www.denverpost.com/2006/09/21/massive-theft-of-gold-claimed-3-held/
3. Grimstad, B., and Drake, R.L., 1893, The last gold rush: A pictorial history of the Cripple Creek and Victor Gold Mining District. Victor, CO, Pollux Press.
4. Hunter, E., 2006, High-Grading: Theft or wage supplement right?, in T. Blevins, T. Nicholl, & C.P. Otto, The Colorado Labor Wars: Cripple Creek, 1903–1904, p. 210, Colorado Springs: Pikes Peak Library District.
5. Newton, H.J., 1928, Yellow Gold of Cripple Creek, Denver, Nelson Publishing Company.
6. Ore Stealing in Cripple Creek, 1903, December 17, Engineering and Mining Journal, pp. 920–921.
7. Rappold, R.S. (2007, August 15). Ringleader of gold, silver heist gets 6 years in prison. Retrieved from Colorado Springs Gazette: http://gazette.com/ringleader-of-gold-silver-heist-gets-6-years-in-prison/article/26073
8. Sprague, M., 1953, Money Mountain: The story of Cripple Creek Gold. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
9. Taylor, R.G., 1966, Cripple Creek. Bloomington: Indiana University Publications.
10. Teller County Assay Offices, 1902, March 1, Engineering and Mining Journal, p. 327.