Curator's Log

Gold in Jasper Exhibit - Expanded

Fourteen newspaper clippings have gone up on the gold exhibit, taking it to twenty one across ten papers and pushing the record back to 1882. More go up over the next few weeks. That is five years earlier than the record reached before, and one of the fourteen changes the whole shape of the ledger. In June 1896 the Rocky Mountain News reported that William Farrish, described as one of the best known mining experts of the West, estimated thirty million tons of ore in sight on two groups of claims, averaging nine to thirteen dollars a ton. At the low end of the paper's own range that is about 13.1 million troy ounces, which is several times the gold Colorado has produced in its entire recorded history, claimed for one camp in one paragraph. It is in the ledger because it was printed, and it now accounts for 99.98 per cent of everything the sources claimed. The second useful find is a correction. The Colorado Statesman of 10 May 1913 covers the same Miser strike as the San Juan Prospector front page already here, printed the same day, and the two do not agree. The Prospector said ore assaying $32,618 a ton. The Statesman says $32,532, and adds the detail the Prospector left out: the rich streak is an inch and a half wide, while the vein as a whole averages $1,488 a ton. The famous number was never stable, and it was never the vein. Gilmore turns up twice more. The La Jara Enterprise of June 1913 has the Gilmore tunnel at 380 feet with the vein 15 feet 8 inches between the walls, reported rich but no definate information concerning exact values can be obtained, and the Statesman places the Miser property eight miles below Gilmore. That is the clearest fix on it yet, though the unidentified camp photograph is still unidentified. The oldest clipping, from the Colorado Chieftain of January 1882, promises a railroad to Cornwall that was never built. The 1887 Weekly Register correspondent reports the assays and says in the same breath that he does not believe them, and explains why: the ore is refractory sulphides needing a smelter. Thirty five years later the Antonito Ledger is reporting a smelter finally being built. One clipping is undated and unattributed. It is headed Rio Grande County Gold and the curator would like to know which paper it came from.

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A Hemingray insulator joins Relics

A clear glass Hemingray insulator, still on its wooden pin, found on a property in Jasper. It probably came off the Elwood telephone line, built in 1907 over Elwood Pass and kept up by Mountain States until 1955. Locally it is called the transcontinental line.

Thirty million tons in sight, 1896 Opening up the Jasper mines, 1898

New collection, Relics, opens with a Del Norte saloon token found in Jasper

Relics is a new collection for objects found in or around Jasper. The first is a brass token reading H. KIEL and GOOD FOR 5 CENTS AT THE BAR, found at the site of the Lost Elk Lodge. It traces to Henry Kiel, who ran a saloon and bowling alley in Del Norte from 1881 in a stone building that still stands at 630 Grande Avenue. Whether his saloon was still open during the Jasper gold boom of the 1890s is not yet known.

Strike in the Minneapolis tunnel, 1882

The first seven gold clippings are up

Seven newspaper clippings are catalogued and readable on the gold exhibit, running from 1887 to 1929, and the next batch goes up next week. Each one is transcribed, tied to its paper and date, and entered in the ledger. The earliest, from the San Luis Valley Graphic in August 1887, has a crushing mill being unloaded at Monte Vista for the Champion mine above Jasper. The loudest, a San Juan Prospector front page from May 1913, announces ore assaying $32,618 a ton, which sounds decisive until you read the next sentence and find it describes a narrow streak in the vein. That figure is a grade, not a quantity, so it sits in the ledger carried at nothing, and the record says why. Only one of the seven carries a figure that can be totalled at all. What reading them together shows is how little changed. In 1899 the Monte Vista Journal calls the ore mostly low grade but exceedingly rich in pockets, and reports that every mill built at Jasper had failed. In 1929 the San Juan Prospector calls it mostly low grade interspersed with high grade pockets. Thirty years, a boom and several mills separate those two sentences. Two of the 1913 clippings also mention Gilmore, once as a rich gold strike and once as a tunnel at 180 feet where a paying mine was said to be assured. That is the first time Gilmore has turned up in the museum's own sources, and it bears on the unidentified camp photograph, which is still unidentified.

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Every critter cam frame now says what is in it

All 99 trail camera frames have been gone through one by one and described. Each now carries a note of the animal and what it is doing, so the gallery can be read at a glance instead of opened frame by frame. The count: elk and mule deer in most of them, bull elk in velvet through the summer and in hard antlers through the September rut, a herd bull with cows and calves, two spike bulls, mule deer bucks in both velvet and hard antlers, a black bear twice, a wild turkey twice and a snowshoe hare three times. Moose appear on two occasions, which the collection had not previously noted. One animal without antlers in May 2023 over three frames, and a bull in hard antlers in October 2023 over two. Where an animal could not be identified with confidence the note says deer or elk and stops there. No antler points are counted, because a trail camera frame is not good enough evidence for that.

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Gold in Jasper is coming in October

A new exhibit on the gold mining years is in preparation, built around newspaper clippings running from the 1800s to recent times, with photographs of the workings. The clippings still have to be scanned and dated, so the exhibit opens in October. Two parts of the page are complete and available now. A chart of the gold price from 1792 to the present, which shows that the price was fixed by statute for the whole period the Jasper mines were working. And a running tally that totals the figures the clippings report, as they are catalogued. Production figures are not included and will not be, because they were generally not published. The page records that absence rather than estimating a number.

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The scanned documents are now searchable

The geology thesis and the three parts of the Bockhaus family history were page images with no text layer, so nothing in them could be searched, quoted or linked to. All 376 pages have been through optical character recognition and 357 carry text. There is now a search across all of it and an index of the collection listing every catalogued item alongside the surnames, mines and places the documents contain. The recognition is imperfect, since the pages are typewriting, printed forms and handwriting. Both pages note this, and every entry links back to the scan so the reading can be checked against the original.

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Everything in the museum now has an accession number

Every map, photograph, document and frame in the collection has been catalogued and given an accession number, and most now have a page of their own that can be linked to or cited. This log and the Friends list are both new. More material is waiting to be scanned, and additions will be recorded here as they go up.