Standard-Examiner

WILLARD — Mike and Steve Holmes may be the first guys to have hunted for treasure in the mountains above Willard and actually found enough to make it pay.

Unlike the miners who preceded them, the Holmes boys weren’t hunting for gold or silver or even lead.

The brothers, who hail from Northern Utah, although Mike just moved to Ohio, were hunting history, and they found it everywhere: shafts, ore, foundations, tools, even bunkhouses, the detritus of more than a dozen mining operations.

The mines were in an area called Sierra Madre West, which extended along the western face of the Wasatch Mountains from Willard Peak to Ben Lomond Peak.

The mines themselves were near the tops of the mountains. They had names that oozed wealth and romance: El Dorado, Prince of India, Florence, Napoleon & Maghera, Santa Maria.

There was nothing romantic about the work. Hundreds of miners dug dozens of shafts, some thousands of feet deep, seeking pay dirt. They built two trams, one to the top of Willard Peak, to haul down their treasure.

None of that was cheap. The Holmes brothers figure those miners spent $5 million to $10 million, and this was back when a dollar was a good day’s wages.

Nor was it easy work.

The western face of Willard Peak is considered very difficult for an experienced climber. A century ago, mules and miners made that climb daily, hauling equipment, food, lumber, mining engines and everything it took to build bunkhouses, trams and all the rest.

Women and children went up, too. Pictures the brother dug up show smiling young women and children cavorting amid the crags like so many mountain goats.

What did those miners get for all those decades of laborfi Daily wages, but nothing more, and the investors who bankrolled it all lost their shirts. Not a one of those mines ever paid off.

There was metal: copper and lead, gold and silver. But never enough to pay more than the overhead. Which is why, late into the 20th century, the history of the whole thing had descended into the sorts of stories children tell each other.

“When I was a kid, I remember going up behind Pettingill’s and hearing about Maguire’s ghost,” said Mike Holmes, who did the bulk of the writing on the book he and his brother have put together.

He was referring to Pettingill’s, a fruit orchard and store below Willard Peak, and Don Maguire, one of the most prominent promoters of some of the most spectacular mining operations.

In the early 1990s, Steve Holmes said, he and his brother finally got the energy to climb up themselves, “and that’s when we found out about Maguire.”

Since then, between repeated climbs up the mountain and a lot of wading through dusty archives of the Salt Lake Mining Review, the Standard-Examiner and other publications, they have finally dug up enough to put together an entire book.

The book isn’t published yet. Mike Holmes said he’s talking to publishers, trying to figure out how to get the manuscript into shape and print.

The history of mining in the area started in 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln sent surveyors and prospectors out to look for possible sources of metal. They found some, but not a lot was done about it.

It wasn’t until Maguire came to Utah that things took off.

Don Maguire was born in Vermont in 1852, Mike Holmes said. He was an adventurer and promoter, making money in livestock and land before following the transcontinental railroad to Utah in the 1870s.

His contribution was not so much his expertise at mining, although that was considerable, as his skill at getting people to invest in his mining ventures.

“Western capitalists, impressed with his knowledge of geology and mining and everseemingly optimistic attitude, provided an estimated $5 (million) to $10 million to develop many of the mines in the Sierra Madre district,” the Holmes brothers write.

Mike Holmes downplays speculation that Maguire was working some sort of mining scam to get money from investors.

Maguire’s personal history as a geologist included exploring with John Wesley Powell and putting together Utah’s display at the Colombia Exposition in Chicago. However his mines worked out, he was no fraud.

“I think his intentions were good,” Mike Holmes said. “He believed there was enough copper up there to rival Kennecott.”

Of all the mines, the El Dorado was the most remarkable, mostly because of the work that went into it.

The mine was just below Willard Peak near the Weber/Box Elder county line. Work began in 1898. An article in the Ogden Standard in January of that year quotes Maguire telling another newspaper that “large bodies of smelting ore have been uncovered, some of the mineral carrying values of 50 percent lead, 30 to 40 ounces of silver and $1 to $2 in gold to the ton.”

Copper in promising amounts was also found.

Pictures show a network of wooden ladders snaking up the side of the mountain to the mine. The Holmes brothers say Maguire built a trail up to the top of the mountain, some of which can still be seen and used.

During the summer of 1899, rumors of a rich strike were flying. In November, Maguire talked of the tramway he would build to haul ore down, saying he had “sacked 1,000 sacks of the ore as he has taken it out and says it would break a millionaire to buy sacks to hold it all.”

The mine itself was incorporated in 1900, and through the summer and fall of that year, workers put up a bucket tramway to the mine. The tram consisted of 1.5-inch thick cables strung up the mountain on pylons, with the loaded cars going down pulling the empty cars up.

On Jan. 31, 1901, the newspaper reported “three carloads of ore have been shipped from the El Dorado. Returns received are perfectly satisfactory to Mr. Maguire.”

Mike Holmes said that’s an interesting report, because the information he found was that two railroad cars of lead-zincsilver were shipped and “did not pay the freight and smelter charges.”

The Holmes brothers have climbed to the El Dorado several times. Their book has pictures of a massive mining engine that was somehow hauled up to it, the remains of a wooden bunkhouse for the workers, and even pictures of themselves inside the mine’s shafts, which were carved into solid rock and still stand.

There might be recoverable amounts of metal up there now, especially using modern mining and smelting methods, Mike Holmes said, “but the remoteness makes it impossible to develop.”

Maguire went on to develop other mines, including a silver mine in Taylor Canyon east of Ogden. As late as 1928, the Ogden paper reported Maguire talking about, and raising money, to mine the El Dorado, but nothing ever came of it.

“I don’t think there was any money made,” Mike Holmes said.

What happened to the tramfi It was abandoned and, in 1917, its cable, more than a mile long, was cut, taken down and sent to Seattle for reuse.

Maguire, promoting mines to the end, died in 1933 in Ogden after being hit by a car.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page B8.