The History of Empire Mine Company: The Bourn Family
On January 24, 1848, John Marshall discovered flecks of gold in the south fork of the American River at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. Since his discovery, the Sierra Nevada has been mined more or less ever since. Interestingly and unfortunately for Mexico, Marshall’s discovery occurred one week before the execution of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ended the Mexican American War and which required Mexico to allow the United States to annex the California territory. At such time, there were only about 800 non-native Americans living in all the California territory which stretched over 600 miles across the Pacific Coast of North America. The news of Marshall’s discovery of gold quickly reached the east coast of the United States, Europe, and even Asia. Thus began the California Gold Rush of 1848, and instantly, thousands of people started migrating to the California territory from all over the world. Within 20 months of Marshall’s discovery of the valuable precious metal, the non-native American population in the California territory exploded to well over 100,000.
The majority of these emigrants to the California territory went straight to the Sierra Nevada mountains where alluvial gold was initially quite plentiful. Alluvial mineral deposits are accumulated materials composed of sand and earth leftover during the erosion upon rocks by rivers and floods over vast amounts of time. The alluvial gold down the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains, which would later become the proverbial gold nugget fueling the California Gold Rush of 1848, was deposited in these riverbeds during the 65 million years prior to Marshall’s discovery beginning in the early Paleogene Period of the Cenozoic Era.
As the former editor of the local newspaper wrote later in 1867, in 1849 a few individuals found their way to a “verdant valley, coursed by a beautiful stream then unrntiled [sic] by the labor of the prospector” in the Sierra Nevada. These individuals would be the founders of a locality to be later known as Grass Valley, California. During the fall of 1849 and the spring of 1850, combing the local stream beds for alluvial gold was quite prosperous. By accident, and in June of 1850, George McKnight discovered from where these alluvial gold deposits in the riverbeds had originated during these millions of years of erosion. Tripping over the quartz outcropping on what is now known as Gold Hill, McKnight discovered gold deposits in the form of gold flecks and gold veins embedded within the quartz. In October of 1850, George Roberts discovered another outcropping not far away from McKnight’s initial chance, yet an opportunistic discovery.
People flooded to Gold Hill in attempts to remove the gold from the quartz outcroppings. These first hard rock miners marked their claims (usually a 30-foot by 40-foot square) and began attempting to hammer into the quartz outcroppings. These pioneering hard rock miners found little success. Because hammering and blasting into the quartz was so difficult, within a couple of years, Gold Hill was covered with remnant holes in the quartz which were 20 to 40 feet deep that miners had hammered straight down through the quartz in attempts to free the gold from the rock. Over time, many miners simply gave up trying to laboriously extract the gold from the hard quartz foundation due to the degree of difficulty in freeing the gold from the quartz fissures. Many miners sold their claims for nominal amounts. These small claims were consolidated by a small group of investors into the Ophir Hill mine, and in 1852, the Ophir Hill mine was purchased by John Rush. In 1869, William Bowers Bourn acquired the mine under the banner of the Empire Mine Company.
The Bourn family owned and operated the Empire Mine Company for the next six decades. In the intervening years after Marshall’s initial discovery of gold in the riverbeds of the California territory and the discovery by the fortunate George McKnight of gold deposits in the quartz composing the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, the Empire Mine Company brought in investors, heavy equipment, and immigrant miners primarily from Cornwall, England, and created one of the largest mines in California. The mine also attracted local businesses such as farmers, grocers, blacksmiths, merchants, and the like, who engaged in support of the local population and precipitated innovations in water power with the Pelton Wheel. By the time the Empire Mine closed in 1957, the Grass Valley Cornish miners, and miners of other nationalities including many Asians, had created miles of tunnels, some even as deep as 11,000 feet. During the course of over a century, the mine was one of the first hard-rock mining operations in California. Being one of the most productive mines in California as well, the miners of the Empire Mine Company removed millions of pounds quartz from the mines, and from this quartz, extracted over 5,800,000 ounces of gold by crushing the quartz and using chemical reactions (sometimes with cyanide) to further separate the gold flecks from the quartz. Through good management, keeping labor costs low, and innovation, the Empire Mine Company became one of the greatest mining businesses in California and the central hub for the creation of the little town of Grass Valley, California.
As noted above, William Bowers Bourn was the original owner of the Empire Mine Company. According to Roger A. Lescohler in The Story of the Empire Mine, 1850-1956, Bourn was a descendant of Jared Bourn “who came from England in 1630 with John Winthrop, the founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” William Bowers Bourn was born in 1813 in Somerset, Massachusetts, and came to San Mateo, California, during the Gold Rush with his wife, Sarah. Prior to relocating to California in 1850 from the east coast of the United States, Bourn was already a successful and wealthy businessman. When he arrived in California during the Gold Rush, his success continued. “Since the first news of Marshall’s discovery in 1848, people from across the world had flocked to California. Many found their calling not in the mines but in the fields that provisioned miners’ stomachs or the stores that outfitted their toolkits.” Likewise, Bourn found his calling in local business. At first, Bourn chose neither to comb the riverbeds for alluvial gold nor to dig in the mountains for gold flecks trapped in the quartz. Rather, he chose to be a merchant and an investor to the miners. After over fifteen years of lucrative businesses in California, Bourn became the president of the Imperial Silver Mining Company of Gold Hill, Nevada and of Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company. Bourn became even more wealthy after the huge success of a string of investments related to mines in Nevada, and in 1869, Bourn exchanged some of his wealth in order to acquire a controlling interest in the Empire Mine in Grass Valley, California, from John Rush.
Despite his early success with mines in Nevada, Bourn’s investment in the Empire Mine Company got off to a rocky start. Immediately after Bourn’s purchase, he faced labor issues with the miners. The miners resented that the owner of the mine was from San Francisco and felt that he cared about neither the miners nor the community. After Bourn took over, miners walked off the job protesting the use of dynamite in the mines which is highly dangerous and also eliminated the need for one driller per site. In September of 1870 and according to Lescholer, a fire destroyed substantial portions of the stamp mill as well as “pumping and hoisting equipment, and winter supplies.” By 1871, Bourn restored the mine to full capacity with a new 20-stamp mill powered by steam engines to lift the 900-pound stamps, but in 1872, Bourn’s labor woes continued when the mine manager reintroduced dynamite to the Empire Mine operations. Fortunately for Bourn, who was not an onsite owner of the Empire Mine Company, the mine manager was able to reassure the miners that blasting with dynamite had proven “a safe and effective tool in mining.” The miners went back to work, and by the time the Panic of 1873 hit, the Empire Mine Company was employing over 100 men as Cornish immigration increased.
In order to understand why miners from Cornwall were instrumental in mining the Empire Mine, one must consider the nature of mining free mill gold deposits versus refractory gold deposits. In 1848, when Marshall discovered alluvial gold nuggets in the riverbed, which sparked the California Gold Rush, thousands and thousands of people emigrated from the east coast of the United States and thousands and thousands also immigrated from Asia, South America, and Europe to partake in the gathering of these gold nuggets laying the rivers of the west slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Over the next couple decades, all of this alluvial gold was scooped up by “placer miners.” Placer miners are miners who rinsed the alluvial gold from the sediment of the riverbeds by panning or by irrigation methods. Once the rivers were empty, the miners started mining the actual mountains from where the alluvial gold had originated millions of years prior. The problem for these hard rock miners was that the California gold is trapped within the quartz of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Such gold entrapment required generational knowledge of hard rock tunnel mining, and the Cornish of Cornwall, England, had developed mining knowledge from mining in the Cornwall region since the early Bronze Age. Tin from Cornwall was traded and exported across Europe beginning nearly four millennia ago. In fact, and by the middle of the 18th century, Cornish mines were annually producing 24 million pounds of copper ore. During the 19th century, there were over 2,000 mines in Cornwall. Due to these millennia of hard rock mining in the Cornwall area, the generations of Cornish knew mining and knew it well.
As stated previously, the Empire Mine was a quartz mine with an average yield of $30 per ton of quartz. In 1866, and according to the Report on Precious Metals from the Paris Exposition in 1869, Grass Valley had twice as many stamps (hammer mills) as Nevada City.
Based on this data, it is clear that Cornish miners gravitated towards their knowledge base related to hard rock mining in Grass Valley as opposed to hydraulic mining with which the Cornish may not have been incredibly familiar in Nevada City. To this day, Grass Valley still espouses its Cornish roots annually with a Cornish Christmas celebration in December of each year. In addition, there are still two “pasty” restaurants in Grass Valley. A pasty is a flaky meat pie with origins in Cornwall, England, and when the Cornish miners immigrated to the Grass Valley during the Gold Rush, it is said that the miners’ wives made them pasties to be eaten in Empire Mine while working. By 1874, and largely by the hands of these Cornish miners, about 11,000 tons of material had been removed from the Empire Mine’s mine shaft which had been dug to the 1,250-foot level and from another 7,900 feet of tunnels dug laterally from the main shaft.
In the midst of his success, and unfortunately for Bourn and his wife and their family of four daughters and one son, the elder Bourn died in San Francisco in 1874 from an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot wound to the stomach. While some headlines shrieked “A Millionaire’s Death: Shocking Suicide of a Noted Capitalist,” there was no evidence that the elder Bourn committed suicide. Bourn’s colleagues speculated that, because nobody would commit suicide by shooting themselves in the stomach, Bourn “fumbled” his pistol and accidently shot himself. In any event, at the time of Bourn’s untimely death, the Empire Mine Company was still in financial straits as a result of the Panic of 1873.
The Panic of 1873 brought another round of mining-company consolidation. In the midst of economic depression, large investments from London recapitalized many of California’s mines. By 1875, more than half of the large hydraulic mining operations were British owned, and five of the largest quartz mines in California had been acquired by the British as well, including the infamous Eureka mine in Nevada County, regarded in the early 1870s as one of the most valuable gold mines in the world. However, two years later, the Eureka mine was no longer in commercial production. Due in part to an incorrect estimation of its productive life, the mine was heavily overcapitalized and lost money. It was not that the mine ran out of gold—rather, the gold in the quartz was not free milling and the Eureka Mining Company could not mine the gold profitably.
In the late 1870s, California mining operators criticized British quartz miners for their failures, particularly for investing too heavily in mining infrastructure—crushing mills, roads, amalgamation tanks, and houses for miners—before they knew that the ore contained enough free-milling gold to justify their investment. According to Adam Romero from the University of Washington in his article titled, “Beyond the Mother Lode: Synthetic Cyanide and the Chemicalization of California Gold Mining,” this was not just a British trait, but instead was symptomatic of a larger industrial crisis in gold mining across the world: the industry lacked the technological ability to operate profitably in refractory deposits.
Where the other mines failed because of financial difficulties and difficulty separating the gold from the quartz, the Empire Mine Company succeeded through good management and innovation. Not only does the excerpt above explain some of the consequences of the Panic of 1873 on California gold mining, but it also demonstrates the difference between failed mines and the Empire Mine Company. Romero asserts that “the gold in the quartz was not free milling and the Eureka Mining Company could not mine the gold profitably.” These early California quartz mines required power in the form of water in order to operate the massive stamps that crushed the quartz in order to separate the “free milled” gold from the ore. Free milled gold ores are deposits which can be separated from the quartz by crushing and without any chemical reactions. Refractory gold deposits are also found in the gold mines. Refractory gold deposits are gold flecks embedded in the quartz which require a chemical reaction (usually a cyanide component) in order to separate the gold from the ore.
Free-milling gold is found only in those gold veins that have been exposed to the alchemy of earth’s surface processes, where chemical and physical weathering has stripped the gold of its chemically bound mineral baggage. In other words, refractory ores exist deeper in the earth’s crust, often below the water level, where the undulations of climatic shifts are not felt, and where oxygen cannot cast its chemically transformative spells. In these refractory ores, gold atoms intimately coexist within larger sulfide minerals, making them immune to gravity separation or mercury amalgamation.
In order to be profitable, not only did the miners of the Empire Mine Company have to dig, blast, and crush the free milled gold which had already been atomically freed from the quartz by the Earth’s chemical processes, they had to dig deep for the refractory gold deposits and then innovate in order to free the gold flecks from quartz which had not been exposed to such chemistry. The Cornish miners dug deep, and scientists invented artificial chemical reactions using cyanide and mercury in order to finish what the Earth’s chemistry had not yet gotten to.
It was during these difficult economic conditions and tough industrial realities when Bourn’s estate ran the Empire Mine Company’s mining operations, and it did not go well. In January of 1875, the decedent’s son, William Bowers Bourn, Jr., left his Nob Hill community in San Francisco and went to England for his education at Cambridge University. “Like other privileged young men his age whose fathers had acquired great wealth during the Gold Rush, he was expected to obtain a degree from a prestigious university, return to San Francisco to grow his family’s fortune, and finally to engage in civic activities and building projects that would project a more sophisticated San Francisco image—one that was more urbane and less Wild West frontier.” During this period after the Panic of 1873 and while William attended Cambridge University, the Empire Mine Company was run poorly and many outside engineers believed that the mine was spent to the point that future operations would be pointless and that the mine should be closed. In 1878, the main shaft was closed, and the water pumps turned off which allowed the deep ground water to fill the tunnels. Between 1854 and the main shaft shut down in 1878, the Empire Mine had a total production of $2,967,416.
When William returned to California in 1878 after being summoned by his mother Sarah before he could complete his university education at Cambridge, his mother demanded that he take over for his father’s estate and rebuild the Empire Mine Company. The Bourns had other investments, but the Empire Mine Company was the largest of them, and in 1879, Bourn’s son, William, took over mining operations and began to systematically search for new ore.
In what turned out to be an amazing stroke of luck and in 1881, William hired his cousin, George W. Starr, as a mucker in the mine. In the next article in this series, we will discuss George W. Starr and his innovations related to the Empire Mine Company.
Start reading: The History of Empire Mine Company: George W. Starr
