Atlantic Cable Quartz Lode
By editor
Near Anaconda, Deer Lodge County, Montana
In June 1867, Alexander Aiken, John Person, and Jonas Stough went looking for horses that had drifted from a Flint Creek camp. They found placer gold in Warm Springs Creek and quartz prospects on Cable Mountain instead. They named the lode for the second transatlantic telegraph cable, freshly laid and still a wonder of the age—an odd cosmopolitan label for a hole in a Montana mountain.
Cable City grew up around the diggings. The Helena Weekly Herald admired the miners’ “good hard sense and big hearts.” The Atlantic Cable Mine worked with indifferent success until about 1880, when crews hit extremely rich ore under the mountain. A five-hundred-foot piece of ground produced wealth that later accountants would translate into more than $150 million in twenty-first-century dollars. In 1889 Butte copper king William A. Clark paid $10,000 for one chunk of ore and called it the largest gold nugget ever found in Montana.
Accidental discoveries are a Montana specialty. So are boomlets that flare, pay spectacularly, and leave a name on a map long after the camp is gone. The Atlantic Cable marker keeps both the telegraph joke and the Clark boast in circulation—reminders that even in copper country, gold could still stop a conversation.
See also
- Contributions of the Washoe Smelter at Anaconda, Deer Lodge County
- Marcus Daly - An Irishman with Vision at Anaconda, Deer Lodge County
- Granite Mountain Mining Company Office at Philipsburg, Granite County
