Ruby Shaft

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, August 1885

The story of the Ruby Shaft begins with a man named McIntyre and a single foot of rock that he declined to dig, a decision that cost him three million dollars and secured his place in the annals of Montana mining as the most expensive act of stubbornness in the territory's history.

In about 1880, when the Granite Mountain Mining Company was still feeling its way around the ledge of silver-bearing ore that ran through the mountain above Philipsburg, McIntyre was contracted to sink a fifty-foot shaft. The terms were straightforward: dig fifty feet, receive one quarter of the mine. McIntyre dug forty-nine feet and stopped. The shaft was one foot short. He decided, for reasons that the record does not preserve, that he had done enough. He surrendered his share and walked away. That one-quarter interest, the share he traded for a single foot of unexcavated rock, eventually paid out more than three million dollars in dividends. The Philipsburg Mail did not record what McIntyre said when he learned this, but one imagines the vocabulary was considerable.

The company hired men who were less particular about completing their contracts. In 1885, a new shaft was started on the same ledge. They called it the Ruby Shaft, for the ruby silver ore, the dark red proustite and pyrargyrite that glittered in the candlelight when the miners broke it from the wall. Ruby silver was not the most common silver ore in Montana, but it was among the richest, and the Granite Mountain ledge was thick with it. The shaft went down. And down. And down again. By the time the crews finished, the Ruby Shaft ran 1,550 feet into the earth, more than a quarter mile straight down into the granite, and several hundred miners were working three eight-hour shifts a day, six days a week, hauling ore to the surface in cages that rose and fell on steel cables powered by steam engines burning wood and coal.

The headframe that stood over the shaft was enclosed in a building, a practical arrangement in a climate where winter arrived early and stayed late and where the wind off the Flint Creek Range could strip a man's ambition along with his hat. The building is gone now. The headframe itself has fallen into the shaft. But the shaft remains, a vertical tunnel bored through solid granite, and the ore that came out of it went to Mills A and B adjacent to the mine, and later to the Rumsey Mill, also called Mill C, which the company built in 1888 in a valley to the east on Fred Burr Creek.

The Rumsey Mill was a serious piece of engineering. It was completed in 1889 and connected to the mining complex by an aerial tramway 8,750 feet long, a little more than a mile and a half of cable strung across the mountain. The ore buckets rode the tramway down to the mill, and the empty buckets rode back up, and the system ran day and night during the years when Granite was producing. Those were years when the Granite Mountain Mining Company was paying dividends that made investors in New York and Boston and San Francisco sit up and take notice, years when the population of the town of Granite climbed toward three thousand and the saloons on the main street were doing business that would have satisfied a man with considerably lower ambitions than the average Granite miner.

The ore that came out of the Ruby Shaft was not all ruby silver, of course. The ledge produced a mix of silver sulfides and some gold, and the mill processed it all. But the ruby silver was the prize, the ore that justified the investment and the labor and the 1,550 feet of shaft. When a miner broke a piece of it from the wall and held it up to his candle, the dark red crystals caught the light in a way that plain gray galena never did. It looked like something worth finding. It looked like the reason a man would come to a mountain in Montana and spend his working life underground.

The shaft work at Granite was not easy work. The miners who descended in the cages each morning went down into a world of rock and candlelight and compressed air and the constant dripping of groundwater that seeped through the granite. The temperature underground was more stable than on the surface, which was a mercy in winter and a misery in summer. The work itself was drilling and blasting and mucking, the same work that miners did everywhere, but at 1,550 feet the stakes were different. A man who was injured at that depth was a long way from the surface, and the cages that brought him up were the same cages that brought the ore up, and the ore did not wait.

The Granite Mountain Mining Company paid its miners three dollars a day in the peak years, which was the standard rate for hard rock mining in Montana and which was enough to live on if a man was careful and not enough to save on if a man was human. The company also operated the Miners' Union Hall, which gave the men a place to meet and organize, and the union was strong enough in the late 1880s to negotiate the eight-hour shift that the marker records. Three shifts of eight hours each, six days a week: this was the rhythm of the Ruby Shaft, the schedule that kept the ore moving and the dividends flowing and the investors satisfied.

Then came August 1893, and the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and the price of silver fell off a cliff. The Granite Mountain Mining Company suspended operations. The miners who had been working three shifts a day packed their belongings and left. The town of Granite, which had been home to three thousand people, emptied in a matter of days. The Ruby Shaft stopped producing. The steam engines that powered the hoist went cold. The aerial tramway stopped moving. The mill on Fred Burr Creek fell silent.

The shaft is still there, 1,550 feet deep, bored through granite that has not moved since the Precambrian. The headframe that stood over it has fallen in. The building that enclosed the headframe is gone. The mills are ruins. But the shaft itself remains, a hole in the mountain that McIntyre declined to finish and that the men who came after him drove to a depth that he never imagined, pulling out the ruby silver that paid three million dollars in dividends to men who were not McIntyre, and not a cent to the miners who actually dug it.

See also

• Ruby Shaft at Granite Ghost Town, Granite County (Montana Department of Transportation, erected 2009)
• Granite Ghost Town at Philipsburg, Granite County -- the silver boom town that the Ruby Shaft built
• Superintendent's House at Granite Ghost Town, Granite County -- the residence of the man who ran the mine