Homestake, The Mountain That Made Fortunes

In the spring of eighteen seventy-six, two brothers named Moses and Fred Manuel followed a rocky gulch in the Black Hills and found what they called a promising outcropping of gold ore. They named their claim the Homestake. Within a year, a San Francisco financier named George Hearst had bought them out for a reported seventy thousand dollars. Hearst knew what he had purchased. By eighteen seventy-eight, an eighty-stamp mill was crushing ore at the bottom of the gulch in the new town of Lead. Full production had begun.

The Homestake Mine would operate for one hundred twenty-five years, from eighteen seventy-six until two thousand one, the longest continuously operating mine in United States history. Over that span it produced more than thirty-nine million troy ounces of gold, making the Lead mining district the second-largest gold producer in the country, behind only the Carlin district in Nevada. At its peak, the mine employed more than two thousand workers and drove everything: the town of Lead, the surrounding county, the Black Hills economy.

The ore was low grade, less than one ounce per ton, but the deposit was enormous. Miners followed it downward for more than eight thousand feet, making Homestake the deepest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere. When low gold prices and rising costs finally closed it in two thousand one, the surrounding community faced a reckoning. The answer came from physics. Today the Sanford Underground Research Facility occupies the old mine's deepest levels, running experiments that require being shielded from cosmic radiation by a mile of solid rock. The mountain that made fortunes is now helping scientists search for dark matter.