Hardscrabble in the Guadalupes

A sealed mine entrance in the vicinity of upper Dog Canyon.

NPS Photo

The grizzled mining prospector, on a quest for that one fabulous strike that will transform him from subsistence miner to man of wealth and status, is one of the many colorful characters that walk the pages of Western history. The remote recesses of the southern Guadalupe Mountains were prospected in the 1890s, and small-scale mining for valuable minerals was attempted briefly at a few locales. The Guadalupes are now known to be devoid of valuable metal and metallic ore. Some of this knowledge was gained the hard way, at much labor and expense. Such is the story of the Calumet and Texas Mining Company.

The company had been in existence for only one year when in 1902 it purchased, from a group of four miners, a mining claim known as Hardscrabble No. 1, in the Dog Canyon area of what is now Guadalupe Mountains National Park. The claim held an active mine known as the Gopher tunnel, which was probably begun around April 1901. Copper-lead ore was mined by pick and shovel and loaded by hand onto pack mules. The mules then carried the ore a mile down the mountain to a level spot, where it was hand-loaded onto wagons for the sixtyfive mile trip to Carlsbad. From there, the ore could be hauled by wagon or train to a smelter in El Paso.

When Calumet and Texas came on the scene, company officials decided to start over with a new tunnel. Using dynamite and hand tools, small work crews slowly hacked their way through solid limestone over 800 feet into the mountain. There was a camphouse for the workers about a mile away, but there was no store, no town, and no entertainment. Everything but water and firewood had to be hauled in. The mine itself could only be reached on foot or by horse or mule. It is not surprising that workers were hard to come by in this rugged, isolated environment.

The miners found no valuable ore and disbanded in 1908 when money ran out. The president of the company, John H. Shary, moved to the Lower Rio Grande Valley and found great success as the father of the Texas grapefruit industry.

Under Shary’s guidance, mining of copperlead ore was restarted in the Gopher tunnel in 1931 and again in 1937. A few new exploratory holes were blasted. Each time, mining was unprofitable and stopped after a few months for the same reasons: small quantities of ore, the remote location, and high smelter fees. Hardscrabble No. 1 and the other company assets were sold at public auction in 1938 to satisfy an unpaid bank loan; soon after, the Calumet and Texas Mining Company dissolved and ceased to exist.

The Old Mines Today

After the national park was established, angle iron “bat gates” were installed in four tunnel entrances to block human access and allow bats to pass. One entrance was closed with a native stone/mortar barrier and some small test pits were backfilled. Materials for the project were lifted in by helicopter to minimize impact on the land. The mine openings are all located on steep, difficult to reach hillsides in the backcountry of the park. For your safety, visitation is discouraged.

During the 1937 mining episode, company officials considered various ways to increase production. Perhaps a road could be built from Dog Canyon through the mountains to the top of Pine Springs Canyon or Bear Canyon, and ore lowered by wooden chute or conveyer line to trucks waiting below? Or maybe a new road/ore chute out the west side of the mountains? The most ambitious idea of all was to build a copper smelter in Dog Canyon and strip mine the area with a steam shovel. But there were never any profits to finance such grand projects, so they never happened.

A large surface mining operation and road system would have disrupted this secluded wilderness and degraded its outstanding scenic qualities. The land would probably not have been suitable for a national park at all. The investors of the Calumet and Texas Mining Company lost their money, but the people of the United States have profited in ways that the 1890s prospectors could scarcely have imagined.

Written by volunteer Boyd Kennedy
Originally published in the spring/summer 2018 issue of the park newspaper