An English prospector’s 1897 copper strike, and the partner who did not walk away
In 1897 a prospector from Whitehaven in England named Ed Haggarty found copper on the western flank of the Sierra Madre in Carbon County, Wyoming, and staked what was first called the Rudefeha. What his partners then built to get the ore out is the reason this pin exists.
The mine portal sat at 9,880 feet on Haggarty Creek. The mill and smelter were at Riverside on the Encampment River at 7,200 feet, on the other side of the range. Between them is the Continental Divide. Rather than haul ore over it, the North American Copper Company, which bought the mine for a million dollars in 1902, strung an aerial tramway sixteen and a quarter miles long from the portal, up the western slope, across the divide at 10,690 feet, and down the eastern side to the smelter. Three hundred and four wooden towers. Nine hundred and eighty five buckets, each rated at seven hundred to a thousand pounds. It was the longest aerial tramway in the world, and it was finished in 1902, the same year as the smelter.
By 1904 the operation employed two hundred men and produced over a million and a half dollars in copper. Then it came apart, quickly, the way these things do: smelter fires, financial trouble, mismanagement, and falling copper prices. Mining stopped in 1908. Eleven years from discovery to silence.
The site went onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.
Encampment is a small town now with a very good local museum that keeps the tramway story, and pieces of the line survive in the mountains. Treat the workings themselves with respect and check land status before you go poking: this is a mix of national forest and private ground, and old copper workings from 1900 are exactly the sort of hole that has been quietly waiting a hundred and twenty years for somebody to fall into it.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
