| Blue Light Mine History Compiled by Mike “Rockdad” Boeck Although Mexicans had probably mined the area previously for many years, records show that on August 12, 1877, H.C. Purcell, G.F. Slankerd, Henry Casida and Thomas Smith filed a mining claim after Casida "discovered" the abandoned mine site. They found blue and white quartz ore containing silver which assayed out at about $60 a ton in the Pine Canyon area and named their claim the Southern Belle. The rush of prospectors didn't start until the next spring however, following published reports of the news. Eventually 500 locations/claims were made in the area, organized as the Santa Rosa Mining District. U.S. Marshal J.D. Dunlap staked a claim up in the Pine/Halfway Canyons area and named it the Blue Light Mine. This was the most famous and productive of the mines in the Silverado area. What we know today as the Blue Light Mine is actually a consolidation of numerous former claims: the Dunlap or Blue Light, the Flanigan, and the Harvey and Thistlewaite. Henry S. Thistlewaite exhibited the first ore samples from the Silverado area in Anaheim just before Christmas 1877. Pharez Allen Clark, of Anaheim, laid out a townsite at the fork of Pine and Madera Canyons and called it Silverado. He was Silverado's first postmaster. Soon the town boasted three hotels, three stores, a post office, two blacksmith shops, two meat markets and seven saloons. The Los Angeles Board of Supervisors established Silverado as a township and Sam Shrewsbury was elected Justice of the Peace while Isaac Harding was elected Constable. Peak population of the canyon during mining activities was between 1000-1500 residents and two daily stagecoaches ran to Los Angeles while three ran to Santa Ana. The New York Mine was dug into the north side of Pine Canyon. It filled with water and another tunnel was run up at an angle from below to drain the main shaft. An Irish worker was killed in this tunnel when the water broke through the ceiling from the tunnel above. Names of other mines in the area included the Mountain View, Loring, Gold Hill, Ophir, and Excelsior claims. Some slabs of silver "as thick as a book and as large as a chair seat" were found in the mines but this was the exception, not the rule. The fractured geological structure of the mountains in this area makes mining difficult and expensive. After spending huge sums of cash on equipment and labor, most mine operations were struggling and by 1881 Silverado was abandoned except for a few diehards. Later sporadic attempts to wrest the silver ore from this rugged area lasted into the 1930s but the expense of operations eventually made the mining unprofitable. This information was gathered from books by Jim Sleeper, Leo J. Friis, Terry E. Stephenson, and articles from the Anaheim Gazette circa the late 1870s and early 1880s. |