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Richard Frailey |
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Ruby and Tailings from the Air |
Column No. 39
Bob Ring, Al Ring, Tallia Pfrimmer Cahoon
By 1961, the Montana mine and the Ruby mining camp had been owned and operated
by mining men for 84 years. From 1944 to 1961, local assayer and miner Hugo
Miller tried to make a living from the Montana.
In late 1961, Hugo Miller sold the mine and old mining camp to a group of
non-mining people from Tucson. The sale became official with the recording of
the mining deed on December 6, 1961. The sale price was $75,000.
The property included the 19-patented mining claims of the Montana group of
mines, covering a total of 362 acres. The northern Montana Group of 16
contiguous claims covered 302 acres. The southern Gold Boulder Group of three
contiguous claims covered 60 acres. The property also included two lakes and
700,000 tons of mine tailings, the residue from decades of deep mining for lead
and zinc. About a dozen buildings remained to remind the new owners of the “ups
and downs” of Ruby’s mining history.
On December 11, 1961 Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star announced the sale. The new
owners (20% each) were:
Louis E. Daugherty and wife Mary T. Daugherty
Richard R. Frailey and wife Betty J. Frailey
Francis A. Hardy II and wife Lane R. Hardy
Genevieve G. Roberson, wife of Lawrence W. Roberson
Dr. George A. Shetter and wife Dorothy L. Shetter
That same newspaper article identified Richard Frailey, a Tucson real estate
broker, as spokesman for the group.
According to Frailey, his group bought Ruby as a real estate investment. They
also had an interest in the outdoors and planned to use Ruby as their private
playground, a retreat where they could relax, fish for bass and hunt at a
relatively short distance from their homes in Tucson.
But while they were pondering their recreational opportunities, it was the huge
tailings dump that attracted the owners’ interest. The dump, positioned east of
the old mill in a canyon with fairly steep sides, was 1,100 feet long, 300-500
feet wide at the top, and up to 50 feet thick!
The new owners suspected (hoped?) that besides lead and zinc, the dump might
contain small amounts of gold and silver. With increasing prices for gold and
silver, they wondered if they could make any money by mining the tailings for
the precious metals.
So in 1964 (as Green Valley started to develop a few miles north), the owners
hired Jacobs Assay Office in Tucson to assay the tailings. The assayers even
took samples from the bottom of the two lakes. Results were encouraging, but for
the moment with the price of gold at $35 per ounce, the owners didn’t think the
mining prospects were economically sound.
But the dream of riches from mining wouldn’t go away. After a false start in
1968, on February 28 1972, the owners incorporated “Ruby Mines, Inc.” with the
stated objective:
“To carry on the business of mining, milling, concentrating, converting
smelting, exchanging, and otherwise producing and dealing in gold, silver.”
The Articles of Incorporation authorized one million dollars of capital stock
and listed the original five owners as the incorporators.
Between April 1973 and May 1974, the owners considered several proposals to
“reclaim” the lead and zinc tailing to obtain gold and silver. The trick was to
find an economically feasible process that would be worth the effort. They even
considered relocation of the tailings and forming a recreational lake from the
two existing lakes for a tourist attraction for the old Ruby mining camp.
Still not convinced that there was money to be made, the owners did not move
forward on any of these proposals.
For a brief period in 1975, the Henderson Companies of San Francisco held an
option to buy the Ruby properties, but this effort languished with the untimely
death of owner Richard Frailey.
Finally, in late 1977, “as a direct result of soaring prices of silver and
gold,” the Dallas Texas firm of Tech Associates leased the Ruby property in
order to process the tailings. It took the Company two years to figure out a way
to do it. They laid a sprinkler system to drop chemicals, with cyanide as a
principle ingredient, onto tailings wastes that they bulldozed onto plastic
sheets. The chemicals leeched through the wastes and combined in a solution with
gold and silver. In April 1980 the Company’s “cyanidization” process reportedly
produced 300 ounces of silver and four ounces of gold. But, this production
return was not good enough to pay expenses, so Tech Associates gave up their
lease.
Between late 1981 and mid 1983, three different companies held what turned out
to be short-term mining leases on the Montana mines property. These companies
included Holland Petroleum of Dallas Texas, Santa Sarita Mining Co., Ltd., and
Arivaca Silver Mining. None of these leases resulted in any mining at Ruby.
Based on a prospectus he had put together earlier in the year, H. A. Kinnison
leased the Montana mines in mid 1985. Kinnison formed the K & K Mining Co. to
sell limited partnerships. He planned to construct a heap-leach pad on the
existing tailings dump and mine the upper six feet of tailings. He figured he
would be able to work about 100,000 tons of ore from the 700,000-ton dump. He
planned to start with a cyanide treatment to mine gold from the tailings. He
raised some money, and bought and installed his equipment. However, over the
next three years he could never get the gold recovery process working
efficiently. Out of money, he ended the last mining operation at the Montana
mine in 1988.
The Montana mine suffered one last metallurgical assessment. In 1990, Sierra
Precious Metals of Sparks Nevada ran some tests to determine if an economic
concentrate could be recovered from the tailings. No mining started as a result
of these latest tests.
Since 1990, there has been no additional mining or even tests of mining
feasibility at Ruby.
(Sources: Santa Cruz County Recorders Office, Arizona Daily Star, Green Valley
News and Sun, Arizona Republic, Pat and Howard Frederick’s private files,
Arizona Department of Mines and Mineral Resources)
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Richard Frailey |
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Ruby and Tailings from the Air |
