Adventure at the Carney Mines

[Music] howdy folks I'm Hank Sheffer and welcome to another true life story right here with Jack San Felice on Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains in 1905 and 1906 a fellow by the name of Pete Carney came to Arizona and he decided that he was going to look for copper you see electricity was just come into fashion among houses houses all over the west the east coast etc. so there was a demand now for copper he thought if he could find this mother lode of copper in arizona where there were already a lot of copper mines that he could be rich beyond compare like those who were the first to find the mother lode in nevada or in california the 49ers the first guys get there usually get the best claims well he filed several claims in and around east side of superstition mountain proper next to Peralta road and in that particular area he formed a camp and so he found this camp right next to a spring and it was called carney spring that was named and they put a pipe in the ground and ran it out and they built the little structure for it where the pipe would go through and the water would drop down so you could get in your buckets or whatever in fact when I first came to Arizona in the early 90s that pipe was still coming out of the mountain into this cement device you could drink the water out of it was good water because it wasn't contaminated by um the bacteria that would be left by animals but later someone of course tore the thing down destroyed it well it called that Carney springs and right next to Carney springs they had a camp and they set up a camp and they had two dozen men working on this uh particular site now this site had upper and lower mines uh and it was going to take some heavy-duty equipment and some funds so Carney goes to back east looking for a prospector looking for money men and he finds a guy named Ogden Bowers and so they called the camp and he financed the the one dig site and so they called the camp camp bowers and they started work and they brought in the power drills and started working on that rock because that's what it was it was the side of the mountain which was solid rock so they they dug a lower tunnel and then they dug some other drifts up top and then tried to cross cut the tunnel coming across they were able to one location just barely but that mine in solid rock it went 600 feet into the base of that mountain in solid rock so they would all they did was drill and blast and muck drill blast and muck you had to take out the the rock and it was uh actually when i found it in the 1990s it was still open and and it was all solid rock and it was done so that that it was safe so nothing was going to fall down on you from the top when the flat went a flat roof it was like calm concave a little bit and you could go back i took a fella in there that was six foot nine he had to stoop a little bit but we he walked the whole way in the whole way in and that was early on in the 1990s well carney had trouble with with um bowers because bowers expected a return on his money right away and but so he withdrew from it so carney said well if you did that the heck with you i'm gonna change the name to camp Carney who did away with the name Bowers that was called camp Carney and he looked around in Mesa in Phoenix and he found some other people to finance him now about this time copper mining was uh really taken off in the west you see after 18..... um in 1893 when the gold became the standard and silver lost its value tremendously went from a dollar 40 an ounce to about 20 cents an ounce could not make any money on silver so all the mines in the west shut down a lot of the mines there were copper in fact the Silver king mine found copper and its values and it was high grade some high grad copper and the Silver Queen right down a half a mile from it they found very high grade copper after 200 feet down and they didn't mind anymore and it was taken over that silver queen mine became the very famous Magma mine these guys are still working they're still bringing money in and they got a new there's a new kind of drill that came out called the diamond hex drill and they were using that new drill with diesel-powered power drills they weren't the hand drill that they were of the 1870s this was a power drill it was operated by diesel fluid and operate the engine and then the hose is going to it and then it would just bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam and it turned as it was going bam bam bam bam bam and guys would stand behind it it looked like a machine gun is what it did on an aircraft carrier and and it made that terrible noise and so they drilled so much then they'd blast some that insert the dynamite and blast and then they would pull all that rock out and at the base of that mine from going back to 600 feet and to the right it's all rubble now and it's all outside some of it was hauled away Carney in fact he built a road and then the early days these early ford trucks had a gear in them that you didn't need four-wheel drive that thing would go just about anywhere and so he had these old-fashioned trucks they were not old-fashioned them they were brand new and they would haul this ore that they was going to he thought that the vein was in and they would take that down and have it processed and try to get some money out of it now what they saw when they first started looking there was green rock and they in the upper mines had a lot of green rock in it now in that was in 1906 when they really started in 1906 and 1907 there were several stories in the newspapers the local papers about Carney and his mines and they would talk about how how well it was going and mining people from the Ray mine area and from down around San Manuel which were big copper mines they talked about what a good mine that this was going to be so it was encouraging and so carney didn't want to give up also there was an old fella by the name of Ed Cave and his his nickname was old rackensack and he had he had come back to arizona and traveled a thousand miles to see his old diggings so he had diggings here in Arizona and when he gets into the phoenix area he gives an interview and he talks about emerald gold and what do you mean emerald gold well the gold is in a green rock and so that's what they thought that they were going to find as a matter of fact up at the dayside mines you'll find a lot of the green rock and this actually comes from the daysite mines or the Carney mines as they were also called daysite was a type of rock and and it found it's a volcanic type of rock that was found up in the area of uh that uh part of the Superstition Mountains so they're still there they're digging away now the paper comes in and they're talking about emerald gold and it's found in green and in a matter of fact at the Silver king mine which I'm part of i've been part of for 20 years a lot of the uh ore up there had green in it which is chrisacola chrisacola is is a very greenish type rock and that's what you see right here chrisacola and that's a sign of copper but also in the copper in Arizona almost every mine that has copper has some gold values in it now Carney's starting to find gold and the newspaper the newspaper is talking about like this was the 49ers strike camp Bowers fine gold Carney mines fine gold rich find and that's exactly what they talk about a very rich find in at the Carney mines so now that draws more money into it people that would invest but also draws other people to the area prospectors uh claim jumpers and and sure enough Carney was involved in a suit somebody filed suit against him said that hit that one of his claims that was his claim in 1875. so he yeah of course it's been expired for 40 years but doesn't make a difference that he still wants a file suit on it well in in any event that thing was settled in a hurry so Carney is is digging away now he's got the upper mines and that's where he finds a lot of green and so they're trying to dig in these upper mines and come back down because it's about 150 feet from the upper mines to the lower mines and they dug several tunnels up there and then they drifted down and then they dug some shafts and the more they progressed the more prospectors come in interlopers and uh vagabonds rogues and that's where the term rogue and vagabond really applies and they would set up their camps now in late in the later days of the Carney mines in 1914 they had hired this guy named eli korvich to be the mind foreman now look they're working the mines from 1906 to 1914. that is a long time to work a mine without having a bonanza find in it or find a big load of copper or find a real strike but they're finding enough just to get by on is what they were doing well another group comes in and they were having some problems this other group was shooting at their camp and the mine foreman the new mine foreman eli korvich so he gets his rifle and he gets three shells and he loads one of the shells he said he's going to go over and talk to those guys get them to stop shooting at the camp well he doesn't come back that night in the morning they put a search party out and they come across eli korvich's body he had been shot through the head i believe through the head at least once and he was dead his rifle was there and one expended shell in it and they couldn't find the other two shells so we don't know if he fought he actually shot more than once now the sheriff comes in and starts in those days this is the way it worked the sheriff comes in and they grab everybody within the vicinity and everybody's a likely suspect and they sometimes they just grab everybody and they grab them more than once and they bring them in and talk to them and that was a method of operation called like a drag neck sweep a sweep of the area everybody's around we just want to lock em up until we sort out that who's the suspect well they developed three guys that were suspects one of them named Bert Wingar was a he was a mining man and he was well known in the area but as soon as they found out Bert Wingar was grabbed up they got they got an attorney and they convened a coroner's inquiry a coroner's jury is put together and that's the way they did it in those days they pulled in a coroner's jury it's still written in the laws and the old common laws of back East coroner's juries and then they uh they decided there were six people in this jury that's normal normal and they have a hearing and so after the hearing they dismissed any charges against the three men including Bert Wingar that had gone and after that the Carney mines sort of uh faded into obscurity but the mines are still there and I was teaching at the community colleges and I was also lecturing around the area I used to like to take them back in because it was a safe mine it was all hard rock it wasn't gonna it wasn't a chance in the world it was gonna collapse on you and so we're going back and and we get back there and go back 600 feet I tell them what you've got to look for and bring lights of all things boots because the first time i went in there would rattle two rattlesnakes right inside the entrance and that's of course where rattlesnakes like to go we get we start to go back into bat caveman and one of the guys in front hears this noise you hear that rattle and oh shoot you can't find we can't find a rattlesnake we couldn't see him there was no way in the world well it was a black rattlesnake is what it was and you couldn't see that son of a gun it would dark I didn't kill the black rattlesnake because they're so rare we did find them and we got him and take him and we took them out we carried them out actually so we got rid of the snakes and we went back but when i started taking people back there we go back 600 feet dog leg and there's bats now there's a few bats and i'm saying 20 to 30 bats back there and as time progressed and a few years later I go back again I'm taking another group back and your dog leg again you go back and at the at the end of almost at the end of the tunnel you start seeing bats but not 20 or 30 there's 200 to 300 bats but the one thing you can't do is make loud noises you can't haul or you can't drop stuff you can't bang on against the walls you can't bring canteens that are metal at bang so you got to be quiet so you can observe them and it's kind of really neat to see them it's like looking at a beehive for the first time and you see all of these little bees well that's what the bats are they all just kind of like uh just hanging out and that's what they do they hang from their feet so they were hanging out so i'm bringing this guy named jake jake's with our group i'd say jake whatever you do don't say anything keep quiet you don't want to disturb the bats you want to be able to see the bats and photograph and not disturb them and don't get a chance we get back here no problem 600 feet we get back there we go another 100 feet and i put the light on and was getting closer and 40 feet away from the bats about 40 or 50 feet all of a sudden jake goes god almighty look at all those bats guess what happens two or three hundred bats come out of them because what the vats going to do they're going out the escape hole which is right by us so everybody's got to hit the floor one guy had a hair on it knocked his hat off and he is he is petrified okay petrified in the back of the business on another occasion we're going up to the upper dacite because we want to gather some green rock as you're going up the mountain and you start out on a semi incline and then as you're going up you go up but you got to have a landmark because all the rocks look alike and right there on the way up not too far from the dacsite is a large rock formation it looks like a teepee and so i always called it tp rock but when you get to that rock if you make a dog leg right you come to a small cave and in that small cave it goes it's i guess it's about 60 feet long and about 20 feet deep it's really neat it look it was an old site there that was a real cave it wasn't mine and in the floor there are in indian grind holes and they're about eight eight inches wide and they're about six to eight inches deep so some ancient indians had lived there at one time and we know of course there being more water that they did live in that area but when you get inside and you look out it you get to the back it looks just like a teapot so you see and i always called that teapot cave now it's an ancient cave been there for hundreds of years but most people that's gone up there for years will walk right by it because as you're going up you're focused on up and you're not looking for things all around now in the cave at the back of the cave there's a small niche about this thing and I shined my flashlight I thought I saw something move and sure enough it was a desert tortoise he was about that long and as soon as the light hit him his old head popped right back in he would not poke his head out I didn't want to disturb him you shouldn't deserve those those critters they're rare to see and so with that done we resume our hike up to the top now as you're going the elevation of course it's not going this it's going like this now and it gets steeper and steeper and steeper and just before you get to the top there's a soft area there it's dirt where it come from over the years who knows but it's a little tricky spot you can trip and fall there before you get right onto the little plateau that's there and when you get to the plateau you start looking over to the left and you see a mine well guess what it's not the only opening you go a little further around the bend there's another one and it's in solid rock and then you go over down now you go on you're on top of the one particular dacsite mine it's a level area but it goes and it drops off and when you drop off there's some more mines to the left some more uh and all of this work had been done but what did they do with the ore well when we go back over to the end of that plateau there's a drop off and it it go it's gradual and it goes in that whole little canyon is filled with dacsite rock with green rock and it's greenish blue also some and that bluish color of course is azurite as you write chriscola and malachite that's the formation of of copper silver and then you find gold in most places in the in the copper so that whole ravine is full of it now uh if you're real adventurous you can look in the mines and you can take a rope in there because once you go in the one that's uh really good to see you go in and it goes dry out it's a shaft it becomes a shaft and and it's a deep shaft so you want to if you wanna get down to the bottom of that shaft you gotta have a long rope and i don't recommend anybody do that the last time i was there we decided that we're gonna go not go down the same way we came up we're going down the rubble and now you're going a long way on the rubble down this canyon and it slip and slide and fall and slip and slide and fall and and you got just to be careful when you get to the bottom seems like you're never going to get out of the rubble so there was a whole lot of material taken out of those Carney mines back in the early 1900s during the time when copper was sought for in arizona and in the west so that's basically my story of the Carney mines except korvich's crime was never solved and this was 1914 and that era and beyond there were a lot of unsolved deaths or murders in the Superstition Mountains and Eli korvich... Eli korvich's story and his death is another one of those unsolved mysteries of the superstition mountains thank you for watching this episode of Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains [music] you

Channel: Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains

Views: 45,597

Rating: 4.9411764 out of 5

Keywords: Charlie LeSueur, Superstition Mountains, The Lost Dutchman Mine, Superstition Mountain Museum, Opal Images, Arizona, History, Gold, Treasure, Jack San Felice, Carney Mine, Carney Springs, Apache Kid's Cave, Wave Cave, Hiking, Mine, Copper, Silver, Hank Sheffer, Larry Hedrick, Opal Images Inc.

Id: 96j7FCYW_YM

Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020