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Second of two parts

By 1879, the Horn Silver Mine in Beaver County's San Francisco Mountain Mining District was considered "unquestionably the richest silver mine in the world now being worked." And it did work, for many years, until tremors shook the ground, cave-ins "doomed" the adjacent mining town of Frisco and the rich ore that brought boom and prosperity to the Horn played out.

Discovered in September 1875, within four years Horn's monthly profits reached $40,000. Predictions of $2 million in annual profits and mined ore valued at $17 million were considered "truly conservative" projections.

Ore was taken from the mine's first three levels, and the advantages were many and financially rewarding, including a "favorable location, climate and accessibility; an enormous body of rich ore; its uniformity and unchanging character; the supply and ease of extraction," and entirely free of worthless gangue rock, waste, and water, historians Leonard J. Arrington and Wayne K. Hinton wrote in "The Horn Silver Bonanza."

Before the completion of the Utah Southern Railroad Extension and Horn's privately-laid 3-mile spur, the mine's ore was taken to the plant in Frisco for smelting, and its bullion transported by wagon to Salt Lake City. Frisco, reputed to be "Dodge City, Tombstone, Sodom and Gomorrah all rolled into one," tempered its moniker, as it became a working town dependent upon the Horn.

In 1880, the mine experienced its first cave-in which left an enormous "crater-like" opening at the mine's surface, but it never missed a beat in production.

In January 1883, with the first level's ore depleted, its space was presumed a safe portal to the second level. Refuting calls for additional (and costly) timber to shore up the "surface of the old cave," the company countered by removing that level's mining equipment and tracks.

It wasn't enough. In March, the mine's surface trembled and sank, carrying everything with it straight down into the second level. Two days later, the second level collapsed into the third level. A car crumpled and railing twisted, but life and limb were spared.

Despite such cave-ins, by 1885, the Horn was considered among the eight "strongest veins in the American Continent" — with seemingly wall-to-wall silver.

In February that same year, a cave-in went off like a shotgun boom heard and felt in Frisco and as far away as Milford.

Just prior to the cave-in, two weeks of steady rain had turned into two feet of icy snowfall that saturated the ground and weighed heavily on the timbers below.

"A little past midnight, the Horn Silver hoisting works began to sink in such a manner as to foreshadow a grand tumble of things movable underground," reported the Feb. 17, 1885, Salt Lake Tribune. "Mammoth lumbers were crushed into toothpicks. A chunk of the earth's crust more than 700 feet thick slid down between the walls toward the [seventh] level."

Mining equipment, timber, tools, candles, cars, and rails were blown apart. "The surface ground showed a shrinkage of nearly two feet and yawning chasms extended out as far as the old railroad track," The Tribune reported. "Some say the shock was so great [it] resembled an earthquake. And the 700 loads of excavation were large enough to stow away the town of Frisco, buildings and all."

Fifty men were in the mine. All escaped with their lives. Frisco, never the same, eventually became a ghost town. The Horn resumed mining, recovered its reputation, and lived through more cave-ins, ownerships and revivals until the mid-1960s and its demise.

Eileen Hallet Stone, author of "Hidden History of Utah," and "Historic Tales of Utah," a new compilation of her "Living History" columns in the Salt Lake Tribune, may be reached at ehswriter@aol.com. —

To read Part One

To read the first installment of Eileen Hallet Stone's portrait of the Horn silver mine, go online to the following address. › http://bit.ly/1rZXQD1