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Show MARYSVALE DISTRICT HAS 1 YEAR OF GREAT PROGRESS Potash Development as Well as Mining Interests; Report Prosperity in 1917; Supply Al- j most Inexhaustible. BY. J. F. GIBBS. COMPARED with others, the year just closing has been unexampled unexam-pled in its progress in mining and the reduction of ore. After years of slow, but steady, development, the old Deer Trail mine, owned nv the Salisbury brothers and associates asso-ciates of Salt Lake City, has a luO-ton unit mill, just completed, and from which during the years to come a stream of wealth .will be flowing. As a kind of "freak."' and as an object lesson to Marysvale mining men, the Deer Trail is entitled to a brief description. The basic formations of Deer Trail mountain, aome six miles southwest of Marysvale, are bedded nuartzite and limestone, fissured, tilted, faulted and accompanied by' eruptive erup-tive dikes. The contact, exposed along the east base of the mountain, rises toward the soutl at an angle of about 10 degrees from the horizontal, and, broken at Cottonwood canyon, ends against a -great east-west porphyry dike, which forms the crest of Gold hill the site of the Monte del Rev. owned hy W. J. Barret te of Salt Lake City. To the north and south of the Deer Trail ore bodies is a local fault of --lose to a hundred hun-dred feet of displacement, thus forming a deep trough, which dips gently downward down-ward under the mountain soward a north-south north-south dike, which is exposed on the apex of Deer Trail mountain. Character of Ore. The character of the ore within the trough -con taet. to a distance in of about moo feet. is prln-vipallv prln-vipallv a white, almost impalpable clay tiie result of intense alteration of the limestone, and which yields about ?6 to M0 per ton in gold and silver, and in thickness ranges from twenty to forty feet. At about 1000 feet the tunnel enters en-ters heavy lead ore galena and carbonates carbo-nates running well above SI 00 per ton. Hundreds of tons were shipped last summer sum-mer to the Salt Lake valley smelters. The tunnel is now in close to 2200 feet, and discloses the great deposits continuing continu-ing westerly in ful strength and value. The Marysvale mining region lo the west and southwest is that of bedded contacts associated with eruptive dikes, and "flows" from the higher altitudes, and the Deer Trail is a well-defined "hunch" lo cease "gophering" in the treacherous eruptive Hows and do rhoir exploration work in tiie contact r. Another of the old-time properties is the Monte del Rev. situated' some two miles south of the Deer Trail, and where geological conditions are practically identical. iden-tical. After years of neglect, Xew York men a re systematically opening that old and one-time producer of "picture" rock in surprising quantity. The Great Western. A corporation of local irfen is developing devel-oping the Great "Western, situated on the north side of Bullion canyon, some seven miles westerly from Marysvale. During the more than fortv years since Henry "W. Lawrence of Salt Lake City patented the Great "Western, spasmodic efforts, under options, have been made to open bodies of shipping ore. But not until Max Krotki. with his local backing, began work last spring, has any serious effort been made to locale the "blind lead." When last Visited by the writer, a few weeks since, an incline and crosscut revealed re-vealed a vein fully twelve feet wide, and carrving sample values of S12 1 per ton in lead, copper, gold and silver. From the best of the ore assorted shipments have been regularly made to the Salt Lake vallev smelters. Following the present pres-ent steep dip of tltp vein, about 300 feet more in depth will put the development down to. or verv close to. the bedded contact con-tact where, bv every dynamic law of geology as aoplied to veifc forming, Mr. Krotki' and his associates should encounter encoun-ter a bonanza. v Space limit forbids a ?omplete enumeration enumer-ation of the other active purely melal- tearing properties. Utah's Potash Industry. j On t lie east, west and north isolated veins and cores of a! unite the potash -aluminum ore form an irregular arc fully thirty miles in length on three sides of the Marvsvale valley. The hundreds of millions of tons of available potash-aluminum potash-aluminum ore in this vicinity, and the urgent demand for domestic potash, and the increasing demand for aluminum, will vet make Utah famous as the very nearly $oe producer of that rare combination of necessities called alunile. Excepting the great Mineral Products alunite lodes there are severad parallel j outcrops, each averaging fully twenty feet wide one of which has been proved bv the extraction of thousands of tons of aiunite to be a fissure vein, and the Florence Flor-ence vein, as yet unexplored. The ore bodies appear to be gigantic cores within rhyolite, or altered rhyolite cores surrounded sur-rounded bv other eruptives. or are ac-companied'bv ac-companied'bv dikes of rhyolite. as at the Mineral Products mines in Cottonwood canyon, and are generally associated with iron "blossom," and in other instances with a hard, silk-ions capping. Alunite ranges in color from pink through all the "various tints of purple, bluish, cream and grav to snow white, and is a kind of spar. " (The, foregoing details are given as a guide for prospectors in other parts of the Rockies.) In every instance rhyolite rhyo-lite is near by, and doubtless is the deep, underlying formation from which the potash pot-ash and aluminum atoms were collected i by hot solutions and transported to the 'open fissures and cores the latter hav-i hav-i ing been gigantic hot springs engaged in altering the mass and the deposition of potash -aluminum ore. The Ma-'vsvale Peak region, ten miles easterly from the D. & R. railway station sta-tion here, bears unmistakable evidence of being a gigantic core of potash-aluminum ore, with three great spurs radiating from a common center. The Santa Cruz and other vast outcrops in the Antelope range, four or five miles northerly from Marysvale, Marys-vale, are of the core class of deposits. Inexhaustible Supply. As an illustration of the practically inexhaustible in-exhaustible supply of a I unite ore in this vicinity, a description of the Copper Butte, a typical deposit in Deer Creek cauvon, three miles westerly from the ; D. & U. G. railway in Sevier canyon, or. as the crow flies about seven miles i northwest of Marysvale. will be of inter-j I est. The deposit is an irregular core. ' full 1"00 feet in diameter, once a colossal hot spring, containing a surprisingly uniform uni-form grade of potash-aluminum ore of workable value in potash, exclusive of the : aluminum content. The statement that 1 the Copper Butte ore. and it is but an j example of the medium grade ore of this .locality, is easily worth 100 per ton .in the "quarry," may seem some w ha t I staggering, but is an easily demonstrated j fact. l7-"ractions aside, t heoret h-ally. alu-1 alu-1 n i te contains per cents as follow : W'n -ter. UJ: sulphuric acid, 'AH: pcfash, 10, and alumina. 35: of the alumina t -vo-iifihs are aluminum, (ft is not. infrequent lhat I he alumina content runs to be I ter than 40 per cent, at tiie expense, of course, of the other eonlenls.) ignoring the potash pot-ash content, which in th" future will be a by-product, thv aluminum alone will 'be, 'considered. Reducing Hie alumina to 30 per cent, a ton of alunlt e will yield 11-10 pounds of metal (aluminum ! which, at present market value, is wr rth ;")0 cents prr pound, and we have $12(1 per ion as Ihe value. Allowing $20 per ton for extraction, ex-traction, the above statement is nitiieh' conservative. Prior to the burning of ! the Mineral Products plant a fw weeks 'since, fully 7.r00 tens of alunile had hr-cn 1 converted into potash a nd pure alnmiirj. 1 The latter, as it emerges from ihe plant, is one-half aluminum, and there are close 1 to :2ij0it ions now on the "tailings" dump, , worth ?".0() per ten! Extracting the Potash. The process of ex I vac I hi g the potash from aiunite. as worked out by Howard V. Chapped, tiie cheniis' - !re;iu.-nt of ihe Mineral products corporation, is not unlike un-like that of extract ing zd and silver i from sulphide ore. The alunite is crushed i and rolled to a line powder, then passed through a revolving kiln, where the moisture mois-ture and sulphuric acid are expelled. Water Wa-ter is then used In dissolve the polasi: sal'-. when eva pora t h m and rcfinim compir tes t he proc-sc. Tiie Florence print, within te corpn-rile corpn-rile limits of Marysvale, merely rushes anil desulphurizes the aiuniie, thur. rc-lcasmir rc-lcasmir the potash i'm',c7;t. A a hirji-grad hirji-grad fertilizer it brings close to ?G0 per (ton f.o. b. The J 'it; sh'.ire-Fta h P- da sh rompa nv, oper.uin-; tif-ar Belknap sUl.iou m Sevier canvon. after build-in.' a spur oi the L. & Ft. (.;. jicm?H tic- river and dnin- a lot of other preliminary work, has suspended sus-pended operations temporarily, ii is believed. be-lieved. There is quite a lol of c .-')( r e that the Puited ap. Pn, filing & Rffinmc; company lias pur' lei sed some good aKnite ;.-,f that F'o- 'or "a n. until re- l"en'h" in the employ of ihe -nvr m n en t , lis in charge of preliminary work. Enterprise of Interest. ! Another enterprise 'hat heinr i ? a teheri with keen inte rf st is t ha ' of VY;i;-.am lh-oper aj.fi a ,-oeia l r-s of X'w York. So-ne i wo fiid a ha I f vefirp a L-0 Mr. i fo-'p r m-' arc: la rge aiunite ho'.d -n it':- hi i , '" ?da rys Peak eon ntrv. ,-, r,,j did a lot of work. IV-cen iiy ii,- a rid his ssn.-:a;es o-;r- 1 -ed ihe Santa Crux a' m'i'- group, and are no.v --r.dhig' o i; .-irlo- is to i heir poi a.-h anil a ; Tr":r or.. N. ' u his re--en i v: .t y, p f f- valuable acids, in addition to potash, will' be extracted from alunite. In fact, like i lie paikers, who utilize all of t'ne pig but Us si ucal, Mr. I loop--r's pla n is to save every atom of alunite trans form ing the "waste" into lire hrkks. A mill of large capacity, to 1 e erected near i he railway station here, to work the Marysvale Peak ccpos its. is a pro ha lull ly ol the near future. Such is the splendid industry that now, looms above Utah's eastern horizon an industry that has been quietly developing develop-ing and gathering momentum since Howard How-ard K. Chapped built the first plant of its kind in the world. It was not an experiment, ex-periment, because Mr. Chapped, backed by unlimited capital, knew exactly what , his mill would do before a wiieel began turning, and with hardly a hitch of any hir.d potash began pouring out of the refining department. Mr Clianpell is now on the ground, supervising the rebuilding re-building of 1 he burned Mineral Prcducts plant. It will be larger than the ot her. and will be a unit of a verv extensive mill, with the production of aluminum as one of the objectives. The entrance here of the Southern I'tah Power company will be a great aid in the reduction of ores. the Peer Trail mill having been connected up for a supply .of eleefj-ie power. All of central-southern Utah has felt the Impulse of the prosperity that has come from the inauguration ot the newest industry. Alunite has become a word to be conjured with a synonym for unlimited unlim-ited prosperity during centuries to come. |
