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1156

Cerro Gordo, VB, SW, 85 Pound Silver-Lead Ingot, c. 1873

Currency:USD Category:Coins & Paper Money / Ingots Start Price:2,000.00 USD Estimated At:4,000.00 - 8,000.00 USD
Cerro Gordo, VB, SW, 85 Pound Silver-Lead Ingot, c. 1873
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The 'V B' most assuredly belongs to Victor Beaudry, the co-owner of the Union and Swansea mines. By 1866, Victor Beaudry, a French Canadian and merchant at Fort Independence in Owens Valley, realized there were opportunities at the Cerro Gordo mining camp. He opened a general store on the mountain. He began acquiring mining properties by lending miners money and, when they couldn't pay, he would get their claim(s). By April of 1868 he had acquired some of the richest claims on the hill, the Union, the San Lucas, the San Felipe, etc. Cerro Gordo was in full production by 1868 after an influx of cash by Mortimer Belshaw and Victor Beaudry, who both built large scale smelters at Cerro Gordo, completed in 1868. Belshaw was a successful assayer in Fiddletown, California in the heart of the Mother Lode Country. Beaudry was a prominent Los Angeles businessman. Beaudry had arranged with Pierre Desormeaux to build an ore furnace to smelt the silver-lead ore. Although his furnace was less effective than the Belshaw furnace, there was more than enough ore to go around! The Swansea mine was in full production by 1873. That year, the average daily product of the smelters at Cerro Gordo was about 140 to 148 bars per day weighing 83 pounds each. That year, Beaudry's furnace had 12,000 bars waiting for shipment over and above what they could normally ship. In 1873 alone, Beaudry's furnace produced 4,530 bars in the month of May-June, a record for the district at the time. "Some 20,000 pigs are out waiting transportation" cited an article in the Mining and Scientific Press in April, 1873. The "pigs" consisted of "argentiferous galena, in bars." (The term "pig" was coined because of the style of bullion mould that allowed for the rendering of handles on each end of an approximate two foot long ingot. The handles were called "ears", and the pig nomenclature came because of the heavy weight.) The process of pouring the bullion was rather crude. Large crucibles were used at the furnaces, and the impurities floating at the top of the molten metal were removed first. "When this scum is removed, the lead is dipped with an iron ladle and poured into iron moulds, forming pigs, 83 pounds in weight. This sized furnace ages 80 such pigs in 24 hours when the furnaces are running well."


Overview of Cerro Gordo Ingots (Lots 1156 and 1157)

These rare ingots were a classic discovery about 40 years ago. A gentleman found about 11 Cerro Gordo ingots on the surface of Owens Lake after it first dried up, using a metal detector. There were about 4 different company names stamped into the bars using embossed moulds similar to ones in this section of the sale. The bars have since been disbursed to museums and collections.
Cerro Gordo is a mining camp tucked in the Inyo range at an elevation of about 8500 feet. In an article in the Mining and Scientific Press in 1874, the author described it thus: “Cerro Gordo is 8250 feet above the level of the sea. The winter has been very severe, not having thawed for eighty days. Shocks of earthquakes are very frequent but do little or no damage.” The mining camp itself got its start in the late 1860’s, after many prospectors had discovered silver ores there in the early 1860’s. A number of the early mines were worked by Mexicans, and there is a good chance the property as a whole was discovered by Mexican miners before 1860.

Cerro Gordo was in full production by 1868 after an influx of cash by Mortimer Belshaw and Victor Beaudry, who both built large scale smelters at Cerro Gordo, completed in 1868. Belshaw was a successful assayer in Fiddletown, California in the heart of the Mother Lode Country. Beaudry was a prominent Los Angeles business man. Belshaw’s furnace was the first completed. It was announced that “On March 17 M. E. Belshaw and E. Jordan started the first lead-silver smelter on the Pacific Coast, running ever since.” It was further reported that more than 10,000 tons of silver-lead had been shipped to Selby, the private precious metals smelter and refiner located on the east side of San Francisco Bay, about 20 miles north of Oakland.

The two new smelters were processing lead-silver ores from Cerro Gordo’s largest mines, the Union and the Ignacio. Production was so large that the smelters couldn’t keep up. A competitor company with a mine right next door to the Union built a new smelter at the foot of the mountains on the north shore of Owens Lake, a massive lake filling a fertile valley about twenty five miles long and ten miles wide. The competing company was the Owens Lake Silver Lead Company, formed in 1870 by New York capitalists. They built the new smelter at Swansea.

At one time, the base bullion produced by the various furnaces at Cerro Gordo and Swansea was about 12.5 tons per day per smelter for the three smelters. The bullion from the Union and San Ignacio was worth about $115 in silver and $90 in lead per ton. It was reported that the lead paid the cost of transportation to San Francisco, and the smelting and refining cost $25 per ton leaving a profit of about $90 per ton. The cost of mining was not included in the information.

City: Cerro GordoCounty: Inyo CountyState: CADate:
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