East Tintic Mining District
The Tintic Mining district is located 60 miles southwest of Salt Lake City at the eastern most edge of the Basin and Range. The district is named for the East Tintic Mountains, which in turn are named for Chief Tintic (1820-1858), a resistance leader of the Timpanogos who retreated to the mountains after losing in battle to the Mormon invasion of his ancestral territory. The region including so-called Utah Lake, Utah Valley and the adjacent Goshen, Tintic, and Cedar Valleys, is the ancestral territory of Timpanogos, Ute, Paiute and Shoshone.
In 1849 Mormon pioneers invaded Timpanogos territory to establish Fort Utah. The Mormon settlers interfered with Indigenous practices of land management in order to establish their own grazing and agricultural practices. They restricted access and caused the decline in resources that local Indigenous groups depended on. Mormon settlers decimated hunting game, diverted water, stole lands, over-fished the lake, and introduced disease. The Mormon strategy, explicitly led by Brigham Young, was to let the Indigenous people starve to death in the second winter following pioneer settlement in the valley.
Timpanogos did everything they could to survive the violent invasion of their lands, but were eventually outnumbered by the Mormons and Federal Officers. After the so-called Tintic War, the Federal Government intervened and removed any remaining Indigenous people from their homeland in the valley. Tintic retreated to the mountains and was never captured. Mormons abducted his only daughter after his death in 1858. She would have been 12 years old when the first prospectors laid claims in the so-called Tintic Mining District.
Established in 1869, the district is the second most productive mining district in Utah. Supposedly, a man named George Rust found silver in the East Tintic Mountains. The historic record of Rust’s initial find is scant. Most accounts refer to his “discovery” as accidental, but there are several historic records that note he was prospecting known Indigenous mining sources. Activity in the district has varied, but it has been in production at some level since 1869 to the present.
In 1879 the United States Geological Survey (USGS) was established as a government agency in the United States Department of the Interior. Today, the center of activity for the USGS continues to be the surveying and mapping of ‘resources’. The USGS first published Special Folio 65 on the Tintic District in 1900, following with Professional Paper 107 in 1919. Since these two initial reports, there have been numerous surveys and professional papers describing the research, geology, and “productivity” of the district.
In Tintic Folio 65, geologist George Otis Smith, writes a detailed speculation of the geological formation of the Tintic Mountains in four major phases. It begins with Paleozoic sedimentation in a deep ancient sea 541-252 million years ago, followed by uplift and erosion in the Mesozoic 252-65 million years ago. The mountain range was “rejuvenated” by volcanic activity as Tertiary rhyolitic lavas were followed by andesitic flows 66-2.6 million years ago. Finally, alluvial and lacustrine deposits were eroded during the Pleistocene 2.6 million - 11,700 years ago.
All of this geologic activity moved and shifted elements in various strata and formations to create the precious “commodities” later sought by ambitious miners, including iron ore. The iron, which originated in ancient stars across the universe, was exploded in supernova to dust that formed the earth 4.5 billion years ago. This original iron, as well as additional space iron our planet picks up from the surrounding universe, is a critical element to life on our planet in what scientists refer to as the “Iron Cycle’. This iron formed pyrite in the Tintic Mountains which slowly combined with oxygen in the rising ground water to create iron oxides: limonite, hematite, and goethite. Today, sage brush and juniper cover an entire mountain of Ochre, born of stellar corpses and assembled over millions of years.
REFERENCES
Alegado, Rosana and Nicole King. Bacterial Influences on Animal Origins. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology, 6(11), a016162 (2014): https://doi.org/10.1101/cshperspect.a016162.
Creque, Jeffrey. "An Ecological History of Tintic Valley, Juab County, Utah.” All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, 6477 (1996): https://doi.org/10.26076/14ca-eee3.
"Did Bacteria Spark Evolution of Multicellular Life?.” University of California - Berkeley. ScienceDaily. (2012): www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121024101758.htm.
Frey, Perry and George Reed. “The Ubiquity of Iron.” ACS Chemical Biology 7, no. 9, 1477–81 (2012): https://doi.org/10.1021/cb300323q.
Hannah, J.L., and Alec Macbeth. “Magmatic History of the East Tintic Mountains, Utah.” Report. Open-File Report, USGS Publications Warehouse (1990): https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr9095.
Lindgren, Waldemar, G. F. Loughlin, and V. C. Heikes. “Geology and Ore Deposits of the Tintic Mining District, Utah.” Report. Professional Paper 107, USGS Publications Warehouse (1919): https://doi.org/10.3133/pp107.
Moore, Daniel, Jeffrey Keith, Eric Christiansen, Choon-Sik Kim, David Tingey, Stephen Nelson and Douglas Flamm. “Petrogenesis of the Oligocene East Tintic Volcanic Field, Utah.” (2007):
Morris, H. T., Thomas Seward Lovering, A.P. Mogensen, W.M. Shepard, L.I. Perry, and S. M. Smith. “General Geology and Mines of the East Tintic Mining District, Utah and Juab Counties, Utah, with Sections on the Geology of the Burgin Mine and the Geology of the Trixie Mine.” Report. Professional Paper, USGS Publications Warehouse (1979): https://doi.org/10.3133/pp1024.
Notarianni, Philip F.. Faith, Hope, & Prosperity: The Tintic Mining District. United States: Tintic Historical Society, 1982.
Notarianni, Philip F. “Tintic Mining District.” In From the Ground Up: A History of Mining in Utah, edited by Colleen Whitley, 342–58. University Press of Colorado. (2006): https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt4cgn2r.21.
Ronald W. Walker. “The Tintic War of 1856: A Study of Several Conflicts.” Journal of Mormon History 42, no. 3, 35–68. (2016): https://doi.org/10.5406/jmormhist.42.3.0035.
Schirrmeister, Bettina, Patricia Sanchez-Baracaldo, and David Wacey. “Cyanobacterial Evolution During The Precambrian.” International Journal of Astrobiology, 15(3), 187-204 (2016): doi:10.1017/S1473550415000579
Smith, George Otis, George Warren Tower Jr., and Samuel Franklin Emmons. “Tintic Special Folio, Utah.” Report. Folios of the Geologic Atlas, USGS Publications Warehouse (1900): https://doi.org/10.3133/gf65.