On Sunday, the feature article was on Miners Spring and a broken link to Grabel’s Hole. I had a difficult time trying to locate the article. While most people in region associate mining with Diamond Mountain and Hayden Hill there were other pockets of activity.

In the mid-1870s there was considerable gold mining done just north of Susanville in the vicinity of Round Valley, including nearby Gallatin Peak.  One of those miners, was J.L Grabel. One of the peculiar oddities, is that Grabel never filed a mining claim, yet his activities were reported in the Lassen Advocate. According to folklore,  it was a rich mine, but for reasons unknown became one of those lost mine stories. My grandmother, Lola (Murrer) Tanner (1899-1973) was born and raised in this area. She, too, knew of the story and gave me some clues about the proximity of where it might be located. All these years later, it is have never been something that I have never seriously undertaken to attempt to locate. May be this, is as good as any time to mount an expedition.

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Locally, most people think that all the mining activity was along Diamond Mountain, south of Susanville, However, there was  mining activity to the town’s north. See  Grabel’s hole..

Starting in the 1890s, for some odd reason,  considerable prospecting was done on Antelope Mountain. If one looks closely on Highway 139, one can see small mine tailing piles. At a place call “the spires” there is a small spring. that was a popular rest stop back in the horse and buggy days, to stop and give the horses a rest. Charley Carpenter thought it was the perfect place to call home, and built a small cabin there, while he was search of the next mother lode—hence Miner’s Spring.

In 1907, due to an extremely wet March, there was considerable flooding and erosion, that was bringing to surface gold among other things. This was especially true to places not known gold such as Antelope, Shaffer and Skedaddle Mountains. The local populace had a terrible case of gold fever, but by fall that fever broke, when dashed dreams of a new Comstock was just not in the cards.

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On July 23, 1890 appeared to be  a typical day at Hayden Hill and then it was not. Frank Auble and W.A. Dunbar were working alone in a mine, the name of which I have not been able to ascertain. The two men came up from the mine shaft to prepare dinner and built a fire in the shaft house to sharpen their picks. They then descended back down the mine shaft, but apparently did not take the proper precaution to extinguish the fire. Eventually, the shaft house caught on fire. By the time the others saw it, they rushed to the scene to extinguish it, By that time some of the mine timbers caught fire. Once the fire was out, an attempt was made to go down the shaft to rescue the men. The gas and smoke was overpowering to prevent them. It was determined to obtain a hose from Adin. When attached to a large billow, this forced the air in the mine shaft to circulate. Montgomery Auble was the first to make the descent and at the  forty-foot level found the bodies of Frank, (his brother) and Dunbar both dead of suffocation. Once the bodies were brought to the surface they were taken to Adin where the two men were buried.

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