The Richest Mine in the World

Just after the Civil War in the U. S., the Montreal Mining Co. sold a tiny one-acre island in Lake Superior to Alexander H. Sibley. Even though a geologist had found veins of quartz suggesting that silver or gold might be present, the company thought that mining it would not be profitable and was probably impossible.

Sibley had other ideas. He began a shaft that indeed yielded a rich deposit of silver. He formed a company that built a wooden sea wall around the island, pumped out the water and continued to dig. Soon it became apparent that Sibley had bought himself the richest silver mine ever discovered.

He placed advertisements in the newspapers of nearby cities seeking workers for his new mine. He gave few other details. When potential employees arrived they found huge coal-powered pumps working overtime to keep the waters of Lake Superior from flooding into the mineshaft. Many applicants left. Some stayed, and in the next fourteen years they dug down more than a thousand feet and extracted more silver than had ever been taken from a single mine. Every day miners would go down twelve hundred feet beneath the waters of Lake Superior and pray that the pumps would not fail.

By 1884 it looked as though the mine might be playing out. Work was temporarily stopped until another three-thousand-dollar coal shipment could arrive to feed the hungry pumps. (Today that amount of coal would be worth about $100,000.) A winter storm on the lake bound the ship in frozen ice, and the coal never arrived. Water flooded the mine and in 1884 work was never resumed.

The miners had doubled the island’s surface by backfilling the sea wall with mine tailings. Nature has reclaimed that land, but one can still see just below the water’s surface the mouths of the two shafts they dug. Now the tiny island and the town that bears its name have returned to quiet obscurity. It is a beautiful place where we tourists drop into the hundred-year-old general store, delight in one of their delicious cinnamon buns, sip coffee and wonder. What if . . .Read more