The Railroad Reaches for Marshall Lake's Mines
Northern Pacific applies for a land patent covering worked mining claims near Marshall Lake, and claim owners prepare to fight.
Miners owning claims in the Marshall Lake district have been apprised that the Northern Pacific Railroad Company has made application to the general land office for a patent on the S½ of SE¼ of Sec. 15-32-45. This land is in the Marshall Lake mining district, and a number of claims on which the assessment work has been kept up for years are included in the land for which the railroad company is making application. Protests are being prepared and a vigorous fight will be made by the owners of claims against the granting of the patent.
Jas. Culberson is up from the district this week, and brought up with him some fine specimens of the ore from the Last Chance, on which he is now working, in company with E. Alger and Harvey McCullough. They have sunk a shaft 141 feet on the Last Chance, and have drifted 40 feet on the ledge. They have a five-foot ledge of sulphide ore with a diorite hanging wall and quartzite foot wall. Assays have not yet been made on the ore, but it looks good to the owners of the claim.
“Protests are being prepared and a vigorous fight will be made by the owners of claims against the granting of the patent.”
Railroads were the great landholding powers of the Northwest, and a patent application could erase years of assessment work by small miners. The same contest—public land, corporate title and local resource claims—still plays out in modern fights over mineral rights and public lands.
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