Frisco: The Story of Utah's Gomorrah
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National -- General Interest
HISTORY
Feature
Frisco: The Story of Utah’s Gomorrah
By Gode Davis
Old West Magazine - - Winter 1988
We soon passed Frisco, [Utah] -- a little abandoned skeleton of a town with false fronts to the stores, and with decayed
wooden sides propped up -- a worn out mining town. We past it and left the lizards rustling in the dead grass.” So remarked travelers
Robert E. Knowlden and William Onions after driving by Frisco's daylit remains in their Packard Roadster on August 25, 1921.
As I write this sixty-seven years later, even less remains of Frisco, a ghost town on Utah's southwest edge. The former town's nearest
neighbor is Milford (population 1,275), which is seventeen miles southeast on Utah Highway 21. Arid alkali hills harboring rattlers and
rabbits and dotted with long abandoned mine shafts are mostly what's in between.
But during the late 1870s and into the 1880s, the town was as wild a place as was ever in the West, a hell-raising mining town
reminiscent only of San Francisco’s infamous Barbary Coast district and a few places more.
Frisco first staked its claim to history in the summer of 1875. In early June, two veteran prospectors, Jim Ryan and Sam Hawkes,
headed east from Pioche, Nevada, with a trio of fresh pack mules. The pair skirted the southern slopes of the Needle Range, then
headed north into San Francisco Mountain country.
It was scrub brush and desert land they were passing through, but at Squaw Springs, there was a water hole, and the prospectors
stopped to give their pack beasts a nibble of real grass around the hole's edges. The hole had cool water, but tasted of alkali. Since
Ryan and Hawkes had brought provisions along and carried ample water, they decided to prospect the area leisurely for a few days -without luck.
As a last-minute impulse before moving on, the pair decided to take one last whack at a small, light-colored outcrop located about a
mile from the spring.
Hawkes struck the fateful blow. When the
limestone cleaved, it shone silver-glossy
grey, streaked in galena. The prospectors
again made camp, then blasted a ground
hole in search of more silver. The vein got
thicker, and at a depth of twenty-five feet,
the veteran diggers realized their highgrade find was stuff for selling. By
September, Ryan and Hawkes had retired
from the mining business, gotten back to
prospecting, and between them they were
$25,000 richer.
The new owners, Frank Horn and John
Teasley, sank the twenty-five-foot shaft to
a depth of nearly 300 feet. The vein held.
This mine, called the Horn Silver, soon
produced nearly $2 million in valuable ore.
But by 1877, Horn and Teasley decided
that the mine was about played out, and
let out word that it was again for sale.
By this time, the town of Frisco, which had
grown up around the mine, was a tangled
mess of camps. Some lay near the mine,
and the rest fringed Mount San Francisco,
a local peak (elevation 9,725 feet). The
peak later was renamed Frisco Peak, after the town. Early Frisco was home for about 350 hardy souls, mostly miners.
Down-on-his-luck financier Jay Cooke, newly impoverished and being pursued by hordes of creditors, bought the Horn Silver Mine for
five million dollars in 1878. The purchase price was paid with a little cash and a lot of loans and promises. But when Cooke decided
to go for broke, neither he nor the sellers were aware that the Horn Silver was actually far from depleted and would yield an
additional twenty million dollars in king silver before its producing days were finally over in 1913.
Unbeknownst to most, Cooke also had an ace in the hole -- a friendly relationship with the Mormon Church. At Cooke's urging, church
leaders soon were persuaded to extend their Salt Lake-Provo line (the Utah Southern 200 miles south to Milford, from there
completing the seventeen mile link to Cooke's silver mine.
Cooke saw the advantage of a railroad that could haul relatively low-grade ore from his Frisco mine to smelters and mills in Salt Lake;
early leaders of the growing Mormon Church doubtless sensed the promise of needed income. A scant few months later, church leaders
must have been writhing in spiritual agony as they considered the Gomorrah to the south which they had helped to create.
With the railroad securely in place, Frisco's population exploded in a matter of weeks to 3,000 men, women, and children. Between
1880 and 1885, Frisco had more than 6,000 inhabitants at any given time, despite much lower United States Census estimates. The
town was always filling and emptying with transients of every description -- people who were next to impossible for census-takers to
keep track of. This was Frisco's heyday, and the town made the most of it.
Cooke was realizing values of up to $100 per ton on his extracted silver ore; other mines like the Carbonate, Rattler, Golden Reef,
and Grampion were struck, each having its own smelter and producing an aggregate fortune of close to $60 million in copper, gold,
lead, and zinc ores by 1885. Charcoal-fired kilns were built to serve the smelters, using cedar, dwarf pine, mountain mahogany, and
even sagebrush for fuel.
Frisco was also becoming a genuine "civilized" town, with houses and shops built on all usable, level sites and on the adjacent
hillsides. Dozens of general and
specialty stores were thriving. A
hotel with a basement dance hall
also served for town meetings,
political rallies, and church services.
Some fifty to eighty children
regularly attended school in Frisco's
modest two-room schoolhouse, and
a newspaper established in 1881,
the Frisco Times, seldom failed to
go to press. Frisco's small,
improvised hospital was often
chaotic, as most miners suffered
from severe lung congestion caused
by high temperatures, choking dust,
and relentless dawn-to-dusk shifts.
Despite the respectable facade, as
the town's wealth and reputation
grew, mining merchants and
drifters of all sorts continued to pour into town. Frisco itself drifted towards being a wild, lawless place featuring harsh liquor, gaming,
and prostitution suited to even the most jaded tastes.
One Federal observer, D.B. Huntley, wrote in a government report in 1880 that Frisco's drinking water was "very bad and scarce,"
which was one legitimate excuse for the town's having twenty-three saloons. Wrote contemporary Frisco resident Ed Dillon, a journalkeeping storekeeper who lived there from 1878 to 1887, "We need plenty of drinking establishments here so folks can find a way to
wash down their spit." Some of Frisco's water supplies had entered town from Squaw Spring and other local natural springs, but when
they ran dry in 1881, Frisco's water was simply freighted in from Salt Lake City with other essential supplies and sold door to door.
Most of the town's saloons doubled as brothels. These dens of vice were noted for their crooked gaming tables, marked decks, lousy
whiskey, and sexual favors doled out by perfumed tenderloin ladies who solicited on the main floor and dispensed their wares on a
rotating basis to randy clients who lounged in the smoke-filled and musky upstairs rooms. Excerpts from shopkeeper Dillon's journal
provide details about Frisco's lurid entertainment scene. "The saloon whores are pretty things," he writes, "and usually they're full
growed and full bosomed ladies."
But other sexual tastes were accommodated, too. In certain 'sinful' particulars, Frisco might well have rivaled San Francisco's notorious
Barbary Coast district. "The Southside and the Midway kept littler girls and 'peg-boys' in the rear of their establishments," writes
Dillon in reference to Frisco's child prostitutes, some as
young as ten years old.
.
The youngest girls were either imported Oriental slaves or
"pretty waiter girls" who were Spanish speaking or stolen
from Indian tribes. Some spillover 'trade' also came to
Frisco via the larger San Francisco emporiums. Most of
the boys used for sexual purposes (either in San
Francisco's infamous "peg-houses" or in Frisco's) were
runaways who had traveled West in search of adventure
and the possibility of striking it rich in a boomtown. In
some of Frisco's low, vicious dives, children of both sexes
(as well as women) were sometimes made to perform
lewd dances for the customers' pleasure.
As Sodom-like as Frisco may have been, the town's
violent aspects were even more morbidly dangerous. The
worst time was summer when daytime temperatures
above ground might creep above 110 degrees in the
shade. Temperatures in direct sunlight and in the mines
could be twenty degrees higher. Evening temperatures
"cooled" to eighty-five or ninety degrees.
In this vicious environment of blazing summer heat and a
volatile human stew of often alcoholic, short-fused miners,
rowdies, gambling sharks, and errant gunslingers, it was
inevitable for tempers to flare and fights to broil. Ghost town authority Nell Murbarger writes that "a dead wagon cruised the streets of
Frisco each morning in quest of human meat killed during the preceding night" and that the search was "seldom in vain." Dillon and
other contemporaries reported that Frisco would have been a more sizable town if so many citizens hadn't murdered each other.
Before long, Frisco's two morticians became more essential to the town's welfare than its physicians.
But the situation changed. In 1884, several of Frisco's few upright citizens hired reformed quick-draw artist John T. Pearson from
Pioche, Nevada, to gun down bad hombres and to restore a semblance of law and order to the town. Pearson's idea of law
enforcement was simple: he declared open season on anyone he decided was undesirable. Offenders had a choice -- leave town or
draw. Pearson was always faster than the hard cases who chose to draw. One Denver-based newspaper reporter claimed that Pearson
killed six men in a single day. Within six weeks of Pearson's arrival Frisco had attained respectability.
Cooke's Horn Silver mine was Frisco's heart. For about a decade, from 1875 to 1885, the mine operated with no major disaster. But
in 1885, the mine's luck -- and the town's -- ran out.
One bright spring day, a foreman at the Horn Silver noticed a trembling of the ground beneath him and in the gallows frame and
cable. One crew of miners had come off shift only moments before and left the skip, and the foreman was debating about sending the
next crew down. For some inexplicable reason, the foreman waited, and a few moments later the ground emitted a low rumbling roar,
caving in the mine's entire 900-foot vertical shaft from bottom to top. Because of the foreman's crisp intuition, not a single miner was
caught in the massive cave-in, but the force of the collapse was said by observers to have broken windows a few minutes later in
Milford, seventeen miles away. Since Utah's geology is ideal for occasional earthquakes, however, it is more probable that the mine
cave-in and Milford's broken panes were both due to a moderate local tremor.
The aftermath was pathetic. Most Horn Silver miners packed up and left town immediately after the cave-in. Cooke's mine had been
Frisco's largest employer, so when the Horn crews
left, the town's population was cut by two-thirds.
Other miners were "temporarily" laid off as small
crews set to work drilling the 900 feet of newly
filled shaft. In a vicious cycle, the smelters, charcoal
kilns, and pulp mills went quiet with the smelters
closed, operators of the charcoal ovens went broke,
and woodcutters no longer had a market for their
product.
After a few weeks, Frisco was devastated. The mine
eventually resumed operations, but it was too late -only a handful of miners and families were left
behind to work it. Ed Dillon left Frisco in May 1887,
headed north, and wrote dismally, "Everything's
gone. I can't make a livin' here." The Horn Silver
mine still managed to produce an estimated $10-15
million in silver ore from 1885 to 1913, but the
miners commuted from Milford or stayed in shacks
on the mine property rather than live in town.
By 1895, only desert fauna like rattlesnakes and
lizards still survived in the vacant shacks and stores
which littered Frisco's hillsides. A few dozen
dwellings were yet occupied. Two stores were still
open. But by 1921 when Knowlden and Onions
drove by in their roadster, Frisco was an empty place.
In 1981, I visited Frisco's remains with two companions. The three of us explored every nook of the ghost town. A handful of beehive
shaped charcoal kilns brooded over desolate stone walls. Decrepit railroad grades ran in several directions, but led nowhere. I went to
the town's cemetery, and later walked gingerly into the foundation of what once had been Frisco's main dance hall. Moments later, as
I stood in yet another abandoned shell, a strange vision of roaring saloons and palaces of sin meandered through my brain like so
many sips of bad whiskey. **** END
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