Silver City, California: The Camp the Snow Built

01Six Miles Short of the Valley

That autumn, Visalia's merchants raised $3,000 to cut a trail up the East Fork toward the high country, and John Meadows led the crew. Early snow caught the men about six miles below the valley. They built shelters where they stopped and called the place Silver City.

Others had used the canyon long before them. The Wukchumni people had hunted and foraged along the upper Kaweah for generations. In 1856 Hale Tharp, a Tulare Valley cattleman, homesteaded the high country and summered his stock in its meadows, away from the valley heat. His brother-in-law John Swanson built a dwelling nearby in 1858. Four years later Harry "Parole" O'Farrell, the first visitor of European descent, came up and built a summer settlement at Harry's Bend.

02The White Chief and the Spirit

The strike came from Porterville. In August 1873 a party of prospectors led by James Abraham Crabtree located the White Chief lode. On September 4, six men signed the bylaws of the Mineral King Mining District. One of them, Sewell Langdon Goodhue, was a New Hampshire farmer's son who had been teaching school in Yuba County at twenty. Another, Marcus Dietrich Sinn, would never again reach the professional height of that signing.

The Crabtree family held séances. In 1911 John Crabtree said a spirit had visited the brothers and shown them where to dig, and in one telling the spirit was a dead Indian. John himself located no claim on the White Chief that year. The Mineral King Preservation Society calls the tale the "Mineral King creation myth."

Miners came over the snow on snowshoes as early as March 1874. By June 1, Silver City held fifty or sixty people, and a school was announced to open there around the fifteenth. Farther up in the district that August, J.P. Ford gave a party in what the Visalia Times called his "snug, commodious dwelling-house in the heart of the district." Enough guests turned out to dance a double quadrille. By 1877 women were arriving in numbers.

The ore was poor from the start. Between 1876 and 1878 the New England Tunnel and Smelting Company produced nothing that paid, and some of Silver City's people drifted away. The company tried to push a road from Red Hill down to the river and up the canyon's north side. The work went so slowly that the company gave it up, and the finished stretch became known as the Mule Trail. Prospectors kept filing anyway: 43 claims in 1877, the year mail delivery began in the district.

03Fowler's Toll Road

Tom Fowler, a Tulare County rancher and politician, bought the Empire Mine from O'Farrell in 1879 and organized the Empire Gold and Silver Mining Company. He then bought a stamp mill in Grass Valley, which left him with heavy machinery and no road to carry it.

The Mineral King Wagon and Toll Road Company started work that March. Thomas C. and John W. Crowley directed 125 men, who built 25 miles of road in five months for $30,000. When it was done in August, Fowler was the first to drive its full length. Much of today's Mineral King Road follows that grade.

Within months, fifteen or twenty teamsters petitioned the county supervisors to repair the county's section. The supervisors went up to inspect it and found it "in a rather unserviceable condition and requiring a considerable sum of money to put in repair." The county had no such sum, and the toll company was soon in financial trouble of its own. In 1882 the road passed to the toll-gate keeper, Robert McKee, in place of the salary he was owed. Two years later he sold it to Tulare County for $1,573.

04What Happened to Silver City?

The Empire's tramway and ten-stamp mill ran briefly "with poor success," and Fowler lost his fortune on them. Only spasmodic mining followed. By the mid-1880s the rush was over, and no significant tonnage was ever shipped.

Silver City lived on summer visitors instead. With a wagon road to the head of the valley, Central Valley families could climb out of the triple-digit heat into the pines, and cabin leases began appearing in the 1890s. The upper road had to be reopened every spring. The Alles family at Atwell Mill and the Crowley family of the Mineral King Resort gave time and money to the work, and in the 1890s Army troops helped too. Up at Mineral King, slides in 1906 destroyed most of the old mining structures. By the 1920s Silver City was one of three private cabin communities on the upper road, with Cabin Cove and Beulah, and summer houses went up piecemeal until 1942.

On September 19, 1966, Walt Disney Productions announced a ski resort for Mineral King. It would have 27 lifts and capacity for two million visitors a year, served by an all-weather highway in place of the old toll road. The Sierra Club sued. Sierra Club v. Morton reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 and became a landmark case on environmental standing. Disney eventually withdrew. In 1978 Congress added Mineral King to Sequoia National Park, and Silver City's cabins were grandfathered in as private inholdings.

05What Remains of Silver City Today

The silver boom left no headframes or mill foundations at Silver City. What survives is the road and the lots platted along it: 58 fee-simple parcels, 39 of them built on, where board-and-batten cabins with stone chimneys cling to the hillside above the East Fork. The cabin lanes are private. The Mineral King Road Cultural Landscape was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003 for its buildings from 1915 to 1942, but its boundary stops short of Silver City's inholding.

At mile 21, the Silver City Mountain Resort runs the only services on the road. It has rental cabins, a small store, and a restaurant known for homemade pies and bread.

The road opens around Memorial Day and closes with the first heavy snow, usually in late October or November. It is narrow and unpaved in its upper reaches, and it is closed to trailers and large RVs. It climbs roughly 6,000 feet in 25 miles, and the Park Service tells drivers to allow ninety minutes each way from Highway 198. In winter the cabins sit under several feet of snow with their shutters fastened, and the road is gated below. On its water-system paperwork, the federal government lists Silver City as a "transient non-community."