Vintage 1940s Crystal Lead Mines Stock Certificate ⛏️ Idaho WWII Mining History, Wallace Coeur d'Alene

What Was Crystal Lead Mines? ⛏️ A Stock Certificate That Actually Did Its Job

Size: 12" x 8" ~ Issued and cancelled. They vary a little one to the next.

These are issued and cancelled stock certificates for the Crystal Lead Mines Company, incorporated under the laws of Idaho and headquartered at Wallace, Idaho. The design is a real showpiece. A wide gold ornamental border runs the whole way around, and three vignettes cross the top: miners loading an ore car underground, a bird's-eye view of a mining district with smoke rising off the hillside, and miners working a rock face with a pick and a drill. Right under them the company name runs across a gray band in big bold Old English lettering, that heavy old blackletter type, and it turns up again down in the wording of the certificate. I love that lettering. It's a big part of why the sheet looks so serious. An embossed gold foil seal anchors the lower left, reading CRYSTAL LEAD MINES COMPANY / INCORPORATED / SEAL / 1931 / WALLACE, IDAHO. The company authorized 1,500,000 shares at a par value of 10 cents each. Every certificate was filled out, signed by the Secretary and the President, and cancelled when the shares changed hands. Some still have the left-hand transfer stub attached, the counterfoil that recorded who the shares went to. That's usually the first thing to go missing, so I always like seeing it.

🏔️ The Mine on Cottonwood Creek

The Crystal Lead mine sat on Cottonwood Creek, a little tributary of the West Fork of Eagle Creek, about six miles north of Murray, Idaho, in the Eagle mining district of Shoshone County. The company's own papers survive at the University of Idaho Library's Special Collections: a stockholders' and directors' minute book running 1914 to 1927, plus the 1931 meeting minutes, proxies and a director's oath. So the company was around well before the 1931 on its seal.

The ore came later, and it came with the war. In 1942 the War Production Board's Premium Price Plan started paying a premium for lead, copper and zinc mined above a mine's quota, because the country needed every pound it could dig. The U.S. Geological Survey's 1956 report on the Murray area records that the Crystal Lead mine produced from 1943 to 1947 and again in 1951: 18,863 ounces of silver, 18,600 pounds of copper, 1,443,000 pounds of lead and 117,600 pounds of zinc. For those years it was the only producing mine in the Idaho side of the Eagle district. Underground it ran about 5,000 feet of drifts and crosscuts on four main levels and three intermediate ones, all worked by lessors. The galena and sphalerite came out of a single steep ore shoot. That's WWII mining history you can hang on the wall.

🤠 Murray, Eagle City and Wyatt Earp

The creeks around this mine have a wild history. Rich gold placers turned up along Prichard and Eagle Creeks in the early 1880s, and by 1883 a rush was on. Eagle City, where Eagle Creek meets Prichard Creek, was a bustling camp by May 1884. Then the richer ground turned up higher on the creek, and everybody moved to the new town of Murray, named for a miner, George Murray.

Wyatt Earp was part of that stampede. In early 1884, a couple of years after Tombstone, he came up with his wife Josie and his brothers Jim and Warren. The Earps bought a circus tent 45 feet high and 50 feet across for $2,250 and opened it as a dance hall in Eagle City. Later they ran the White Elephant Saloon, which advertised itself in the Coeur d'Alene Weekly as "the largest and finest saloon in the Coeur d'Alenes." The gold faded fast. In 1885 rich lead and silver turned up on the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River, and the district's future went with it. That's the lead-silver country Crystal Lead was chasing.

🏙️ Wallace, Idaho, the Silver Capital

Wallace, the town printed on every one of these certificates, takes its name from Colonel William R. Wallace, who settled there in 1884. The railroad arrived two years later. After an 1890 fire the wooden downtown was rebuilt in brick, and most of it is still standing. Nearly every building downtown is on the National Register of Historic Places. The Big Burn of 1910, the largest wildfire in American history, took about a third of the town. Shoshone County has produced around 1.2 billion ounces of silver since 1884, more than anywhere else in the United States, which is why Wallace calls itself the Silver Capital of the World. It has even declared itself the Center of the Universe, and it's a small enough town to get away with it. Old-timers around Wallace will tell you the whole town ran on mining money, and that for every big mine there were a dozen little companies like this one selling shares on hope and a good vein.

🏢 Day Mines, and What Came After

Crystal Lead's life as its own company ended on October 1, 1947. That's the day Day Mines, Inc. came into being as a new Idaho corporation, voted in by the shareholders of twelve separate Silver Valley mining companies, Crystal Lead among them. So these certificates were issued somewhere between the 1931 seal and that 1947 merger. Day Mines of Wallace owned the Crystal Lead property from then on, and it also owned the original Hercules mine. On October 21, 1981, Hecla Mining bought Day Mines for $105.8 million in stock, and that deal made Hecla the largest silver mining company in the United States. A long road from a 10-cent share on Cottonwood Creek.

📜 Who Printed It

Down in the lower-left corner of the border is a small imprint reading © GOES 91. That's the Goes Lithographing Company of Chicago, founded in 1879 by Charles B. Goes. Goes sold its certificate designs by number all over the country, and 91 is the number of this one. It isn't a year. The company's own name and details went in at the printer, and the officers filled in the rest by hand at Wallace.