Missouri's iron Mountain obtained world wide fame. Missouri's Silver Mountain was for some years the basis of great hopes.

Missouri's Tin Mountain is only an historic mystery. Silver Mountain's friends believed it would surpass Iron Mountain as a wealth producer.  Tin Mountain was expected to become the richest of the three.

Tin Mountain is southwest from Fredericktown about nine miles. Until 1870 the oldest inhabitant of Madison County hadn't heard of it.   But that is not surprising. The location is in one of the wildest parts of this region.

About the year named there came an Englishman named Stocker, and he was equal to his name. There was no doubt about his nationality. He spoke "Henglish" and took pride in doing so. His supply of  h's was inexhaustible. Otherwise he was down to bedrock so far as capital was concerned.

Stocker reported that he had discovered tin on the banks of the Little St. Francis, in the locality mentioned.   He didn't stop to fool with the natives, but went to St. Louis and almost at once got both Mr. Moody and Mr. Michel, of the wholesale grocery house of Moody, Michel & Co., greatly interested. They formed a company and employed Mr. Sproule to enter the land for them.  

Stocker was everywhere. One day he would be down on the mountain digging for black sand, which he showed triumphantly as containing tin.  He was between six and seven feet tall and raw-boned.  At work he was the slouchiest tramp miner on the mountain. The next day he might be seen on the public square of Fredericktown wearing a gaudy plaid suit, which added to his gigantic proportions.   A silk hat and "about a peck of jewelry," as a native remembers him, attached to his vest, were among the evidences that Stocker had struck something. He first paralyzed and then enthused the Madisonians.

By the time the big machinery began to pass down from the railroad to the mountain everybody had tin in his head.  There was tin in the air.  Tin Mountain was over­run with prospectors, and the farms were sadly neglected.

The company went to work in earnest. There grew in a month or two a community of 1,500 people at the mountain.  A young Mr. Tyler, of Connecticut, who was a chemist by profession and had some money, came out, investigated the prospects, became satisfied there were fortunes in sight, and put in his capital and time.

 Lamoreaux, the shoe man, of St. Louis, took stock.   Nicholas Schaeffer invested the profits of some thousand of tons of soap grease, and, what was more surprising, studied chemistry in his old age.

The company sunk shafts and ran tunnels, taking out vast quantities of green rock, which was expected to give the tin product.

A mill was erected to treat the ore. Very powerful crushers were put in, because the rock was tough. A furnace that cost $65,000 was added to the plant to reduce the ore after it was ground out of the green rock.  The machinery was to run by steam, and boilers and engines were put in place. Large sheds were built, and hundreds of thousands of bushels of charcoal were put into them.

The Investment and the Collapse.

Fredericktown tradition has it that not less than $200,000 was expended first and last by the Tin Mountain Mining Company.

 The operations extended through nearly three years. Not as much tin was turned out as would make a dinner bucket. When the first run of ore was put through the works the investors were thunderstruck. No tin resulted. These shrewd grocers and shoe men and soap-makers didn't know anything about tin themselves, but before they went into the scheme they had taken samples of the alleged ore to the best assayers in St. Louis, and analysis after analysis had showed tin. Tons of the green rock were ground up, put through the elaborate separating machinery and reduced only to fail to show a single ounce of tin.

Other chemists and assayers were given samples.  Some of them reported traces of tin and some didn't. The mystery deepened. Mr. Schaeffer refused to take any second-hand conclusions, and studied chemistry so that he could make an assay himself.  "He told me," said Mr. Coleman. of the Mine La Motte, "that he actually got a button of tin from one of his assays."

Opinions differ widely as to the true explanation of the mystery. Many people believe the mine was salted and that the capitalists were taken in by a barefaced fraud. Some years ago Judge Allen, an old resident of Fredericktown, and long connected with mining enterprises in Southeast Missouri, gave the result of his Tin Mountain investigation. "So far as I could discover," he said, "the stone contained a poor quality of iron, and that was all the mineral I found in it by my tests.  Strange to say, I have seen a number of analyses made by respectable chemists that gave tin.  It doesn't seem possible that the mine could have been salted on such a scale as to have deceived all of them.  I must confess that to this day I can hardly make up my mind in regard to the puzzle. We had a chemist here, an accomplished man named Cavallen.  He was not connected with the company, but toward the end he was employed to make some assays.   Cavallen told me that as many as two times he found tin in the samples that were brought him.

But the most of the times he failed to get any tin at all. There were many geological formations about the mountain like those found in the vicinity of tin deposits. It is possible that there are scattered through the rock small fragments of tin ore, and that the presence of these fragments accounts for the confusing returns made by the assayers. That, to my mind, is the most reason­able theory."

There was no mystery about the final result to the men who put their money up.  The enterprise was a complete and total failure.

Stocker went a few months before the collapse taking with him his good clothes, "peck of jewelry," stove­pipe hat and ganglionic shape.  The discouraged company hauled the machinery back over the road they had made to Fredericktown and reshipped it to St. Louis.  They sold the coal.

The buildings have rotted down and only an imposing collection of ruins marks the spot on the Little St. Francis where many years ago was the flourishing, promising mining town of Tin Mountain.

"If those expectations had been realized," said Judge Allen, "this would have been the richest country on top of earth."

There is a rock in the locality of the alleged "Second Cornwall" which looks like tin but is not. This circumstance is believed to have helped the deception.

J. E. Lee, an expert mineralogist, after the collapse, expressed the opinion that the tin ore found was taken to the mountain; that the mine was a clever case of salting.  

About the time of the Tin Mountain fiasco in Missouri, prospectors were in Detroit showing tin ore which they claimed to have discovered in the Lake Superior iron region.  They made their appearance late in the season. Capitalists who became interested sent an expert.  The season was late.  There was just one boat making the trip before navigation closed.  The expert was landed near the locality on the north shore where the tin ore was said to have been found.   He had half an hour to collect his specimens. He brought back as much "tin ore'' as he could carry and was about to base upon it a tempting report.  It occurred to him that a more thorough investigation should be made. The expert locked the report in his desk, waited until spring and when the lake opened, made a second visit to the North Shore. There he found the barrels in which the tin ore for salting the locality had been brought from England.

Missouri As It Was In 1867

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