David Conkling and his Stony Creek Mining Dream

 

The Philipsburg Mail on July 10, 1914 carried a full column article about Stony Creek and David T. Conkling. David had moved his mining equipment and prospecting drill with his crew to Stony Creek. Their plan was to drill holes down to bedrock for the purpose of prospecting for placer gold. Research showed that David had previously been a mining superintendent at Sunrise Mine in 1900. Prior to David taking on this venture, the gulch had been mined for a number of years by Richard Stingle further up the gulch, about 10 years ago, but he never got to bedrock. Herman Kaiser also had organized a company to operate about forty claims along the gulch. Their plan was to make drain tunnels to draw water from the bedrock so that shafts could be sunk and mining carried out by drifting along bedrock. The tunnel was to start at a low point north of the Wyman ranch and pointing south, cut through the hogback to the Wyman house and then into the channel at Stony Creek. This project was abandoned mainly due to a shortage of funds. 

 

Conkling had prospected the creek while at Sunrise and felt it was one of the most promising gulches in Montana. For unknown reasons, he instead went to work managing the forests near Bozeman, Montana as evidenced by the 1910 Federal Census. He also became a married man on August 4,1909 when he took Verena Eleanor (Rena) Hartley as his wife. The 1920 Federal Census showed David in 2 places: At Moose Lake living as a boarder with 18 other men in Mary McDonalds’s Boarding House and in Anaconda with his wife Rena and Nettie age nine and David age five. As the Newspaper cites” Stony Creek is among the longest west side tributaries of Rock creek and its source is in gold district, gold quartz mining being located at the head of the gulch. It was the placer gold found along Stony creek and on West Fork of Rock creek that led to the discovery of basin and Quartz gulches which are due south of Stony Creek and have their source in the same range of mountains (This range is the Sapphire Mountains). These gulches have yielded probably a million dollars in placer gold during the past twenty years and are still producing. It is believed Stony creek is the richest of all, only the gold is not so easy to get at.”

As locals know, this area continues to be of interest and produces with significant labor. But some of the Sapphire foothills are easy to find color. My dad, Harry Bentz, had a claim named ‘Monkey Business” at the head of McKay gulch on the south side of West Fork with a large amount of gold in the tree roots. Enough that he could buy hay for his appaloosa horses every winter from a few weeks of panning and sluicing the black soils in the tree roots. 

Obviously David’s dream of drilling to the bedrock was not that easy. I know my sister and I dug with a spoon in the false bedrock in Maley Gulch, while laying on our stomachs looking for sapphires and often found gold nuggets. Maley Gulch is right over the ridge to the southwest of Stony. 

Apparently neither were his mining dreams at Moose lake, as the 1930 Census shows him and family living in Butte with David working as a laborer and they were living as “domestics” at the Manganese plant where he worked. His mining dreams ended on April 29, 1931 when he died of Myocarditis in Butte at the age of 63. Survivors were his wife and the two children.