The Pioneer Lode Prospecting Company

My great-great-grandfather, Wilburn Christison, formed a mining company with Father Dyer and eight other men in 1864. 

In 2006, I sat in Leadville in the Lake County Courthouse looking through mining records and I ran across the articles of incorporation for the Pioneer Lode Prospecting Company. I still remember the shock of seeing the name "John L. Dyer" in the same list as my great-great-grandfather's name.

For those of you not familiar with Father Dyer, he came to Colorado in 1861, the same year as Wilburn Christison and his family. Father Dyer was an itinerant Methodist preacher. He also carried mail from Buckskin Joe over Mosquito Pass to the mining camp of Cash Creek, where several of the men in this mining company lived, including Wilburn Christison. Father Dyer is considered one of 16 Founding Fathers of Colorado. His portrait in stained glass is in the Colorado State Capitol building. For more information about Father Dyer, see this Wikipedia.

The ten men in the Pioneer Lode Prospecting Company each put up $100 in shares giving the company $1,000 in operating capital to sink shafts in two discovery claims - the Elisabeth Jessie Johnston and the Star Gold Quartz lode - in the Hope, Granite and Clear Creek mining districts. 

Here is a list of the ten men:
Wilburn Christison, Galatia Sprague, R. Mat Johnston, William Snyder, Henry C. Justice, Sullivan D. Breece, Patrick Smith, John Burnett, Charles Hilton, and John L. Dyer. 

Of these men, Sullivan D. Breece had the most successful mining operation. He later owned the Breece Iron Mine at Leadville and Breece Hill is named after him. I also found some mining claims that Breece and Christison discovered together.

For more information about the men in the Pioneer Lode Mining Company, see the book Rush To The Rockies! published by the Pikes Peak Library District. I wrote a paper about "The Cash Creek Miners and the Lake County War" which is included in this book. You might notice that the names in this Pioneer Lode list also show up ten years later in accounts of the Lake County War.