The Tom Reed Mine is the reason Oatman exists. For some thirty years after the first gold finds of the 1860s the Black Mountains were nearly idle, until in 1901 the Tom Reed and Ben Harrison shafts were sunk 100 feet on what became known as the Tom Reed vein, the first general revival of mining in the district. The mine changed hands several times: a 1904 sale fell through when the buyers failed to pay, creditors took it over, and the Blue Ridge Gold Mines Company built a 10-stamp mill before selling out in 1906 to the Tom Reed Gold Mines Company. The settlement that grew up around the Tom Reed took the name Oatman around 1909. By 1 April 1922 the Tom Reed mines had produced $9,488,622 in bullion, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Its geology turned out to be as tangled as its ownership. In 1916 the company sank the Grey Eagle and Aztec shafts, and a young company geologist, Ellis Mallery, worked out that the ore in the Grey Eagle was the upper, down-faulted piece of the rich Big Jim vein next door, displaced by what is still called the Mallery fault. The company sued its neighbour, the United Eastern, for that ore in 1919 and lost.
Between 1907 and 1931 the company mined and milled roughly a million tons of ore, and its mill ran on as a custom mill for smaller mines until it shut in November 1939.
Getting there
35.0236, -114.3805
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