Extensive Photographic Archive of Gold Mining in Colorado and the Canadian Yukon

Locations vary, ca. 1898 and 1902. Collection of 90 black and white photographs by amateur photographer Charles Ashley Hardy taken on two separate trips: one in June 1898 to Colorado while investigating opportunities to work as an assayer in the Cripple Creek and Victor gold mining district; and the other in 1902 investigating Bering Sea and Pacific Coast coal fields in Alaska, and gold mines in the Canadian Yukon. Sizes vary, including 4 1/2 x 6 5/8 in., 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 in., 5 x 7 in., and 4 x 5 in. 54 of the photographs from the 1898 trip mounted to sheets in a three-quarter leather over marbled paper-covered boards album, each identified by hand. Notable photographs from both trips include an image of the Bingham Mining Camp in Utah; the "Garden of the Gods" in Colorado; shots from the Canadian Pacific Railroad; Cripple Creek, Colorado; totem poles at Ketchikan; Eskimos at Port Clarence, Nome, and shore camps on the Bering Sea; a riverboat, ocean kayak, and barge; stops along the Yukon River, including the Northern Saloon at Tanana, the Police Post on the Stewart River; and gold dredging and sluicing at Dawson City. Condition varies. Many photos identified in manuscript on verso. Lot also includes a nine-page autograph letter from Hardy to his father, from Victor, Colorado, June 8, 1898, describing the nature of the mining industry in Victor and Cripple Creek.

Hardy's letter reads in part: "From my first letter you may have inferred that I was somewhat disappointed at not finding the position I had been led to believe was waiting for me...Victor is a rather peculiar mining camp. There are only two kinds of mines, those where machinery is used and those where all the work is done by hand...It is the assayer's business to report the percentage of gold in every sample of rock brought to them...The assaying here is of the simplest sort...but the work is mostly routine...The simplicity of the gold mining industry as carried on here consists in the fact that the work is so divided...If I am unable to get work that will be of some good to me, I shall not stay the summer out...""

The Cripple Creek and Victor mines began excavation in the 1890s, and are still active today. Having removed over 23 million ounces of gold in its history, it is the most profitable mine in Colorado history. Hardy's time in Alaska was just a few years after the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896-98.

Charles Ashley Hardy, was as a mining engineer who built and owned the Chatham Bars Inn in Chatham, Massachusetts. In 1895, he was a member of the Wells and Patterson hunting expedition that accompanied wildlife photographer A.G. Wallihan where he captured images for his compilation Camera Shots at Big Game (1901). Hardy himself was an avid amateur photographer, as seen through these photos.