Republished from our newsletter, Atsmi Uvsari, Issue 21, Summer 2009, written by Rochelle Kaplan.

Jewish Mining Magnates in Utah and the Alta Club

Mining began in earnest in the state in 1870, when minerals were discovered to be plentiful in Utah. Jews such as Charles Popper, who had lived in mining towns in California, moved to the Beehive State and became involved in mining and other businesses. Frederick Auerbach noted, “Our business (Auerbach’s Store) gradually increased until 1868, when the institution known as Zion’s Co-operative Mercantile Institution was started, which for a time seemed to threaten our existence here as merchants. Had it not been for the discovery of minerals here and the steady development of the mining industry, it would certainly have proved unprofitable for us to stay here in this territory.”

By the 1880s, miners from Alta, Ophir, and Park City became Salt Lake City capitalists. A well to do group were either engaged directly in mining or smelting or served the industry as bankers and suppliers of services and equipment. Several of these prominent men decided they’d like a social club like the Union Club in San Francisco and clubs back east. A committee to establish such a club was comprised of Gentiles (non-Mormons) most connected with the mining industry. The group included Fred Auerbach, merchant, and Abraham Hanauer, pioneer smelter owner (Hanauer Smelting Works) and operator, who like Charles Popper was also involved in ranching. Hanauer was the Alta Club’s fourth president, in 1886. In the Territory then were two spheres, Mormon and Gentile, which generally did not mix, each with its own economy, political parties, societies, and holidays.

Of the eighty-one charter members of the Alta Club in 1883, thirty-five were directly involved in mining, smelting, or assaying (analyzing metal or ore to determine its components). In the 1890s, additional wealthy Jewish members of the Alta Club included Jacob E. Bamberger, a representative of the Guggenheim mining and smelting family, and Hartwig Cohen, a manager and grandson and namesake of a rabbi in South Carolina, who persuaded Enos Wall to put his property into the ultimately successful Utah Copper venture. Simon Guggenheim, son of Meyer and brother of Solomon R. (of New York City’s Guggenheim Museum), and Samuel Newhouse, who had already made a fortune in Colorado mining, railroads, and real estate, were colorful Alta Club members and philanthropists.

Like Newhouse, Simon Guggenheim moved from Pennsylvania to Colorado where he worked for his father’s mining and smelting operation, M. Guggenheim’s Sons, as the chief ore buyer. When Simon wed in New York City, the Guggenheims provided Thanksgiving dinner to five thousand poor Manhattan children. When his first child was born in 1905, Simon Guggenheim donated $80,000 to the Colorado School of Mines to build Guggenheim Hall, which at the time, was the largest private grant ever made to a state institution. In 1907, Guggenheim was elected a Colorado Senator, as a Republican.

After one term, he moved to New York and joined the board of ASARCO (the American Smelting and Refining Company) and afterwards long served as company president. When one of his sons died as a teenager in 1922, Simon established the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in his memory. Since that time, the foundation has granted more than 15,000 Guggenheim Fellowships, worth nearly a quarter billion dollars. Although he never lived in Utah, Simon joined the Alta Club, so I presume he came regularly to Utah on business.

Newhouse’s spectacular rise and fall makes him my favorite Utah mining character. Called the father of copper mining in Utah, he was president of the Denver, Lakewood, and Golden Railroad, Boston Consolidated Mining Company, Newhouse Mining Company, Newhouse Mines and Smelters, and Nipissing Silver Mines Company, and controlled the Highland Boy Mine in Bingham Canyon, Utah. Newhouse built the first two skyscrapers in Salt Lake, the Newhouse and Boston Buildings, which still stand. He donated land for the Commercial Building and the Stock Exchange Building with the intent of building an alternative business district to that dominated by Mormons. At one point, he had plans and an architect to erect fifteen buildings. Elsewhere, Newhouse bought the land for and built the celebrated Flatiron Building in New York City. He owned an estate on Long Island in New York, where he raised horses, a chateau outside Paris, and mansions in London and Salt Lake City. Sadly, the Utah home was demolished.

A 1904 New York Times article announced that Newhouse had uncovered $85,000,000 worth of ore at the Great Cactus Mine in Utah. Newhouse said he would share annually the profits with the miners and would build a beautiful city near the mine for their use, with each miner to have a house on a lot 200 by 600 feet. In 1908, the Utah delegation to the Democratic Party nominated Newhouse as vice-presidential nominee but he declined. And Newhouse figured prominently in the national news in 1909, when he beat a train record from Chicago to New York so he could make the Lusitania crossing to visit his dying brother in Europe.

Newhouse also began construction on the Newhouse Hotel but financial problems prevented him from completing the project. A joke on the vaudeville circuit was that Newhouse had the best ventilated hotel in the West (because glass was not yet set in the windows). Profligacy, overextension of credit, legal costs, a financial panic, and the looming Great War which made it hard to get credit, all contributed to Newhouse’s bankruptcy, sometime around 1915. His wife, Ida, from whom he was separated but who remained friendly with him, gave him back her jewels to be sold to help him out. Ida remained for years in the Belvedere Hotel in Salt Lake City, helped by friends including Lester Freed, an Alta Club member and businessman. She died in Los Angeles. Samuel died at his sister’s chateau, which he had given to her, outside Paris, in 1930.

Another early Jew involved in mining was Henry Siegel, first president of Congregation B’nai Israel. He was the manager of the Siegel Consolidated Mining Company, and mentioned in a 1903 article in The Mining Review that a Nevada mine the company owned “has twelve men working an iron-manganese vein and which goes 188 ounces of silver to the ton”. His brother Sol was an Alta Club member.

The Bamberger family was involved in coal mining and owned the Bamberger Coal Company before branching out into other businesses such as transportation. Jacob E. Bamberger controlled the Daly West Mine; he was Simon Bamberger’s brother. Simon went on to become Utah’s only Jewish governor. When Jacob retired, his son Ernest took the reins at the mine. All three Bambergers were in the Alta Club.

A. Van Praag was a wool dealer and mining capitalist and also a member of B’nai Israel and the Alta Club. Charles Popper, still another Alta Club member, discovered and developed the Queen of the Hills Mine in Idaho, paying him $60,000 a month. Isador Morris donated gold dust to Congregation Montefiore to enable construction to begin on a synagogue. M. S. Ascheim, who had a mercantile store in Park City, developed its first smelter.

Moses Hirschman was born in Württemberg, Germany in 1832 and came to the U.S. in 1856. He lived in West Virginia, went to California via the Panama route in 1860, and moved to Nevada. Enamored of mining, he went to Montana in 1869 and two years later settled in Salt Lake City. He was involved in Flagstaff, South Star, and other Alta silver mines and the Brooklyn lead mine in Bingham. He also owned a shoe store in Salt Lake City.

Anna Rich Marks was born in Russian Poland in 1847, went to England, and met and married Wolff Marks in 1862. They moved to NY and then traveled west to Salt Lake City where they operated a store. In 1880, they moved to Eureka, 60 miles south of Salt Lake City, in the midst of the rich Tintic mining area. A local historian, Sam Elton, describes Anna’s arrival in Eureka:

“In the early days of Tintic, two men, John Freckleton and Hyrum Gardner, claimed the land in the west end of Pinion Canyon. They opened the first road through the canyon and placed a toll gate in the narrow part, charging a fee for entrance. Anna was in the lead in a buggy followed by many wagons loaded with everything necessary to open a store. When she came to the gate, she refused to pay the toll. A verbal war was on, the air turning blue with Anna’s cuss words. She summoned her bodyguard and with guns drawn, they tore down the toll gate and went on to Eureka. Anna took possession of some ground on the south side of the street and was soon in business. Her right to the ground was hotly contested by a man named Pat Shay. Many verbal arguments followed. Finally, she pulled her guns on Pat. He went flying and so did the bullets. He made it to a pile of posts. He wasn’t hit, but she sure made the bark fly. From then on, no one crossed Anna Marks.”

She also carried on a historic battle with the Denver and Rio Grand, holding up the building of a railroad at gunpoint until the Denver and Rio Grand met her price to cross the section of her land.

Photos courtesy of the Utah State Historical Society, or the Jewish Women’s Archive.