Eben Smith
Earning a small amount of money, Smith built a hotel at French Corral in Nevada County.
The two men met a party of miners returning from Colorado who had participated in the Pike's Peak Gold Rush.
Smith soon hired himself out to various mines, and inaugurated measures for working and developing promising gold lodes in Gilpin County.
They held the properties for about a year before selling to a Rhode Island mining consortium (retaining a small interest).
Chaffee and Smith organized a group investors in 1867, purchased a mine and formed the Georgetown Silver Smelting Company.
The Caribou claim quickly began producing large quantities of silver again, and Smith made another fortune.
Investors later learned that Chaffee, Moffat and the other initial owners had sold out early, reaping large profits.
In 1882, Moffat and Chaffee secured a controlling interest in the Tam O'Shanter group of mines in Pitkin County, which Smith operated and managed for a year.
He returned to Leadville and took charge of Moffat's and Chaffee's interests in the Maid of Erin, Henrietta and Louisville mines.
Moffat, president of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, saw the chance to expand his business as well as skim profits off the lucrative Cripple Creek mining operations.
The mine owners, who employed about a third of the miners in the area, extended the work-day to 10 hours while refusing to increase pay.
Although some smaller mining companies capitulated immediately, the remaining owners (including Smith) raised a paramilitary force under the legal protection of the local sheriff.
Prior to the Leadville Colorado, Miners' Strike, Eben Smith wrote in a letter to an associate, "we will have to close all of our properties as we have not made a dollar in two years."
After violence at the Coronado and Emmet Mines in Leadville killed four strikers and one fireman, Smith wrote to a London business contact, "The strikers got the worst of it in the raid on the Coronado and Emmet, there were 10 or 12 killed; we do not know how many, and a great number wounded; they take care of their wounded the same as the Indians but every now and then a fellow turns up that the rats have been eating or who has gone to decay that we know must have been shot..."[3] Philpott concluded the remarks suggest "that Smith looked on the miners as almost subhuman.
"[4] After the Cripple Creek strike, Eben Smith slowly began to pull his investments out mines.
Smith continued to extend the F&CC railroad, and built an electric power plant at Goldfield.
In 1896, Smith formed the Mine and Smelter Supply Company with his son, Frank, and brothers John S. and Robert J. Cary.
He realized that much of the slag in the area had been poor milled, and still contained a large amount of gold and silver ore.
The Mine and Smelter Supply Company was founded in order to improve ore recovery rates and save the towns.
Beginning in early 1903, the Western Federation of Miners conducted strikes against refining companies, which eventually spread to the Cripple Creek mining district.
In 1904, Joseph Seep bought out Eben Smith's portion of the Mine and Smelter Supply Company.
In October 1901, Eben Smith returned to California and turned to retirement living in Los Angeles.
As a builder of extra-quality art organs, it was faced with patent-infringement lawsuits and it never attracted significant business, and concurrent with Smith's death, the venture was dissolved.
Smith died in Denver of acute peritonitis stemming from appendicitis on November 5, 1906, before he could finish reorganizing the companies.
