Mammoth and Robinson, Utah: The Tintic Mining Camp That Grew Into Two Towns in One Canyon
Mammoth was never one town. It began in 1870 as a rough camp in a steep ravine at the foot of Mammoth Peak, and by the 1890s it had spilled a mile down the canyon into a second town, Robinson, built where the mills and the railroad could reach it. The two grew together into a single mining community of a few thousand people, with churches, saloons, a newspaper, a theater and the only hospital in the Tintic district.
Today the canyon is a dispersed ruin landscape: mine dumps, cut terraces, foundations and a scattering of old houses, much of it on private ground that is also being explored for minerals. This post follows how it rose, what the documents support, and what you can and cannot expect to see.
“Boys, she’s a mammoth strike!”
A locator’s words as Tintic oral tradition tells how the claim got its name (tradition, not a documented quotation)Tintic and the Mammoth claim, 1869–1880
The Tintic Mining District was organized on December 13, 1869, after a prospector named George Rust found the Sunbeam vein. Mammoth followed almost at once. The original Mammoth claim was recorded on February 26, 1870, by Thomas G. Wimmer, William D. Wimmer, Robert Wimmer, Joseph W. Wright and John W. Tanner, and neighboring ground was staked a few weeks later by others, including the Crismon brothers. The deposit was a large, steeply pitching, copper-gold-silver ore body in faulted limestone, with an open stope at the surface that became known as the “Old Glory Hole.”
Early life in the hollow was hard. Mammoth sat at more than 6,400 feet, with little timber, no farmland and almost no water. Miners from Cornwall, Ireland, Germany and Wales lived in dugouts, tents and rough stone huts, and one account says water was hauled up from Eureka Gulch and sold by the barrel at ten cents a gallon. A wooden gravity pipeline from Jenny Lind Spring eased the shortage in the 1880s.
Ore treatment was the bigger problem. Between about 1872 and 1874 the Crismon-Mammoth venture built iron smelting furnaces and shipped early copper matte. Between 1876 and 1879 a 27-stamp mill was assembled in the valley, but refractory copper minerals defeated pan amalgamation. A British venture, Mammoth-Copperopolis Ltd., made the mine famous overseas, and an English syndicate that held an option later collapsed after the death of its principal backer.
The McIntyre brothers and the cattle trade
The best-known Mammoth story involves Samuel and William McIntyre, Texas-born brothers who built a ranching empire in Utah. The University of Utah’s archival description of the McIntyre papers records that in 1873 the brothers traded cattle for a substantial interest in the Mammoth Mine. That core is documented. The brothers sank the shaft deeper, and the mine grew into a large underground operation. The McIntyres later combined ranching and mining interests under the Samuel McIntyre Investment Company, and the family’s success also brought conflict: Samuel McIntyre Jr. eventually sued his father.
One account says the Mammoth paid between $3 million and $4 million in dividends from 1872 to 1930, and that in 1899 Samuel bought William’s 103,000 shares for more than $250,000 to take sole family control. Both figures come from a single compilation and should be treated as approximate.
Robinson and the two-level town, 1890–1910
By the 1890s the mines were up the canyon but the mills and railroads belonged below. Around 1893–94 the Mammoth company built a large stamp mill near the canyon mouth, and a town grew around it. It was named Robinson for George H. Robinson, a mining engineer and mill superintendent, who is documented as the town organizer. The 1977 National Register survey records a residence there as early as 1892.
Upper Mammoth held the shafts, hoists, boarding houses and company offices. Robinson held the mills, the railroad yards, lumber suppliers and shops. The canyon floor between them filled with houses and stores, a stretch called “Middletown.” Mammoth had a post office from 1890 until November 1, 1973, and Robinson had its own from 1896 to 1914. In 1910 the two were incorporated together as Mammoth City.
Railroads climb the hollow
Rail made Robinson. The Rio Grande Western built the Tintic Range Railway into the district by 1892, and the competing Union Pacific-controlled Salt Lake & Western pushed south as well. In January 1894 the two lines agreed to share track and a union depot at Robinson. To bring ore down from the high mines, mine owner James A. Cunningham and associates incorporated the New East Tintic Railway in 1896, a standard-gauge line that climbed Mammoth Hollow on a 6 percent grade with geared Shay locomotives and served the ore bins of the Gold Chain and Ajax mines. The Oregon Short Line bought it in November 1900 for $37,000, according to the UtahRails history.
The Grand Central and the apex lawsuit
The neighboring Grand Central Mine drove Mammoth’s second wave. A 1900 USGS description notes that the top of the great Grand Central ore body lay nearly 1,000 feet below the surface, which showed how much rich ore could lie deep. Merchant and investor John Dern, who also developed Mercur, led the company, and his son George later became governor of Utah and Secretary of War.
Underground, the Mammoth and Grand Central workings eventually met. In late 1901 Grand Central sued Mammoth in Grand Central Mining Co. v. Mammoth Mining Co., one of the best-known apex disputes in Utah mining law. The fight turned on the federal Mining Law of 1872, which lets a claimant follow a vein that apexes inside the claim downward beyond its side lines. Mammoth argued that one continuous vein dipped into Grand Central ground. Grand Central said the ore occurred in separate replacement chimneys and accused Mammoth of taking more than $300,000 in silver ore. Mammoth’s expert witness was geologist James E. Talmage, later an apostle of the Latter-day Saint Church. The trial court ruled against Mammoth, the Utah Supreme Court upheld it, and in 1909 the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Mammoth’s final petition.
Life in the canyon at its height
Between about 1900 and 1910 Mammoth and Robinson reached their peak. Regional histories commonly estimate the combined population at 2,500 to 3,000, in roughly 350 homes and other buildings. The National Register survey found that about 85 percent of the buildings still standing in 1977 were built between 1892 and 1910, which marks the boom clearly. The community had several churches, a public school, a grandstand ballpark, fraternal lodges, about a dozen saloons, a movie theater, a weekly newspaper called The Mammoth Record and the Hotel Mammoth.
Labor in the Tintic camps
Labor relations in the Tintic district are described as comparatively cooperative next to Cripple Creek, Coeur d’Alene or Bingham. The Eureka Miners’ Union formed in 1890, and a Western Federation of Miners local followed in 1902. A brief regional strike and lockout in February 1893 followed an attempt to introduce sliding-scale wages tied to the silver price. One compilation says that in 1912 Tintic miners disavowed the violent Bingham strike and won wage increases of $3.00, $3.25 and $3.50 a day, and that the Eureka and Mammoth unions merged in 1913.
Fires, a bankrupt city and the long decline, 1912–1973
The camp’s wooden buildings burned repeatedly. A fire in 1912 swept Robinson’s commercial core, destroying its theater, confectionery and post office, and the Robinson post office closed within two years. The old Mammoth company store burned in 1926 and was replaced by the surviving masonry building, and a 1928 fire destroyed the central mine offices, which were rebuilt. The joint railroad depot at Robinson burned in 1942.
Money problems were more decisive. In July 1925 the courts removed several hundred acres of patented mine ground from Mammoth City’s boundaries, taking away its power to tax the Mammoth and Grand Central mines. Voters dissolved the city’s charter on November 29, 1929, and by 1930 the population had dropped to about 750. Underground, stopes below 2,000 feet moved from rich oxidized ore into lower-grade pyrite and arsenic sulfides, and workings flooded at about 200 gallons a minute at the 2,600-foot level. Leasers shipped dump ore and flux through the 1930s, with 474 rail cars in 1935 and 938 in 1937. The McIntyre family sold out in 1954. The last regular commercial rail shipment, a modest 120 tons, left in May 1958, and the Mammoth post office closed on November 1, 1973.
The Tintic Miners’ Hospital
The district’s only hospital, the Tintic Miners’ Hospital, opened at Mammoth in 1902, with Dr. Steele Bailey Sr. treating injuries and silicosis. It operated until 1933. The building was destroyed around 1935, and by 1977 a monument marked the site. Photographs of it are among the best surviving glimpses of everyday life in the canyon.
What is left today
The best architectural record of Mammoth is the 1977 National Register survey, which led to the listing of the 170-acre Mammoth Historic District on March 14, 1979. It inventoried about 49 surviving structures and ruins, including vernacular frame homes from 1892–1910, a two-story boarding house dating to about 1875, the 1928 mine office, the brick fire station of about 1930, the Mammoth Supply Company store, the foundations of the church and school, and the ruins of the Farrell Mill of 1895. That list is a snapshot of 1977. Nearly half a century has passed, and a building listed then should not be assumed standing now.
A December 2024 corporate filing for the current exploration project describes historical shafts, adits and mine remains across the property but says there is no significant operating mining equipment or infrastructure. The Mammoth and Grand Central headframes appear in many historical photos, but whether any given headframe or ore bin survives needs to be confirmed before it is the reason for a trip. What you can count on finding is a dispersed ruin landscape: mine dumps, cuts, shafts or closed openings, foundations, grading, a few scattered buildings and roads.
Timeline
Historic sites nearby
Further reading
Sources
National Park Service — Mammoth Historic District National Register documentation (1977 survey) — the 1892–1910 building boom, Robinson as town organizer, the 1926 and 1928 fires, the hospital, and surviving structures
UtahRails.net — Tintic History, 1977 — district chronology, post offices, municipal history and the decline
UtahRails.net — New East Tintic Railway (1896–1900) — the mining railway up Mammoth Hollow and its sale
Utah Division of State History — Eureka (Utah) Photograph Collection — historic views of Mammoth, Grand Central and Lower Mammoth
University of Utah Libraries — McIntyre Ranch digital photograph collection — the 1873 cattle-for-mine transaction and the McIntyre family
U.S. Geological Survey — Description of the Tintic Special District (1900) — Grand Central’s deep ore body and the principal towns
Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining — Stay Out, Stay Alive! — abandoned-mine hazards
Bureau of Land Management — Mineral & Land Records System and abandoned-mine dangers — checking claims and understanding risks
Utah Geological Survey — mining district compilations for Tintic — deposit type and production background
Additional detail draws on the research compilations assembled for this post, which cite UtahRails.net, Western Mining History, the Mining History Association’s History of Tintic Mining District, a December 2024 SEC filing and other sources. Distances to Knightsville, Mercur, Ophir and Bingham Canyon were calculated from coordinates. Historic photographs courtesy of the Utah State Historical Society. Images marked “colorized” were colorized with AI and are interpretations, not original color.
