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Hathenbruck Cabin

There are two cabins in the area of Grandaddy Lake. The first one has been blown up by dynamite and the second, right off the trail and with a tin roof, is still there and is apparently not hard to find.

When referring to the Sylvanite #1 and 2 claims, he seems to be indicating the second left-hand fork of the West Fork of Rock Creek in his statement "about 4 miles above the confluence of this fork with the main stream." This indicates the Lodgepole Lake area, where the Rhoades and Hathenbruck cabin stood and where several low grade placer deposits had been worked.---Lost Gold of the Uintah, pg. 107

Mining operations soon commenced upon two of the lower grade gold deposits at Lodgepole Lake. A new cabin was built and covered with a corrugated tin roof with the assistance of William Davies, who was at that time the owner and operator of the Rock Creek Ranch. Long, wooden water troughs or ditches were constructed to and from the mines, and heavy, metal sluice boxes were employed in their operations. However, something went wrong. The mining project fizzled and the claims were later abandoned.

Today, all that remains are the flooded mine shafts, several old dumps, the remains of the metal sluice boxes, some pipe, bits and pieces of the old wooden water ditches and the collapsed cabin. Ore samples lifted from the overburden or from the old dumps near the sluice boxes have assayed one-fourth ounce gold per ton, lending credence that these were the workings of the low grade ore bodies, which were described by Hathenbruck. The Rhoades and Hathenbruck cabin, nestled within the timber one-fourth mile to the east, has practically been destroyed by the dynamite charge of some irresponsible individual.--Lost Gold of the Uintah, pg.109 (essentially the same story can be found in "The Utah Gold Rush" on page 54)

I was talking to a forest service archeologist the other day and he was telling me where that Hathenbruck cabin is. He says just follow the trail in from the south past Grandaddy Lake and it drops off a hill and down past Lodgepole Lake. There is a cabin there but it is not Hathenbrucks (must be the newer one with the tin roof). Keep going on the trail and it goes up a little hill and right there next to the trail is what’s left of Hathenbrucks cabin. He said out in the meadow near the cabin there are some old diggings, but that is about all he knows.

A few years later when relations between the Utes and white men weren't so strained, Hathenbruck built a log cabin not far from that mine. It has never been a secret where that cabin was located, but its location may come as a surprise to those who have spent long, hard days searching for it in the rough, rocky slopes along the shore of Granddaddy Lake. Cliff Roberts, who first took sheep into the Granddaddy Lake Basin, remembered how that cabin looked at the turn of the century.

He also made some interesting discoveries about that old mine worked by Rhoads and Hathenbruck.

I've been to the old Hathenbruck cabin lots of times, at the southeast end of Lodgepole Lake. When I first saw it, it was real sturdy and a good shelter, but there's not much left of it now. There were two cabins, not far apart, a large one and a small one. That smaller cabin was built a long time after the Hathenbruck cabin was built, by a man named Behunin. A big pine now grows right where it stood. Rhoads and Hathenbruck mined quicksilver there. They had a big rolling crusher stone wheel, and some heavy iron bottles. They would turn that heavy wheel to crush their ore, and quicksilver would run through a hose into those iron bottles.

Roberts' description of the Hathenbruck cabin places it at the correct location...--Faded Footprints, pg. 79

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