Chapter III: Gold, Fools and Gambled Fortunes (continued)

By August 1884 Ellershausen could bear no more. He left Silver Cliff, he left Newfoundland and went prospecting in Spain. He achieved some fame in the early 1900s for patenting techniques of ore refinement and died in Berlin in 1914 at the age of 94.⁽³¹⁾

The Burke brothers, too, faded from the Silver Cliff scene after 1884. Not so Charles Fowler. He became the unofficial Silver Cliff advertiser and in early 1887 promoted the property in Britain, apparently on behalf of the Cliff Silver Mines Company. Within months of his arrival the mine site was transferred for £4000 to an ill-fated Edinburgh company. What little ore the miners excavated for the company (they failed to find the main orebody) left Silver Cliff in the summer of 1887 and sank in the mid-Atlantic Ocean just before the death of a principal director forced the company into liquidation.⁽³²⁾

No commercial ore shipments left Silver Cliff after 1887.⁽³³⁾ However, a curious tale is tole about an enterprising promoter who used pieces of the best Silver Cliff ore to advantage in another Placentia Bay lead prospect in Jerseyside. When the Jerseyside deposit's owner visited the property, the promoter surreptitiously placed the Silver Cliff ore near a blasting site, blew it up with the bedrock and retrieved it to impress the unsuspecting owners, who promptly agreed to continue supporting the Jerseyside operation.

The directors of the Cliff Silver Mines considered selling their property after the Edinburgh company fiasco, but changed their minds when the 1891 resurrection of the La Manche mine revived interest in Placentia Bay lead deposits. St. John's auctioneer and merchant John W. Foran obtained the Silver Cliff property in 1892 and hired back some of the old miners. This time, the miners found the main orebody, at which news the delighted Foran reportedly refused an offer of $80,000 to buy the claim.⁽³⁴⁾ No profits resulted from the orebody's discovery, however, causing Foran to rue his refusal until his death in August 1898.⁽³⁵⁾

The final mining attempt at Silver Cliff, carried out between 1922 and 1925 by the Silver Cliff Mining Company Limited of St. John's, fared no better than preceding efforts. Since 1941, the mine site with its abandoned machinery and honeycombed underground network has been part of the United States Argentia Naval Base. The base's 'no-trespassing' policy has in the recent past tempted some prospectors to approach the Silver Cliff claim from a seaward direction in thick fog. Fortunately, indications are that the site will once again become open to the public in the near future.

These, then, were the mines that arose in the rest of the Newfoundland coastline in response to the Notre Dame Bay copper boom. Noticeably few operations existed far from the sea; the sketchy maps of the interior offered negligible aid to geological exploration, and the only practical means to the interior lay along arduous canoe routes in the summer and along equally arduous snowshoe and dogteam trails in the winter. Even after the 1897 completion of the Newfoundland Railway, many years passed before the first large mines arose in central Newfoundland.