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Show THE HISTORY BLAZER ATE 11' s OF UTAH'S PAST FROM THE Utah State Historical Society 300 Rio Grande Salt Lake City. YT 84101 ( 801) 533- 3500 FAX ( 801) 533- 3303 Colorful Sam Gilson Did Much More Than Promote Gilsonite Samuel H. Gilson was a colorful and versatile figure in Utah history. He served as a federal marshal, prospected for gold, raised livestock, invented machinery, and defended the rights of organized labor. His name has become most closely associated, however, with a useful industrial hydrocarbon. Gilson was born in Plainfield, Illinois, in 1836 and came west in 1850 with his brother James to search for gold. Fortune apparently eluded him, because by the 1860s he was raising livestock in Nevada and supplying horses for the Pony Express. In 1870 the Gilson brothers moved to the Sevier River Valley where they established the Mountain Ranch. In addition to ranching, Sam also served as a U. S. marshal and presided at the execution of John Doyle Lee at Mountain Meadows. In 1884 Gilson was hired by U. S. Attorney W. H. Diclcron as part of a detective team to enforce the antipolygamy provisions of the Edmunds Act; he quickly obtained enough evidence to indict ten prominent Mormon leaders. In the course of his livestock dealings, Gilson came across a shiny black coal- like substance in the Uinta Basin The material was not unknown; some samples had been sent to the Columbia College School of Mines in 1865, and explorers and prospectors apparently knew of its existence. In 1869 the blacksmith at ' Whiterocla Indian Agency, John Kelly, had asked the Utes to bring him some coal; the stuff they returned with burned so smoky and hot that it nearly bumed Kelly's shop down. Gilson either discovered an outcropping of the mineral in Horse Canyon in 1885 or, more likely, was shown the material by local cattlemen. Gilson might not have discovered it, but he worked hard to discover commercial uses for the material. Analysis by the Smithsonian Institution revealed it to be 99.6 percent pure hydrocar-bon. Gilson experimented widely with the substance, as his widow remembered decades later: ' It is such a sticky, messy, mined asphaltum when it's heated and you should have seen my kitchen! There was gilsonite in every pot, pan and kettle I owned. Everywhere I turned I ran into the stuff. " In 1889 a St. Louis firm bought out Gilson's interest. He jokingly offered one silver dollar for the firm to name the company after him, and they did- The Gilson Asphaltum Company, for years the leading producer of gilsonite, as it came to be almost universally known. The material eventually came to be used for a vast array of industrial purposes, including as a base for paint, electrical insulators, signal flares, building paper, roofing material, floor tiles, and printer's ink. The imaginative Gilson continued to experiment in a number of other fields, including the design of an efficient coke oven. His widow claimed that he invented a widely used platform for railway coaches and designed a workable airplane, neither of which he profited from. Gilson. ( more) continued prospecting and took an interest in the problems of labor. In 1904 he protested the treatment of striking Carbon County miners, even getting himself arrested for supposedly cursing Sheriff Hyrum Wilcox and his deputy. Gilson lived the last years of his active life in Salt Lake City where he died on- December 1, 1913. So-: N e d Christy Remington, " A History of the Gilsonite Industry" ( M. S. thesis, University of Utah, 1959); Allan Kent Powell, " The ' Foreign' Element and the 1903- 4 Carbon County Coal Miners' Strike," Utah Historical QuwterZy 43 ( 1975); Douglas D. Woodad, ' Sam Gilson and the American Dream," MS in Utah State Historid Society Library; Stephedl Cresswell, ' The U. S. Deportmmt of Justice in Utah Territory, 1870- 90," Utd Historical Qmerb 53 ( 1985). THE HISTORYB LAZERis produced by the- UtahState Historical Societydfunded- inp art- bjr a grant h mt he Utah Statehood Centennial Commission. For more idormation about the Historical Society telephone 533- 3500. 059505 ( JN) |
