Historical Note - Week of March 6th

The Livingston Enterprise, March 9, 1889

Cooke City.

A correspondent of the Gazette writing from Cooke City under the date of Feb. 10th says: About 25 miles east of this place on the line of the Billings, Clarke’s Fork & Cooke City railroad, Crandall creek empties into the Clarke’s Fork. Some two miles up the creek, from a point where it is intersected by the railroad, according to the preliminary survey made by Mr. Gallaher in the spring of 1886, there has been discovered a large deposit of very fine marble by Robert Mandeville and William Chick two miners and prospectors of this place. It shows upon the face a length of one and one-half miles, about one thousand feet in height and a thickness of from five to six hundred feet. They have located five claims of 20 acres each, and they have associated with them, Mr. William Jellings and Wm. H. Robinson of San Francisco. Mr. Robinson was here in June last and looked over the properties, before taking an interest. He took out about 1000 lbs of the marble, went to New York and other eastern points and had the marble tested by experts. It is pronounced on all hands to be equal if not superior to the best Italian marble imported, worth $130 per ton for small dimension pieces such as mantles, tomb stones and house ornamentation. They will do some considerable work on the quarries this summer, open up etc. But of course it must lie dormant until the arrival of cheap transportation for moving it.

Museum note: Robert Mandeville lived with his wife and children in Cooke till his death in 1921 at the age of 79 years old. He was buried in the Cooke City Cemetery.

William Chick would be murdered September of 1892 in Cooke City during a drunken gun fight. The accused would be found not guilty, the shot fired in self-defense.