The Winner Mine was one of the countless small gold operations in the area of Atlanta, Idaho. Atlanta was famous for fabulously rich silver and gold mines such as the Monarch and Buffalo. Their ore was so great it was worth packing by mule and wagon hundreds of miles to Utah during the 1870s. Without going too much into the geology of the area, there were two main types of gold-silver deposits around Atlanta. The Monarch and Buffalo Mines were classic epithermal deposits, consisting of bonanza ore near the surface that quickly diminished with depth. The Winner Mine was of the other type, a narrow sporadic quartz vein associated with the Idaho Batholith. Veins like that of the Winner Mine can be found over a range of ~200 miles from Pierce, Idaho all the way down to Boise. These veins were notoriously fickle and few amounted to much.
The mine was first located in 1903 by the New Century Exploration and Investment Co. as the Little Queen. Sometime around the mid-1920s it was taken over by Earl F. Money who renamed it the Winner Mine. Only minor development work was done until 1925 when a mill was built. The mill had a 5 ton Ellis Ball Mill powered by a 2.5 hp Fairbanks Morse gas engine. When the mill was installed, the equipment had to be hauled ~100 miles from the nearest railroad at Mountain Home, Idaho. Around 1930 the mill was converted to water power. In 1931 a 3 stamp mill was also installed. A short tramway was erected in 1933 to bring ore down to the mill. In 1934 a shaft was sunk equipped with a water driven hoist. I could find no sign of this shaft or the hoist. All of the tunnel was drilled by hand until 1937 when a Gardener compressor was installed.
Earl Money employed a crew of 2-3 men until 1939 when he started working alone. He continued to work the mine independently until 1948, but apparently produced little. The claims were leased by Little Queens Mines, Inc. in 1949. This company did not list the mill as an asset, so it can be assumed it was abandoned by this time.
Over time, Earl Money’s name was assigned to the mine, so it is referred to in modern reports as the “Money Mine”. It was also confusingly sometimes grouped with another Little Queens Mine, which was roughly 1.5 miles south of the Winner Mine. Both mines were owned by the Money Family, and ore from the Little Queens Mine was hauled to the Winner mill for a time. The Winner Mine was reported to have produced 621 tons of ore containing 163 oz of gold from 1925 to 1942. Some of this however may have been material hauled in from the Little Queens Mine.
