Tales of the Tungsten Mine

This is the sweet and bitter story of the Tungsten Mine. The story takes in the amazing life of Frank Arnold, the long-time caretaker who made the Tungsten Mine his home for twenty years. He wandered the vast eastern Cascades in what we now call the "Pasayten Wilderness" until his untimely death in the winter of 1934-35, while out scouting his trap lines. The mystery surrounding Frank's death, how he was found by a mental patient and the stories that boiled out of the strange event are enough to move a statue of stone.

Frank Arnold himself was unique, a riddle, and "not your average human being," as one man who knew him said. A man extremely intelligent and in every way a curiosity. Fortunately, there are those from whom one can gather the fading shadow of this little-big man and the mystery of his sad death at the mouth of Horseshoe Creek. The legend of Frank Arnold and the Tungsten Mine are one, and so should the story be of these two intriguing tales that were so interwoven into the history of the high mountain land called the Pasayten, a French word meaning "land of Satan:' The area is as beautiful as an angel, but can be cruel as its namesake!

History is good and bad, sad and happy, and this story is both happy and sad. The eventual fate of the Tungsten Mine rests no longer with the miners but in the hands of a government organization known as the Forest Service, which has had a track record of destruction for old historical cabins. And how Frank died is still open to the imagination of the reader... But...

This is the story of the Tungsten Mine, written for the most part in the late 1980's.