With Mount Isa celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2023, we have decided to go back through Trove newspapers to find early mentions of the town and surrounds.
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The first mention of the area we could find was a small article in the Brisbane Courier of September 26, 1923 entitled "Government Geologist's Inspection" which reported one of two rich recent finds of silver-lead.
One was in the well established Chillagoe region but the other was "at West Leichhardt River, outside Duchess in the Cloncurry region".
Mining authorities had established the Cloncurry district lode discovery "is of very considerable extent".
The Courier reported the Under Secretary of Mines Mr H. Marshall said the day before that government geologist E.S. Saint-Smith had returned to Brisbane after an inspection of the region and would report his findings to the minister "in due course".
"Mr. Saint-Smith was very much impressed with the possibilities of the new field, on which 30 men already held mining leases," the Courier's article concluded.
The name "Mount Isa" is first mentioned in the next article found, a much longer article from the Daily Telegraph of October 2, 1923.
In an article entitled "Queensland silver-lead" the Telegraph said Queensland's "enormous body" of silver-lead deposits were attracting a great deal of attention.
"Most interest attaches to the Queensland deposits which are situated almost 64 miles north-west of Duchess on the Leichhardt River and over 130 miles from Cloncurry by road," the Telegraph declared.
"A prospector sent some samples for assay to Cloncurry early in the year and the results were so encouraging he took up a prospecting lease of 40 acres and proceeded to work it with a mate."
That prospector's name was John Campbell Miles, the acknowledged founder of Mount Isa.
The Telegraph did not name him but said there were now 32 men on the ground with 20 leases and another 12 applied for.
"All the miners were on payable ore and making good wages, the average being £8/10 per week per man," the paper said.
After a description of the ore body, the paper mentions four distinct lode channels, "the most important being Mount Isa."
So the city's first reference is that of a lode channel.
The Telegraph said most ore was taken to Duchess by teams with camel expected soon to aid with the burden while smelters had a representative in Cloncurry looking at having the ore treated at Chillagoe.
"All the ore has to be graded and the richest sent to the smelters and the lower grade stacked until it can be treated locally," the Telegraph concluded.
From such humble beginnings a city was about to spring up.
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