Dust flies off the pants every time Armstrong touches them.
The jeans are gray with filth and dotted with wax from candles, which would’ve been attached to bands around the 19th-century miners’ heads. Resurfacing toward the end of the Castle Dome footage, Schlichting and Romo present their finds to Armstrong. “We have the best lighting and equipment to do this.” “We haven’t had a major issue or rescue, but we’re pretty cautious,” he says. Each person on his team carries $1,500 worth of equipment, from harnesses to oxygen monitors to auto-stop equipment that automatically ends a descent in the event of trouble. Schlichting mentions other risk factors, too, like hibernating rattlesnakes, cellphone lights and flashlights dying, and poor-quality air in coal mines. On top of the legal fallout, exploring such spaces carries “a great magnitude of danger,” posing hazards like cave-ins, flooding and falling rocks, according to Armstrong. Securing consent from the owners of mineshafts is key to this kind of exploration, as trespassing in seemingly abandoned mines can result in criminal charges. Using a pickax and their hands to shift through rubble, the explorers-who didn’t set out in search of denim specifically-pull pair after pair of jeans from the dirt.Īrmstrong gave Schlichting and Romo permission to survey the mineshaft with the understanding that anything they found would end up in the nonprofit Castle Dome museum. Upon reaching the bottom of the shaft, Romo removes his harness and climbs a short ladder to a sublevel where Schlichting awaits. Schlichting’s YouTube video, which has garnered more than 1.5 million views since February 2020, begins with his colleague Gabe Romo descending into the 250-foot mineshaft, as captured by a GoPro helmet camera. “A one-time finding of seven pairs of denim pants, including the riveted Levi’s 201 waist overalls, is phenomenal,” she says. “She carried around for two hours like they were a little kid in her arms,” says Armstrong.īased on details of the denim’s design, including a single back pocket (the company only added a second back pocket to its pants in 1901), Panek deemed the jeans genuine 19th-century Levi’s. historian Tracey Panek, who drove out from California.
To authenticate the Levi’s, Armstrong turned to Levi Strauss & Co. He did, however, find a pair of Levi’s 201s-a lower-priced version of the classic 501s, created around 1890 with cheaper buttons and a linen label rather than leather-on his first rappel to the shaft two decades ago. (The latter two brands are now defunct.)Īllen Armstrong, CEO and founder of the Castle Dome museum, mine and ghost town where Schlichting made his find, had previously explored the same shaft but missed the trove of jeans, coming within 20 feet of it. The cache included two pairs each from Levi Strauss & Co., Stronghold and Pacific Coast, and one pair from Triumph. Early in 2020, Schlichting found seven pairs of 1800s jeans in an abandoned mineshaft in Yuma, Arizona. The relative rarity of historic denim makes a discovery by YouTuber Frank Schlichting even more significant. In 2018, an 1893 pair of Levi’s set the record for the world’s most expensive pair of jeans, selling at auction for nearly $100,000 earlier this month, a pair of 1880s Levi’s discovered in an abandoned mineshaft fetched $87,400 (including buyer’s premium).
But while denim is ubiquitous today, surviving examples of 19th-century jeans are few and far between.
Now known as blue jeans, the modern descendants of Davis’ invention evoke the gritty era of standing in a river to pan for gold or entering a mineshaft to pick away at rock. The pair filed a patent in May 1873, with Davis noting that his method “avoid a large amount of trouble in mending portions of seams which are subjected to constant strain.” A Latvian-born immigrant living in Reno, Davis soon partnered with Levi Strauss, the dry goods merchant who’d provided the canvas cloth, to launch his product on a large scale. When Nevada-based tailor Jacob Davis received an order for a hardy pair of work pants in December 1870, he decided to experiment with a new design, reinforcing the seams and pockets of canvas trousers with copper rivets.
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