Copper Cliff never traded

I am looking for any information concerning a company called Copper Cliff Mines. I believe the company is a Canadian company. In particular, I am looking for any information concerning a mine outside of Cuprum, Idaho, called the Copper Cliffs Operation. The mine was purchased by Silver King Mines about 1972.

Jessica Baker

Seattle, Wash.

Copper Cliff Mines, incorporated in British Columbia in 1963, never traded publicly. The only property held by Copper Cliff of which we have a record is an 11-claim block near Alice Arm, B.C., which it explored for base and precious metals in the late 1960s. There is no mention of a property in Idaho.

It was a subsidiary of another company, Dolly Varden Mines, which was traded on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. Dolly Varden owned slightly more than 80% of Copper Cliff, and in 1974 it bought out the minority shareholders. Copper Cliff was inactive from the early 1970s.

Dolly Varden Mines was reorganized three times in the mid-1970s. In February 1976, its shares were consolidated one-for-four and the company was renamed Silver Dolly Resources. In October of the same year, there was a second consolidation, this time one-for-five, and the reorganized company was named Dolly Resources. In March 1977, Dolly Resources was renamed Dolly Varden Resources, without a change in its capitalization.

If you’ve followed us this far, you’ll be pleased to know Dolly Resources and Copper Cliff were amalgamated into a new public company, Dolly Varden Minerals, in December 1979. That amalgamation took in three other companies as well: Yorkshire Resources, Yorkshire Copper Mines and Kitsault Silver Mines. The company had its principal projects in the Kitsault Valley in B.C. (The two Yorkshires didn’t have any properties in Yorkshire, but we suppose the name was catchy.)

Dolly Varden Minerals became New Dolly Varden Minerals (NDV-V) in 1992. It still has its Kitsault properties, and through a subsidiary, Pyroil Resources (PYR-V), in which it owns 64%, it has an indirect interest in a claim block in the Northwest Territories currently being explored by Kennecott Canada, the exploration arm of Rio Tinto (RTP-N).

New Dolly Varden recently consolidated its shares again, this time one-for-100. The shares trade very thinly, the last trade having been executed on April 20 at 25.

That leaves your other question open — who had a mine outside Cuprum, Idaho? We don’t know, but there were three U.S. companies with similar names. There was the Copper Cliffs Mining Company, incorporated in Idaho, and another of the same name incorporated in Oregon. A third company, incorporated in Washington state, was called the Copper Cliff Copper Mining Company. All of these companies are listed as being inactive — the Idaho and Washington companies had vanished by the late 1940s, and the Oregon company by the late 1960s.

The information we have available on Silver King Mines (a Utah company) does not show anything about a property called Copper Cliff, but there was also a company called Silver King Mining and Milling, which was based in Washington and was active in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That company did have properties near the Idaho-Washington border.