Beside the museum building, at the front, is an old "Mucking Machine" which was used to load and haul blasted ore from a mine, in this case most likely a gold mine, as there was quite a bit of gold mining activity in the area from the mid nineteenth century on. After ore was blasted loose in a mine, mucking machines like this one would scoop up loose ore with a large scoop or shovel and toss it back into an ore car following the mucker.
As compressed air was available in the mine to operate rock drills, these were powered by compressed air as well. The compressed air was produced by compressors on the surface and carried to the equipment by, sometimes, miles of hoses.
Though it looks as though it could be 100 plus years old, this mucker wouldn't be older than 79 years old, as of 2017, as the EIMCO Rocker Shovel Loader Model 12-B, the world's first mucking machine, wasn't patented until 1938. The combined brainchild of Edwin Burt Royle and John Spence Finlay, both working in the '30s for the Anaconda company in the North Lilly Mine in Eureka, the loader revolutionized mining around the world. It could do in 25 seconds what it had taken one man an hour to accomplish, that is, loading one ore car. The EIMCO loader was so revolutionary that it was named a Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Eureka, MT, BTW, is only about 250 road miles northwest of Deer Lodge.
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