The story of the mine

Front matter

THE STORY OF THE WEST SERIES

EDITED BY RIPLEY HITCHCOCK yfte Story of m Ulest Series.

Edited by Ripley Hitchcock.

Contents

CHAPTER

I. — Miners and mining camps

II. — A LAND OP PRECIOUS METALS ,

Chapter I. Miners And Mining Camps

This book is not a technical treatise upon the mining industry. It is only an attempt to describe in a clear and simple way some of the every-day features, as well as some of the unusual things, that belong to mines, keeping constantly in view the purely human elements of the story.

Many writers go into the mining camps of the AVest and endeavour, after various fashions with varying degrees of success, to fix in words the changing life of those camps. More often than otherwise the resulting poem, story, or sketch rings false; it is overwrought and passionate; it lacks the simple emotions; pistols and bandits abound in a nickel-novel atmosphere. Things that are on the surface of mining-camp life are easy to see, but no one can give even this a reality unless he understands the people and the occupation by that which is more than study — the sympathy and affection born from years of close fellowship.

I remember an old Nevadan silver freighter who

walked all day long for many successive weeks, month i^,

and years beside his high ore wagon across the Nevada

desert. He was one of brave old Dr. Gallv's companions; lie had read those rough, breez}', genuinely frontier articles that " Single-line " used to publish in mountain newspapers; he knevv^ the whole IHad of the Nevada fighting editors by heart. I remember well how slow, simple, and methodical was this old American silver freighter, patiently plodding back and forth over a land of desolation, placidly sorting out liis ideas until they were as sweet and real as Avinds from Sierra pine forests.

Said he, one uiglit in camp, " I had an odd notion lately. I thought that perhaps one of these days, when all the frontiersmen have been dead a hundred thousand years, the stories that will be written and believed about them will be much like those of the demigods." My old freighter could have shown a college degree if he had cared to (which he never did), and he knew his mythology as well as Leland knows liis gipsies.

" Some fellow, I don't know who," the silver freighter continued, " has got to stand right out from the ruck some of these days to represent all the pioneering that has been done by hundreds and thousands of us for generations on this continent. It might be a fellow with buckskins and Kentucky rifle, or another Tvdtli slouch hat and mule whip, or Doc. Gally's ' Big Jack Small,' the bull-puncher.

" As I was saying, it might turn out to be a plain freighter. But the freighter is simply pacldng around some one else's ore. The miner is behind him, working even harder. Out yonder, fifty miles in the desert, there's a man and his wife hammering the drill, blasting rock, opening their mine. Been there all by themselves for five or six j^ears. jMaybe their mine will peter out; maybe they'll die there, and some ore freighter will put them under the sand.

" Yes, and behind the miner there's another fellow

MINERS AND MINING CAMPS. 3

of the same sort, only more primitive. Sometimes I think he stands up taller than all of us put together. He is looking for ore, and he keeps on looking till he dies. When every mine has heen found, named, and worked, when the whole land is settled and has been fenced off into acre-lots and forties for ten thousand years, what kind of stories do you suppose men will be telling their children about the Mneteenth-Century Prospector? "

My old silver freighter leaned silent on his whipstock. Ijonely, toiling men and women of countless mining camps, not only in America but all over the world and ever since the bronze age began, seemed to become but voices that mingled in one great chorus as the separate parts of the ship in Kipling's story found, by losing themselves, the Voice o^ the "Whole. We stood side by side, and both of us were thinking of the myth spirit which works continually among men, but only at long intervals reaches full achievement. The goddess of myths has not chosen among the founders of the American colonies, splendid though their victories were; nor has she taken the buckskin-clad Boones and Crocketts, for even these, though unique, lack something of the universal. It will not be trapper, or hunter, or mountain guide, or Eemington's virile horsemen, noble and eloquent types though all these certainly are.

But what is more likely, when one considers the settlement of the far West, than that a myth of the miner shall grow, unseen, and find ultimate expression in art, song, and literature? The hills will some day be empty of gold. The waters will reclaim the deserts. New and strange conditions of life will prevail over all the lands between Atlantic and Pacific. But the groat myth story of the West will have to do with some Titan of Sierras or EocMes, leaning upon his mighty pick, as Thor upon his Mjolnir. Strong and lonely as a grizzly, the prospector will " stand right out," in the words of the silver freighter, " to represent all the pioneers."

Far enough are we from any immediate apotheosis of the much-enduring miner, who is the last of men to magnify his calling. If, now, we endeavour to select some group of mines, or some mining period of especial importance, which shall fitly illustrate the more brilliant achievements of miners, we shall have many claimants to consider. One might even find great and characteristic groups of classic mines in Mexico and South America, such as the Sierra Madre with its authenticated yield of more than $800,000,000, or the still more famous Potosi, which in three and a half centuries poured forth about $1,400,000,000 in gold and silver. The Spanish American is a little-understood fellowcreature, Avith an especially " good nose for silver," as the saying goes. Some one will come along, sooner or later, who has carried ore in rawhide bags up the slippery, notched posts that the Mexicans call ladders, who has summered and wintered with Jose and Juan, and who knows their pet superstitions, their hereditary and acquired mine lore. Then we shall have the quaint and pretty story of the Mexican mine, but the story herein told must keep to more familiar ground.

In the United States there has never been a more dramatic episode than the Californian gold rush of 1 848-' 50 — an episode that is in its way unique, the very epitome of the whole history of placer mining. After California were the gold placers of Colorado, Idaho, and [Montana — the days of Pike's Peak, Salmon Elver, and golden Helena. As trained prospectors continued to explore the Sierras, the Eocldes, and other mountains of N'orth America, these were followed in

MINERS AND MINING CAMPS. 5

swift succession by many equally important mineral discoveries. Then came the news of the famous fissure veins of " King Solomon Mountain/^ Ouray, and the whole wild San Juan region, first entered by that brave old prospector, John Baker, in 1860, but opened to the miners in 1873. Next, still- thriving Leadville won renown, with its " six log cabins '^ of August, 1877, and its "thirty-four huge smelters" of December, 1879. Work had hardly begun on the Leadville carbonates before Eichard Gird and the Scheifielin Brothers were astonishing the mining world with the rich chlorides, carbonates, and horn-silver of Tombstone.

The glories of many of these earlier camps have somewhat paled in recent years before the sudden and splendid records of new groups of mines, such as Cripple Creek and other frontier camps. Within the past five years more than a hundred promising new camps, some of them extremely profitable from " grass roots down," have been established all the way from the Mexican borders to the Yukon and its tributaries.

Nor has it been in the United States alone that mining for the precious metals has greatly increased in importance. The world's average yearly yield of gold alone during the first half of the century was only about $16,000,000, but the statisticians tell us that in 1895 about $205,000,000 in gold was taken from the mines. The details of this extraordinary increase in the world's mine-yield belong to the history of colonies, states, and nations. A few of the more striking results can be given here. Eussia, owing to Siberian discoveries, turned out $34,000,000 in gold last year, the highest amount in her records. Australasia has increased its output from $25,000,000 in 1887 to $44,- 000,000 in 1895. The total yield of Africa was about the same last year as that of Australasia. New mines are rapidly making records all the way from Patagonia to British Columbia. Even now syndicates are endeavouring to obtain entry into the mineral districts of China^ hoping to find another California.

While this book was being written, mining interests the world over were each day more potent factors in the social, industrial, and political life of the nations. New captains of industry have come to the front in lands which five years ago were strange names in the ears of men. Frontier battles have been fought, the world's peace has been seriously threatened, the whole complex machinery of modern diplomacy has been set in motion to avert disaster, and through it all one hears the vibratory ring of the miner's drill, uncovering hidden ledges in Africa, Asia, South America, and rousing the fierce gold hunger of mankind. Plot and counterplot shake the secret places of the earth to-day, and, for a time at least, the central figure of it all is the prospector, going forth to strike again the ke3rQote of Spain, of California, of Australia, of South Africa; to find and conquer a desert, waste and terrible; to build cities, and carry farmers to unpeopled valleys; to give to the new land railroads, fleets of ships, mounted police, armies, legislatures — and then to fling it down, one more colony or commonwealth, whose corner stone is based on quartz, and to go on into some untrodden wilderness.

What a strange and brilliant procession of bankers, lawyers, speculators, politicians, statesmen, cabinet ministers, lords and ladies of high degree, princes of blood royal, presidents and monarchs are, even now, pressing with reckless haste on the trail of the flannelshirted prospector! 'No great artist has ever painted a picture of this wild procession, storming so fiercely into newly discovered groups of mining camps. Each

MINERS AND MINING CAMPS. 7

generation would have different figures made prominent, but there would always be the camp followers, the outriders, the dead and dying, the utmost follies, the darkest crimes, the noblest self-sacrifices. Limitless avarice, Timon-like hate, courage great as that of the gods themselves, are in the unending march. Some few loom up along its changing lines, the briefly worshipped, the swiftly forgotten, of each fierce gold rush. Once it was some nameless Phoenician speculator, some Eoman who farmed out half the mines of Spain, some successful free-lance adventurer from India or Brazil. History has kept scant record of the thousands of Rhodeses and Barnatos, of I. D. B. robberies, of outlanders and of chartered companies, the men who rose and fell, singly or in groups, ceaseless and changing as the waves of ocean, age after age, while the miner moved on from camp to camp with tliis multitudinous army roaring sealike in his wake.

Chapter II. A Land Of Pkecious Metals

As it happens, there is one place in America where mining for the precious metals has been carried on upon so grand a scale and under such stupendous difficulties that the results of the struggle with Nature's forces have greatly affected the mining interests of the world. Whether we consider the Comstock vein of Nevada from the standpoint of its mineral yield, or study the dramatic elements in its strange history, the group of mines along its course is typical, in the most complete sense, of the dangers and vicissitudes of mining life. The term " Comstocker " is known in every country and in every language; the Comstock miner is everywhere recognised as a post-graduate among miners of other camps. World-famous mining engineers have taxed their utmost sldll in the service of the Comstock; the greatest geologists have given laborious days to the study of its marvels; travellers have gazed upon its mighty engines and threaded its vast underground cities; metropoKses have been stirred to their prof oundest depths by mining news from Comstock bonanzas. The reports of the IJnited States Geological Survey sum up many laborious volumes about the Comstock by such statements as these: ^^ Contributions of the first importance to mining science have been furnished/' " Through contentions of its rival locators, our national mining legislation was mainly shaped."

A LAND OF PRECIOUS METALS. 9

" No subsequent discoveries can rival the influence of the lode/*'

Nevada, the country of the Comstock, is a part of the wonderful plateau known as the " Great Basin/' lying between the Eockies and the Sierra Nevadas. I am indebted to Mr. S. T. Gage, of California, for knowledge of a remarkable prophecy made by Horace Greeley respecting this then-neglected region, in a speech delivered on the plaza of Placerville in the summer of 1859.

Toward the close of his address came these sentences: " Lastly, I have come across a desolate and terrible country, a land seemingly worthless forever — the Great American Desert. But I believe that the Almighty has created nothing in vain, and as I have passed over this awful region, the thought has fixed itself in my mind that, since it is certainly useless for every other purpose, it may be a land of vast mineral wealth. If that be so, it will take a hundred thousand Californian miners a hundred thousand years even to prospect it."

The rugged plateau to which Greeley alluded is from two to five thousand feet above the sea, and is between five and six hundred miles wide, becoming more narrow and sinldng toward the north and south. Nevada, a large part of Utah, and parts of Oregon and California are included within its limits. The Great Basin, whose rims are the Sierra Nevada, the Wahsatch, and the Blue Mountains of Oregon, is crossed by mountains that divide it into a group of lesser basins, such as the Humboldt, the Washoe, the Carson, and the Walker. Even the valleys of the higher portion of the plateau are five and six thousand feet above the sea, while the greater mountain peaks rise five thousand feet more.

There are extensive deserts in the Great Basin, examples of which are the famous Death Valley, the Black Eock Desert, the Sage Desert, the Desert of the Colorado sloping south and west, the Forty-Mile Desert of the Humboldt region, and the Bitter Water district of the Armagosa. Everywhere are alkali plains spotted with scanty bunch grass and miles of basaltic rock, where a few stunted junipers and thorny cacti grow. Horned toads, lizards, scorpions, tarantulas, brush rabbits, sage hens, and innumerable crickets were about all the living creatures that the pioneers found as they toiled painfully across the deserts on their way to Oregon and California.

During ancient geologic periods, when the Eockies and the Sierras were being slowly uplifted from the ocean, an immense area of deep seas holding minerals in solution were for a time inclosed in the Great Basin, and beds of salt, sulphur, mica, borax, soda, arsenic, manganese, and other minerals deposited in water, remain as relics of that inland ocean. If the basin thus formed had contained no other mountains, the great desert would have been nearly or quite impassable for many years, and the development and history of the United States would have been seriously modified by a Sahara between the Mississippi Yalley and the Pacific coast.

The problem of the method of ore distribution has interested leading geologists. According to Baron Eichtofen, immense floods of fluid matter from undercrushed and folded strata of rock were slowly forced out through fissures during the gigantic processes of mountain creation. What Prof. Joseph Le Conte calls the " submountain reservoir " of fused matter thus supplied the sheets of lava many feet thick that occur in the Great Basin. The contents of the metalliferous veins were deposited by hot alkaline waters that came

A LAND OF PRECIOUS METALS. H

up through fissures with various minerals in solution. There are many different classes of mineral-bearing veins of rock, but the desire of the quartz miner is to find a " true fissure vein.^^ By this he means one of the great breaks or fissures caused by a movement of the earth^s crust and filled with ores — that is, with slowly deposited mineral substances. Such fissure veins are often very wide, of an immense depth, and occur in parallel groups.

The mountain system, more closely examined, gridirons the country with a hundred ranges from fifty to a hundred miles long. They rise three or four thousand feet above the plateau, the passes through them are often high and difficult, and many an isolated valley, remote from civilization, lies between their peaks. History is written in the strange names of these mountain chains. Some carry the trade-mark of the American trapper or prospector, as Carson, Buckskin, Muddy, and Pancake; others are Spanish, as Cortez, Pinon, and Vegas; but by far the greatest number are Indian, as Washoe, Toano, Shoshone, Toiyabe, Toquina, Wahsatch, and Pahranagat. Between the dark, treeless, and forbidding mountain ranges are narrow plains or valleys, some only a mile wide. The melting snows keep the grass green in the ravines and supply occasional springs and rivulets along the bases of the mountains, which unite in a few small rivers, every one of which, excepting the Eio Virgin and the Owyhee, soon disappears in the ground or in some lake or depression called a sink.

The earliest maps of the Great Basin and the traditions of Spanish explorers are only important as they serve to show the source of later misconceptions on tlie part of traders and colonists. The eTohn Harris map of 1605 " seems to give," says Bancroft, " the name Quivira to a vast region which embraces Nevada in common ^yith other undefined countries/^ In this map Cahfornia is the island of Nova Albion. On the mainland, larger than Lake Superior, was the Lake of Thongo, from which two great rivers fl.owed to the Pacific. Most of its errors were perpetuated in Finley's map of 1826. According to such maps, the journey from the western base of the Rockies was through a comparatively level and well-watered country. The wandering trappers knew better than this, and mapmakers would have done well to consult rough old Jim Bridger, Captain Ashley, or such leaders of the Hudson Bay Company as Peter Ogden, who was trapping on the OT\Thee and the Humboldt long before Finley published his famous map.

But the trappers left little or no record of their wanderings, although they crossed the Sierras to the Spanish settlements, and named many a mountain peak and alpine pass in the years between 1825 and 1840. Walker, the guide, heroic William Sublette, Eat Carson, Captain Wyatt, Jedediah S. Smith, and nameless free trappers were adventurers in the Great Basin, and some of them soon carried back stories of placer gold, or even showed flakes of the precious metal when they wintered at the noisy frontier posts of the Eockies. For the most part, however, their tales were of suffering and disaster, of thirst and hunger in the deserts, and of hair-breadth escapes from hostile beasts and men.

After Fremont's explorations in 1844 and 1-^45 the main lines of travel were fairly well mapped out, and immigration went on with hardly a pause. The nomads of the Great Basin saw their hunting grounds invaded by longer lines of wagons and larger camps of white men. By 1847 the trails of the trappers had become

A LAND OF PRECIOUS METALS. 13

such pathways that no guide was needed. Books, maps, and newspaper articles began to be published, giving directions to emigrants; signboards were put up at some of the points where roads divided. Elvers of changing life were flowing out of the Mississippi Valley toward the Columbia and the Golden Gate.

The fateful year 1848 brought the discovery of gold in Marshall's mill-sluice, and in an hour after the news went abroad the number of overland emigrants began to multiply. The beaten track became a broad highway, strewn with wrecks of wagons and bones of horses and cattle. Whole families took the long and toilsome journey through Salt Lake Valley, where the Mormon faith was established, and across deserts and mountains, day after day, week after week, until the crest of the Sierras was reached and every river flowed to the Pacific. One and all were gold seekers going to the California placers to make their fortunes. Their thoughts and talk were often of mining and miners. Yet these thousands of immigrants made camp after camp in what is now Nevada without dreaming that precious metals were hidden within easy reach!