إعـــــــلان

تقليص
لا يوجد إعلان حتى الآن.

Mark Twain's Prospecting Adventures

تقليص
X
 
  • تصفية - فلترة
  • الوقت
  • عرض
إلغاء تحديد الكل
مشاركات جديدة

  • Mark Twain's Prospecting Adventures















    Few people know that Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) was interested in prospecting for silver and gold before he ever became an author. Fewer still know that he only got into writing because he couldn't make a living as a miner and prospector. Later, he wrote a number of humorous stories about his times out in the Nevada deserts and the mother lode country in his book "Roughing It". Other interesting stories and thoughts about his time in Northern California and Nevada were published in various short stories and non-fiction books.
    There is no doubt that in seeing the millions made by the men around him when he arrived at Carson City in the 1860s gave him a bad case of gold and silver fever. A lot of what he had to say is still relevant and interesting to the modern reader. So whether you are hoping to learn about prospecting from an old time prospector, or just want to see how the pioneer miners accomplished their work, take a look at what Twain had to say, I think you will find it worth your time and give you a unique perspective.
    I still prospect some of the same areas where Mark Twain looked for riches, although things have changed a lot in the last 140 years. Much of the gold country, however, is just as beautiful as it was for those original pioneers. Listed below is one story I wrote summing up Twains experiences, and 9 others which are written in his own words. For each of Twain's stories, I have inserted my own comments and explanations about the history and background of the times to help the reader.



    Sam the Tenderfoot Prospector




    There were many thousands of tenderfoot, greenhorn prospectors that came out west in the 1860s and 70s. Some came to make their fortunes, some came to flee other problems back east, and some just came for the adventure. Probably every one had a tale to tell, but one of these adventurous individuals was a young man named Sam Clemens, and this is his true story. In his early 20’s, Sam had fulfilled his childhood dream of becoming a riverboat captain, and was making a very fine salary until the civil war broke out. In fact, when he was a riverboat captain, he boasted that he made more money that the Vice President of the USA. Unfortunately, Civil War military blockades ended the lucrative river trade along the Mississippi River, and the once wealthy Sam found himself out of a job. Good things seemed to pop up for Sam, and in the spring of 1861, Sam’s older brother Orion was appointed by president Abe Lincoln as secretary to the Governor of the new Territory of Nevada. Sam decided to tag along as Orion’s assistant. Luckily for us, Sam wrote letters to his family back east and kept notes of his adventure – he later wrote a book about his years living in the wild west.
    It was quite an adventure in those days to come out west – the railroad did not yet reach across the continent. Sam packed his belongings and traveled for weeks in a stagecoach, hearing stories of bloodthirsty desperados, and seeing sights and meeting people he never would have previously imagined.
    Among the first things Sam noticed on his arrival in Carson City were the beautiful horses and the amazing horsemanship of the local residents. Sam resolved to buy his first horse. A few days later, an auctioneer came flying through town on a powerful steed that caught everyone’s eye – he called it a genuine Mexican Plug. Sam decided to bid and won the horse but later found out that he was only partly tamed and barely rideable. Sam said that for years that horse held the speed record in Carson City for a mile and three quarters, as he simply left out the three quarters and did only the mile – jumping over fences, poles, scattering small children and generally throwing up dust storms. Sam tried to loan the horse out, but folks told him that earthquakes were common enough on the west coast and they didn’t want to ride one. The horse ate huge amounts of food and hay was very expensive. Sam realized he needed to get rid of the horse. After found he was unable to sell it because everyone knew his horse, he finally gave it away to a passing emigrant stranger who led the beast out of town.
    Sam described the afternoon winds in northern Nevada, also known as the Washoe Zephyr, as a “soaring rift of dust, about the size of the United States set up edgewise” which contained “things strange to the upper air – things living and dead” soaring among the billowing clouds of dust. It sets up office about 2pm on most summer afternoons, and in those days of dirt streets, the town of Carson City basically disappeared in the dust for as long as the Zephyr was in business.
    A very serious disadvantage of his job as Secretary to the secretary was the fact that there was no salary! Living out west was more expensive than back east, and without a job or source of income, Sam needed to find something to bring some money in. He worked various odd jobs, but nothing ever really “clicked”.
    Sam read the local newspapers and was very interested in the reports of prospectors discovering fortunes all across Nevada on almost a daily basis. The headlines screamed of the riches of the Nevada mountains. It would be hard for any man to resist that type of excitement, and by and by, Sam was smitten with “the Fever”. Not knowing much of prospecting, Sam and a few acquaintances hooked up with an old sourdough prospector with years of experience. One of the booming areas of the state at that time was Humboldt county. The Sheba mine was pumping out millions of dollars worth of silver and new discoveries were being made regularly. They decided to begin their prospecting at Unionville, right in the middle of the Humboldt range. So Sam and his companions traveled by wagon across the 40 mile desert to seek the riches of the hills.
    On their two week desert journey all they could do was dream of the potential wealth waiting for them at the end of the trail. So on their arrival, Sam stole away from his companions at his first convenient chance and began looking around, at first pretending only to “go out for a smoke”. After a short walk closely examining every stone at his feet, a sparkle in a minor drainage ravine caught his eye. It was golden! He picked up the flake and examined it closely. No doubt about that golden color! He looked back at the ravine and spotted another golden flake. Then another and another – within a half hour he had picked up a small handful of the golden treasure. He laughed to himself that he and his friends had come to prospect for lowly silver, when here in this little ravine was an abundance of Gold! What luck – he had spent just a bit more than an hour prospecting and he had already found his fortune. The wild newspaper stories seemed to him now to be too conservative! He spied around to be certain that no one was watching him, but the coast was clear. His mind drifted off to how he would be spending his new found wealth. After a time, he decided to return to his companions and share his exciting discovery. He beat around the bush a bit at first, but finally let his friends know that he had made an important discovery. He spread out his handful of glittering golden flakes before them and asked “what you think of that?” His greenhorn friends looked and beamed with excitement. But old Mr. Ballou, the long time prospector they had taken along to teach them about prospecting, was not so impressed. Why, what do I think of it? He said with disgust – its nothing but a lot of nasty mica rubbish that isn’t worth 10 cents an acre. Sam was crushed! His sparkling “gold” flakes were nothing but mica. It was there and then that Sam learned that gold in its natural state did not glitter and sparkle, and that mica did.
    .-g.-.

    In time, Sam and his friends did find a couple of mineralized quartz veins. They drilled and dug short shafts and adits to prospect them, but none revealed any particular abundance of wealth, and Sam learned that mining was tough work! He liked prospecting, but Sam determined that hand drilling, blasting and shoveling the rock – the life of the miner – was not for him. In time, he and his friends concluded that their chances of a rich discovery were small and Sam returned to the Carson City area.

    In spite of his lack of prospecting success at Humboldt, Sam was still very much taken up with the riches of Nevada mining and invested his savings and even some of his sister’s money, hoping to strike it rich in mining stocks. The gold and silver boomtown of Aurora in the Esmerelda mining District was yielding great riches at that time and Sam decided to go to Aurora to check up on some of his investments. Some of the mining companies were shady at best, with one company collecting assessments from its investors to put in a 300 foot exploration adit into a small hill only 25 feet wide (the mine directors were living off the assessments and had no intention to complete the work). Sam felt that if he checked things out in person, he could find which companies were the best ones to invest his money with.
    Sam found out his investments in Esmerelda were worthless and not long after he arrived, his bankroll had run out. He was again looking to find money for the source of his next meal. In desperation, he decided to go to work in one of the local quartz mills for $10 per week plus room and board. If Sam didn’t like the hard work of mining, he found that the crushing, washing and smelting of the silver mill was even worse! Sam wrote that if only Adam could have gone out of the Garden of Eden directly into a quartz mill, then he would have realized the full impact of his punishment! Those mills often recovered only about two thirds of the metal in the ores, and it was common to screen and then re-treat the ores. Sam said that perhaps the worst duty at the mill was the shoveling and screening of dry dusty tailings in the hot Nevada sun. After a week, he could no longer stand it, and Sam went into the foreman’s office and requested a raise. The foreman said that Sam was being paid a fair wage, but asked what he wanted. Sam told him that he’d like to ask for more, but $400,000 per week seemed like a reasonable amount. He was promptly fired and ordered off the property!
    While Sam was in the Esmerelda District, he teamed up with Calvin Higbie, an experienced prospector. Calvin, Sam and other friends staked a number of claims in the area, and were optimistic that they would soon make a big strike. In those days, before the 1872 mining law was enacted, the normal lode claim gave the owner rights to that vein only. If other veins had their apex on that claim, someone else could claim that other vein. The Wide West, one of the larger mines in town, suddenly started producing rich ore, but of a character different than the normal ore which they had produced in the past. The rich ore was worth more than a dollar a pound! Sam’s partner Calvin Higbie, was very familiar with the ores produced in all the mines of that area. After studying the new ore, Higbie decided the new ore must be coming from a different vein. One night Higbie sneaked into the mine and confirmed it – the new rich ore was coming from another vein. They took some measurements and determined it was a blind lead (vein that does not come to the surface) and open to claim! According to the local mining law, they had 10 days to do development work on the vein, file the paperwork and complete their claim. They publicly announced their find and there was nothing the big mining company could do. Sam and his partner were suddenly millionaires and became the toast of the town! People offered to give them things or make loans only on their word. A day later, Sam got an urgent message that an old friend was seriously ill, near death. Sam left at once, but left a message for Higbie about completing the development work on the vein, because he would not be there to help. What Sam didn’t know was that his partner Higbie had also been suddenly been called away – and left a note for Sam asking him to complete the development work. By the time either had returned, it was too late to complete the work and the big company filed over their claim and taken possession of the rich “blind lead” that they had discovered.
    .

    After briefly being a millionaire and the toast of the town, Sam was really down on his luck. His mining investments had become worthless. He had lost his rich strike in Esmerelda, and his bankroll had run out. He was basically penniless, and didn’t even have enough money to travel back to Carson City where his brother lived. He’d given up on finding work as a miner or mill operator. He had hit rock bottom, but things were about to change. Sam was an opinionated individual, and for some time he had been periodically writing humorous letters to the editor of the Territorial Enterprise Newspaper in Virginia City to let his voice be heard. Mr. Goodman, the editor, recognized the quality of his writing and contacted Sam to offer him a job at $25 per week, and at that point Sam really needed it. So it was only after he was running out of choices, without money and without food, that he pursued other options to keep himself from begging or starving. It was a last choice - He wanted to be a prospector or a mining investor, and he never really intended to become a writer. He was still very hopeful for the mining claims he held at Esmerelda, hopeful that he could strike it rich there. It actually took him several weeks to decide to leave his Esmerelda claims behind, but Sam eventually accepted the job, and without any other means, he was forced to walk the 130 miles from Esmerelda to Virginia City on foot.

    Sometimes fate has a way of working things out, and in the long run, becoming an author worked out quite well for Sam. It took some time, but he became very successful and even famous as an author, far better than he ever did as a prospector. In fact to this day, a good number of people still consider him the greatest author America has ever produced. In those days, it was popular for an author to write under a made up “pen name”. One of the best known writers for the Territorial Enterprise at that time was a guy who had chosen the humorous “pen” name of “Dan DeQuille”. Sam’s initial letters to the editor were written under the pen name of “Josh”, but Sam chose a new one when he went to work as an employee. So what pen name did Sam choose for himself? Well, I mentioned that Sam had been a riverboat captain on the Mississippi River before the civil war, a respected and well paying job. Remembering those happier days, he chose a pen name relating to the terms of riverboat operations. In those days, river pilots called out to mark the depth of the water in fathoms – it was important to avoid shallow water and sand bars where riverboats could run aground. The minimum safe water depth was 2 fathoms and when that depth was reached the pilot called out “MARK TWAIN”. Sam chose the pen name of Mark Twain, and now you know (so they say) the rest of the story. Sam greatly enjoyed his time at the Territorial Enterprise and often took the opportunity to visit the mines when he had a chance. Mine owners commonly gave him shares of stock to write articles about their mine, and Sam ended up with a trunk full of stock, far more than he had ever owned when he was an investor! His gift stocks were so valuable that sometimes he didn’t even bother to pick up his salary from the newspaper. Sam was very popular and soon became a leader among the reporters of the Territorial Enterprise. However, in time his strong opinions got him in trouble with the editor and Sam left to visit some friends who were prospecting for pocket gold in the mother lode country – even after working as an author he was still bitten by the gold fever. It was there that he wrote the nationally famous tale of the Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. The tale became famous across the country. Because of his widening fame as a writer, Sam became a traveling reporter and went to Hawaii, Europe and the middle east, writing humorous weekly accounts of the things he saw there. Although Sam ended up marrying and settling down in the eastern US, his experiences in the untamed western US gave him writing material for the rest of his life.
    After Sam left Aurora, the Wide West vein that Sam and his friend “discovered” continued to produce rich ore for may years and has a recorded production of nearly $600,000. In spite of its very remote location, Aurora survived as a town into the early 1920’s but no one has lived in the town since then. A revival occurred in the Esmerelda area in recent years, though the town of Aurora was not re-established. The old mines around the town however, were still producing significant gold and silver until just recently. Large amounts of low grade ores surrounding the old bonanza deposits were mined and heap leached in the 1980s and 1990s.
    Unionville never became a ghost and a couple dozen folks still call it home. The waters of Buena Vista Creek still flow down the canyon and keep the little oasis of Unionville green and beautiful. Big cottonwood trees planted in the early days still cast their cool shade in the summer. Even though Sam’s “big discovery” there was only mica, there actually is a little bit of real placer gold around Unionville. A remote bed and breakfast hotel there still serves the adventurous traveler, including a few movie stars and celebrities who have stayed there. Although it has been more than 140 years since Sam prospected there, the Humboldt Range still produces millions of ounces of silver each year, as Couer Rochester operates it gigantic heap leach facility at Rochester, only a few miles south of where Sam and his friends prospected.








    This is how Virginia City Nevada looked in the 1860s when Sam Clemens was a reporter there. As small as it was, Virginia City was one of the largest towns on the west coast.







    Mark Twain Prospected for silver ore in the Humboldt range of Northern Nevada. Big Mines in that area still produce millions of ounces of silver every year.


  • #2




    Silver Bullion Beyond Belief









    Since I desire, in this chapter, to say an instructive word or two about the silver-mines, the reader may take this fair warning and skip, if he chooses. The year 1863 was perhaps the very top blossom and culmination of the "flush times." Virginia swarmed with men and vehicles to that degree that the place looked like a very hive - that is when one's vision could pierce through the thick fog of alkali dust that was generally blowing in summer. I will say, concerning this dust, that if you drove ten miles through it, you and your horses would be coated with it a sixteenth of an inch thick and present an outside appearance that was a uniform pale-yellow color, and your buggy would have three inches of dust in it, thrown there by the wheels. The delicate scales used by the assayers were enclosed in glass cases intended to be air-tight, and yet some of this dust was so impalpable and so invisibly fine that it would get in, somehow, and impair the accuracy of those scales.

    Speculation ran riot, and yet there was a world of substantial business going on, too. All freights were brought over the mountains from California (one hundred and fifty miles) by pack-train partly, and partly in huge wagons drawn by such long mule-teams that each team amounted to a procession, and it did seem, sometimes, that the grand combined procession of animals stretched unbroken from Virginia to California. Its long route was traceable clear across the deserts of the territory by the writhing serpent of dust it lifted up. By these wagons, freights over that hundred and fifty miles were $200 a ton for small lots (same price for all express matter brought by stage), and $100 a ton for full loads. One Virginia firm received one hundred tons of freight a month, and paid $10,000 a month freightage. In the winter the freights were much higher. All the bullion was shipped in bars by stage to San Francisco (a bar was usually about twice the size of a pig of lead and contained from $1,500 to $3,000, according to the amount of gold mixed with the silver), and the freight on it (when the shipment was large) was one and a quarter per cent. of its intrinsic value. So, the freight on these bars probably averaged something more than $25 each. Small shippers paid two per cent. There were three stages a day, each way, and I have seen the outgoing stages carry away a third of a ton of bullion each, and more than once I saw them divide a two-ton lot and take it off. However, these were extraordinary events. ^1 Two tons of silver bullion would be in the neighborhood of forty bars, and the freight on it over $1,000. Each coach always carried a deal of ordinary express matter besides, and also from fifteen to twenty passengers at from $25 to $30 a head. With six stages going all the time, Wells, Fargo & Co.'s Virginia City business was important and lucrative.

    [Footnote 1: Mr. Valentine, Wells-Fargo's agent, has handled all the bullion shipped through the Virginia office for many a month. To his memory - which is excellent - we are indebted for the following exhibit of the company's business in the Virginia office since the first of January, 1862: From January 1st to April 1st, about $270,000 worth of bullion passed through that office; during the next quarter, $570,000; next quarter, $800,000; next quarter, $956,000; next quarter, $1,275,000; and for the quarter ending on the thirtieth of last June, about $1,600,000. Thus in a year and a half, the Virginia office only shipped $5,330,000 in bullion. During the year 1862 they shipped $2,615,000, so we perceive the average shipments have more than doubled in the last six months. This gives us room to promise for the Virginia office $500,000 a month for the year 1863 (though perhaps, judging by the steady increase in the business, we are underestimating, somewhat). This gives us $6,000,000 for the year. Gold Hill and Silver City together can beat us - we will give them $10,000,000. To Dayton, Empire City, Ophir, and Carson City, we will allow an aggregate of $8,000,000, which is not over the mark, perhaps, and may possibly be a little under it. To Esmeralda we give $4,000,000. To Reese River and Humboldt $2,000,000, which is liberal now, but may not be before the year is out. So we prognosticate that the yield of bullion this year will be about $30,000,000. Placing the number of mills in the territory at one hundred, this gives to each the labor of producing $300,000 in bullion during the twelve months. Allowing them to run three hundred days in the year (which none of them more than do), this makes their work average $1,000 a day. Say the mills average twenty tons of rock a day, and this rock worth $50 as a general thing, and you have the actual work of our one hundred mills figured down "to a spot" $1,000 a day each, and $30,000,000 a year in the aggregate. - Enterprise. [A considerable overestimate. - M.T.]]
    .-g.-.
    All along under the center of Virginia and Gold Hill, for a couple of miles, ran the great Comstock silver-lode - a vein of ore from fifty to eighty feet thick between its solid walls of rock - a vein as wide as some of New York's streets. I will remind the reader that in Pennsylvania a coal vein only eight feet wide is considered ample.

    Virginia was a busy city of streets and houses above-ground. Under it was another busy city, down in the bowels of the earth, where a great population of men thronged in and out among an intricate maze of tunnels and drifts, flitting hither and thither under a winking sparkle of lights, and over their heads towered a vast web of interlocking timbers that held the walls of the gutted Comstock apart. These timbers were as large as a man's body, and the framework stretched upward so far that no eye could pierce to its top through the closing gloom. It was like peering up through the clean-picked ribs and bones of some colossal skeleton. Imagine such a framework two miles long, sixty feet wide, and higher than any church spire in America. Imagine this stately lattice-work stretching down Broadway, from the St. Nicholas to Wall Street, and a Fourth-of-July procession, reduced to pygmies, parading on top of it and flaunting their flags, high above the pinnacle of Trinity steeple. One can imagine that, but he cannot well imagine what that forest of timbers cost, from the time they were felled in the pineries beyond Washoe Lake, hauled up and around Mount Davidson at atrocious rates of freightage, then squared, let down into the deep maw of the mine and built up there. Twenty ample fortunes would not timber one of the greatest of those silver-mines. The Spanish proverb says it requires a gold-mine to "run" a silver one, and it is true. A beggar-with a silver-mine is a pitiable pauper indeed if he cannot sell.

    I spoke of the underground Virginia as a city. The Gould & Curry is only one single mine under there, among a great many others; yet the Gould & Curry's streets of dismal drifts and tunnels were five miles in extent, altogether, and its population five hundred miners. Taken as a whole, the underground city had some thirty miles of streets and a population of five or six thousand. In this present day some of those populations are at work from twelve to sixteen hundred feet under Virginia and Gold Hill, and the signal-bells that tell them what the superintendent above-ground desires them to do are struck by telegraph as we strike a fire-alarm. Sometimes men fall down a shaft, there, a thousand feet deep. In such cases, the usual plan is to hold an inquest.

    If you wish to visit one of those mines, you may walk through a tunnel about half a mile long if you prefer it, or you may take the quicker plan of shooting like a dart down a shaft, on a small platform. It is like tumbling down through an empty steeple, feet first. When you reach the bottom, you take a candle and tramp through drifts and tunnels where throngs of men are digging and blasting; you watch them send up tubs full of great lumps of stone - silver ore; you select choice specimens from the mass, as souvenirs; you admire the world of skeleton timbering; you reflect frequently that you are buried under a mountain, a thousand feet below daylight; being in the bottom of the mine you climb from "gallery" to "gallery," up endless ladders that stand straight up and down; when your legs fail you at last, you lie down in a small box-car in a cramped "incline" like a half up-ended sewer and are dragged up to daylight feeling as if you are crawling through a coffin that has no end to it. Arrived at the top, you find a busy crowd of men receiving the ascending cars and tubs and dumping the ore from an elevation into long rows of bins capable of holding half a dozen tons each; under the bins are rows of wagons loading from chutes and trap-doors in the bins, and down the long street is a procession of these wagons wending toward the silver-mills with their rich freight. It is all "done," now, and there you are. You need never go down again, for you have seen it all. If you have forgotten the process of reducing the ore in the mill and making the silver bars, you can go back and find it again in my Esmeralda chapters, if so disposed.
    Of course these mines cave in, in places, occasionally, and then it is worth one's while to take the risk of descending into them and observing the crushing power exerted by the pressing weight of a settling mountain. I published such an experience in the Enterprise, once, and from it I will take an extract:

    .
    An Hour in the Caved Mines. - We journeyed down into the Ophir mine, yesterday, to see the earthquake. We could not go down the deep incline, because it still has a propensity to cave in places. Therefore we traveled through the long tunnel which enters the hill above the Ophir office, and then by means of a series of long ladders, climbed away down from the first to the fourth gallery. Traversing a drift, we came to the Spanish line, passed five sets of timbers still uninjured, and found the earthquake. Here was as complete a chaos as ever was seen - vast masses of earth and splintered and broken timbers piled confusedly together, with scarcely an aperture left large enough for a cat to creep through. Rubbish was still falling at intervals from above, and one timber which had braced others earlier in the day, was now crushed down out of its former position, showing that the caving and settling of the tremendous mass was still going on. We were in that portion of the Ophir known as the "north mines." Returning to the surface, we entered a tunnel leading into the Central, for the purpose of getting into the main Ophir. Descending a long incline in this tunnel, we traversed a drift or so, and then went down a deep shaft from whence we proceeded into the fifth gallery of the Ophir. From a side-drift we crawled through a small hole and got into the midst of the earthquake again - earth and broken timbers mingled together without regard to grace or symmetry. A large portion of the second, third, and fourth galleries had caved in and gone to destruction - the two latter at seven o'clock on the previous evening.

    At the turn-table, near the northern extremity of the fifth gallery, two big piles of rubbish had forced their way through from the fifth gallery, and from the looks of the timbers, more was about to come. These beams are solid - eighteen inches square; first, a great beam is laid on the floor, then upright ones, five feet high, stand on it, supporting another horizontal beam, and so on, square above square, like the framework of a window. The superincumbent weight was sufficient to mash the ends of those great upright beams fairly into the solid wood of the horizontal ones three inches, compressing and bending the upright beam till it curved like a bow. Before the Spanish caved in, some of their twelve-inch horizontal timbers were compressed in this way until they were only five inches thick! Imagine the power it must take to squeeze a solid log together in that way. Here, also, was a range of timbers, for a distance of twenty feet, tilted six inches out of the perpendicular by the weight resting upon them from the caved galleries above. You could hear things cracking and giving way, and it was not pleasant to know that the world overhead was slowly and silently sinking down upon you. The men down in the mine do not mind it, however.
    Returning along the fifth gallery, we struck the safe part of the Ophir incline, and went down it to the sixth; but we found ten inches of water there, and had to come back. In repairing the damage done to the incline, the pump had to be stopped for two hours, and in the mean time the water gained about a foot. However, the pump was at work again, and the flood-water was decreasing. We climbed up to the fifth gallery again and sought a deep shaft whereby we might descend to another part of the sixth, out of reach of the water, but suffered disappointment, as the men had gone to dinner, and there was no one to man the windlass. So, having seen the earthquake, we climbed out at the Union incline and tunnel, and adjourned, all dripping with candle-grease and perspiration, to lunch at the Ophir office.

    During the great flush year of 1863, Nevada [claims to have] produced $25,000,000 in bullion - almost, if not quite, a round million to each thousand inhabitants, which is very well, considering that she was without agriculture and manufactures. Silver mining was her sole productive industry.

    [Footnote 1: Since the above was in type, I learn from an official source that the above figure is too high, and that the yield for 1863 did not exceed $20,000,000. However, the day for large figures is approaching; the Sutro Tunnel is to plow through the Comstock lode from end to end, at a depth of two thousand feet, and then mining will be easy and comparatively inexpensive; and the momentous matters of drainage and hoisting and hauling of ore will cease to be burdensome. This vast work will absorb many years, and millions of dollars, in its completion; but it will early yield money, for that desirable epoch will begin as soon as it strikes the first end of the vein. The tunnel will be some eight miles long, and will develop astonishing riches. Cars will carry the ore through the tunnel and dump it in the mills, and thus do away with the present costly system of double handling and transportation by mule-teams. The water from the tunnel will furnish the motive power for the mills. Mr. Sutro, the originator of this prodigious enterprise, is one of the few men in the world who is gifted with the pluck and perseverance necessary to follow up and hound such an undertaking to its completion. He has converted several obstinate Congresses to a deserved friendliness toward his important work, and has gone up and down and to and fro in Europe until he has enlisted a great moneyed interest in it there.]
    -
    Twain's comments on the Sutro tunnel are interesting, although it was completed mostly as planned, it never yielded the wealth it was supposed to. The mines fought with the Sutro company and by the time it was completed, they were mostly working levels deeper than the Sutro tunnel reached. Boom days were renewed in the 1870s, but it was due to the fantastic bonanza find in the hanging wall deposits of the Consolidated Virginia and California Mines.







    This is a photo of one of the shafts of the Gould and Curry Mine in Virginia City. It was from the 1200 foot level of this mine that a drift was run into the hanging wall of the Consolidated Virginia mine and the great hanging wall bonanza was discovered - but that great body of ore was actually discovered a couple years after Mark Twain wrote "Roughing It".

    تعليق


    • #3





      By and by, an old friend of mine, a miner, came down from one of the decayed mining-camps of Tuolumne, California, and I went back with him. We lived in a small cabin on a verdant hillside, and there were not five other cabins in view over the wide expanse of hill and forest. Yet a flourishing city of two or three thousand population had occupied this grassy dead solitude during the flush times of twelve or fifteen years before, and where our cabin stood had once been the heart of the teeming hive, the center of the city. When the mines gave out the town fell into decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared - streets, dwellings, shops, everything - and left no sign. The grassy slopes were as green and smooth and desolate of life as if they had never been disturbed. The mere handful of miners still remaining had seen the town spring up, spread, grow, and flourish in its pride; and they had seen it sicken and die, and pass away like a dream. With it their hopes had died, and their zest of life. They had long ago resigned themselves to their exile, and ceased to correspond with their distant friends or turn longing eyes toward their early homes. They had accepted banishment, forgotten the world and been forgotten of the world. They were far from telegraphs and railroads, and they stood, as it were, in a living grave, dead to the events that stirred the globe's great populations, dead to the common interests of men, isolated and outcast from brotherhood with their kind. It was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy, exile that fancy can imagine. One of my associates in this locality, for two or three months, was a man who had had a university education; but now for eighteen years he had decayed there by inches, a bearded, rough-clad, clay-stained miner, and at times, among his sighings and soliloquizings, he unconsciously interjected vaguely remembered Latin and Greek sentences - dead and musty tongues, meet vehicles for the thoughts of one whose dreams were all of the past, whose life was a failure; a tired man, burdened with the present, and indifferent to the future; a man without ties, hopes, interests, waiting for rest and the end.

      In that one little corner of California is found a species of mining which is seldom or never mentioned in print. It is called "pocket-mining," and I am not aware that any of it is done outside of that little corner. The gold is not evenly distributed through the surface dirt, as in ordinary placer-mines, but is collected in little spots, and they are very wide apart and exceedingly hard to find, but when you do find one you reap a rich and sudden harvest. There are not now more than twenty pocket-miners in that entire little region. I think I know every one of them personally. I have known one of them to hunt patiently about the hillsides every day for eight months without finding gold enough to make a snuff-box - his grocery bill running up relentlessly all the time - and then find a pocket and take out of it two thousand dollars in two dips of his shovel. I have known him to take out three thousand dollars in two hours, and go and pay up every cent of his indebtedness, then enter on a dazzling spree that finished the last of his treasure before the night was gone. And the next day he bought his groceries on credit as usual, and shouldered his pan and shovel and went off to the hills hunting pockets again happy and content. This is the most fascinating of all the different kinds of mining, and furnishes a very handsome percentage of victims to the lunatic asylum.
      .-g.-.

      Pocket-hunting is an ingenious process. You take a spadeful of earth from the hillside and put it in a large tin pan and dissolve and wash it gradually away till nothing is left but a teaspoonful of fine sediment. Whatever gold was in that earth has remained, because, being the heaviest, it has sought the bottom. Among the sediment you will find half a dozen yellow particles no larger than pinheads. You are delighted. You move off to one side and wash another pan. If you find gold again, you move to one side further, and wash a third pan. If you find no gold this time, you are delighted again, because you know you are on the right scent. You lay an imaginary plan, shaped like a fan, with its handle up the hill - for just where the end of the handle is, you argue that the rich deposit lies hidden, whose vagrant grains of gold have escaped and been washed down the hill, spreading farther and farther apart as they wandered. And so you proceed up the hill, washing the earth and narrowing your lines every time the absence of gold in the pan shows that you are outside the spread of the fan; and at last, twenty yards up the hill your lines have converged to a point - a single foot from that point you cannot find any gold. Your breath comes short and quick, you are feverish with excitement; the dinner-bell may ring its clapper off, you pay no attention; friends may die, weddings transpire, houses burn down, they are nothing to you; you sweat and dig and delve with a frantic interest - and all at once you strike it! Up comes a spadeful of earth and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and sprays of gold. Sometimes that one spadeful is all - $500. Sometimes the nest contains $10,000, and it takes you three or four days to get it all out. The pocket-miners tell of one nest that yielded $60,000 and two men exhausted it in two weeks, and then sold the ground for $10,000 to a party who never got $300 out of it afterward.

      The hogs are good pocket-hunters. All the summer they root around the bushes, and turn up a thousand little piles of dirt, and then the miners long for the rains; for the rains beat upon these little piles and wash them down and expose the gold, possibly right over a pocket. Two pockets were found in this way by the same man in one day. One had $5,000 in it and the other $8,000. That man could appreciate it, for he hadn't had a cent for about a year.

      In Tuolumne lived two miners who used to go to the neighboring village in the afternoon and return every night with household supplies. Part of the distance they traversed a trail, and nearly always sat down to rest on a great boulder that lay beside the path. In the course of thirteen years they had worn that boulder tolerably smooth, sitting on it. By and by two vagrant Mexicans came along and occupied the seat. They began to amuse themselves by chipping off flakes from the boulder with a sledgehammer. They examined one of these flakes and found it rich with gold. That boulder paid them eight hundred dollars afterward. But the aggravating circumstance was that these "Greasers" knew that there must be more gold where that boulder came from, and so they went panning up the hill and found what was probably the richest pocket that region has yet produced. It took three months to exhaust it, and it yielded one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The two American miners who used to sit on the boulder are poor yet, and they take turn about in getting up early in the morning to curse those Mexicans - and when it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted above the sons of men.

      I have dwelt at some length upon this matter of pocket-mining because it is a subject that is seldom referred to in print, and therefore I judged that it would have for the reader that interest which naturally attaches to novelty.
      .

      At the end of two months we had never "struck" a pocket. We had panned up and down the hillsides till they looked plowed like a field; we could have put in a crop of grain, then, but there would have been no way to get it to market. We got many good "prospects," but when the gold gave out in the pan and we dug down, hoping and longing, we found only emptiness - the pocket that should have been there was as barren as our own. At last we shouldered our pans and shovels and struck out over the hills to try new localities. We prospected around Angel's Camp, in Calaveras County, during three weeks, but had no success. Then we wandered on foot among the mountains, sleeping under the trees at night, for the weather was mild, but still we remained as centless as the last rose of summer. That is a poor joke, but it is in pathetic harmony with the circumstances, since we were so poor ourselves. In accordance with the custom of the country, our door had always stood open and our board welcome to tramping miners - they drifted along nearly every day, dumped their paust shovels by the threshold and took "pot-luck" with us - and now on our own tramp we never found cold hospitality.

      Our wanderings were wide and in many directions; and now I could give the reader a vivid description of the big trees and the marvels of the Yo Semite - but what has this reader done to me that I should persecute him? I will deliver him into the hands of less conscientious tourists and take his blessing. Let me be charitable, though I fail in all virtues else.

      Some of the phrases in the above are mining technicalities, purely, and may be a little obscure to the general reader. In "placer-diggings" the gold is scattered all through the surface dirt; in "pocket"-diggings it is concentrated in one little spot; in "quartz" the gold is in a solid, continuous vein of rock, enclosed between distinct walls of some other kind of stone - and this is the most laborious and expensive of all the different kinds of mining. "Prospecting" is hunting for a "placer"; "indications" are signs of its presence; "panning out" refers to the washing process by which the grains of gold are separated from the dirt; a "prospect" is what one finds in the first panful of dirt - and its value determines whether it is a good or a bad prospect, and whether it is worth while to tarry there or seek further.


      In this day and age, amateur prospectors armed with metal detectors attempt the same sort of hunting for rich pockets of gold - and in the very same parts of California. The process of scanning the ground with a metal detector is much easier and more efficient than the old time method of taking samples and panning them out in the nearest creek. In a matter of just a few minutes a modern prospector with a metal detector can scan more dirt that an old time could process in an entire day.





      Once rich gravel deposits were located, they were processed in sluice boxes like these mines in California's Motherlode Gold Country.





      This was an early day surface pit mine in the Calaveras Motherlode Gold Country.

      تعليق

      يعمل...
      X