I had already learned how hard and long and dismal a task it
is to burrow down into the bowels of the earth and get out the
coveted ore; and now I learned that the burrowing was only half
the work; and that to get the silver out of the ore was the
dreary and laborious other half of it. We had to turn out at six
in the morning and keep at it till dark. This mill was a
six-stamp affair, driven by steam. Six tall, upright rods of
iron, as large as a man’s ankle, and heavily shod with a mass of
iron and steel at their lower ends, were framed together like a
gate, and these rose and fell, one after the other, in a
ponderous dance, in an iron box called a “battery.” Each of these
rods or stamps weighed six hundred pounds. One of us stood by the
battery all day long, breaking up masses of silver-bearing rock
with a sledge and shoveling it into the battery. The ceaseless
dance of the stamps pulverized the rock to powder, and a stream
of water that trickled into the battery turned it to a creamy
paste. The minutest particles were driven through a fine wire
screen which fitted close around the battery, and were washed
into great tubs warmed by super-heated steam—amalgamating pans,
they are called. The mass of pulp in the pans was kept constantly
stirred up by revolving “mullers.” A quantity of quicksilver was
kept always in the battery, and this seized some of the liberated
gold and silver particles and held on to them; quicksilver was
shaken in a fine shower into the pans, also, about every half
hour, through a buckskin sack. Quantities of coarse salt and
sulphate of copper were added, from time to time to assist the
amalgamation by destroying base metals which coated the gold and
silver and would not let it unite with the quicksilver.
All these tiresome things we had to attend to constantly.
Streams of dirty water flowed always from the pans and were
carried off in broad wooden troughs to the ravine. One would not
suppose that atoms of gold and silver would float on top of six
inches of water, but they did; and in order to catch them, coarse
blankets were laid in the troughs, and little obstructing
“riffles” charged with quicksilver were placed here and there
across the troughs also. These riffles had to be cleaned and the
blankets washed out every evening, to get their precious
accumulations—and after all this eternity of trouble one third
of the silver and gold in a ton of rock would find its way to the
end of the troughs in the ravine at last and have to be worked
over again some day. There is nothing so aggravating as silver
milling. There never was any idle time in that mill. There was
always something to do. It is a pity that Adam could not have
gone straight out of Eden into a quartz mill, in order to
understand the full force of his doom to “earn his bread by the
sweat of his brow.” Every now and then, during the day, we had to
scoop some pulp out of the pans, and tediously “wash” it in a
horn spoon—wash it little by little over the edge till at last
nothing was left but some little dull globules of quicksilver in
the bottom. If they were soft and yielding, the pan needed some
salt or some sulphate of copper or some other chemical rubbish to
assist digestion; if they were crisp to the touch and would
retain a dint, they were freighted with all the silver and gold
they could seize and hold, and consequently the pan needed a
fresh charge of quicksilver. When there was nothing else to do,
one could always “screen tailings.” That is to say, he could
shovel up the dried sand that had washed down to the ravine
through the troughs and dash it against an upright wire screen to
free it from pebbles and prepare it for working over.
The process of amalgamation differed in the various mills, and
this included changes in style of pans and other machinery, and a
great diversity of opinion existed as to the best in use, but
none of the methods employed, involved the principle of milling
ore without “screening the tailings.” Of all recreations in the
world, screening tailings on a hot day, with a long-handled
shovel, is the most undesirable.
At the end of the week the machinery was stopped and we
“cleaned up.” That is to say, we got the pulp out of the pans and
batteries, and washed the mud patiently away till nothing was
left but the long accumulating mass of quicksilver, with its
imprisoned treasures. This we made into heavy, compact
snow-balls, and piled them up in a bright, luxurious heap for
inspection. Making these snow-balls cost me a fine gold
ring—that and ignorance together; for the quicksilver invaded
the ring with the same facility with which water saturates a
sponge—separated its particles and the ring crumbled to
pieces.
We put our pile of quicksilver balls into an iron retort that
had a pipe leading from it to a pail of water, and then applied a
roasting heat. The quicksilver turned to vapor, escaped through
the pipe into the pail, and the water turned it into good
wholesome quicksilver again. Quicksilver is very costly, and they
never waste it. On opening the retort, there was our week’s
work—a lump of pure white, frosty looking silver, twice as large
as a man’s head. Perhaps a fifth of the mass was gold, but the
color of it did not show—would not have shown if two thirds of
it had been gold. We melted it up and made a solid brick of it by
pouring it into an iron brick-mould.
By such a tedious and laborious process were silver bricks
obtained. This mill was but one of many others in operation at
the time. The first one in Nevada was built at Egan Canyon and
was a small insignificant affair and compared most unfavorably
with some of the immense establishments afterwards located at
Virginia City and elsewhere.
From our bricks a little corner was chipped off for the
“fire-assay”—a method used to determine the proportions of gold,
silver and base metals in the mass. This is an interesting
process. The chip is hammered out as thin as paper and weighed on
scales so fine and sensitive that if you weigh a two-inch scrap
of paper on them and then write your name on the paper with a
course, soft pencil and weigh it again, the scales will take
marked notice of the addition.
Then a little lead (also weighed) is rolled up with the flake
of silver and the two are melted at a great heat in a small
vessel called a cupel, made by compressing bone ashes into a
cup-shape in a steel mold. The base metals oxydize and are
absorbed with the lead into the pores of the cupel. A button or
globule of perfectly pure gold and silver is left behind, and by
weighing it and noting the loss, the assayer knows the proportion
of base metal the brick contains. He has to separate the gold
from the silver now. The button is hammered out flat and thin,
put in the furnace and kept some time at a red heat; after
cooling it off it is rolled up like a quill and heated in a glass
vessel containing nitric acid; the acid dissolves the silver and
leaves the gold pure and ready to be weighed on its own merits.
Then salt water is poured into the vessel containing the
dissolved silver and the silver returns to palpable form again
and sinks to the bottom. Nothing now remains but to weigh it;
then the proportions of the several metals contained in the brick
are known, and the assayer stamps the value of the brick upon its
surface.
The sagacious reader will know now, without being told, that
the speculative miner, in getting a “fire-assay” made of a piece
of rock from his mine (to help him sell the same), was not in the
habit of picking out the least valuable fragment of rock on his
dump-pile, but quite the contrary. I have seen men hunt over a
pile of nearly worthless quartz for an hour, and at last find a
little piece as large as a filbert, which was rich in gold and
silver—and this was reserved for a fire-assay! Of course the
fire-assay would demonstrate that a ton of such rock would yield
hundreds of dollars—and on such assays many an utterly worthless
mine was sold.
Assaying was a good business, and so some men engaged in it,
occasionally, who were not strictly scientific and capable. One
assayer got such rich results out of all specimens brought to him
that in time he acquired almost a monopoly of the business. But
like all men who achieve success, he became an object of envy and
suspicion. The other assayers entered into a conspiracy against
him, and let some prominent citizens into the secret in order to
show that they meant fairly. Then they broke a little fragment
off a carpenter’s grindstone and got a stranger to take it to the
popular scientist and get it assayed. In the course of an hour
the result came—whereby it appeared that a ton of that rock
would yield $1,184.40 in silver and $366.36 in gold!
Due publication of the whole matter was made in the paper, and
the popular assayer left town “between two days.”
I will remark, in passing, that I only remained in the milling
business one week. I told my employer I could not stay longer
without an advance in my wages; that I liked quartz milling,
indeed was infatuated with it; that I had never before grown so
tenderly attached to an occupation in so short a time; that
nothing, it seemed to me, gave such scope to intellectual
activity as feeding a battery and screening tailings, and nothing
so stimulated the moral attributes as retorting bullion and
washing blankets—still, I felt constrained to ask an increase of
salary. He said he was paying me ten dollars a week, and thought
it a good round sum. How much did I want?
I said about four hundred thousand dollars a month, and board,
was about all I could reasonably ask, considering the hard
times.
I was ordered off the premises! And yet, when I look back to
those days and call to mind the exceeding hardness of the labor I
performed in that mill, I only regret that I did not ask him
seven hundred thousand.
Shortly after this I began to grow crazy, along with the rest
of the population, about the mysterious and wonderful “cement
mine,” and to make preparations to take advantage of any
opportunity that might offer to go and help hunt for it.
