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 inclosed 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 (150 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 out-going 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. [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 30th 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 under estimating, 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
over estimate—M. T.]]
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 beside, and also from
fifteen to twenty passengers at from $25 to $30 a head. With six
stages going all the time, Wells, Fargo and Co.’s Virginia City
business was important and lucrative.
All along under the centre 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 pigmies, 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 and
Curry is only one single mine under there, among a great many
others; yet the Gould and 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 meantime 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.
[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.
