Roughing It
door to fortune. I marked the spot and carried away my specimen. Up and
down the rugged mountain side I searched, with always increasing
interest and always augmenting gratitude that I had come to Humboldt and
come in time. Of all the experiences of my life, this secret search
among the hidden treasures of silver-land was the nearest to unmarred
ecstasy. It was a delirious revel.
By and by, in the bed of a shallow rivulet, I found a deposit of shining
yellow scales, and my breath almost forsook me! A gold mine, and in my
simplicity I had been content with vulgar silver! I was so excited that
I half believed my overwrought imagination was deceiving me. Then a fear
came upon me that people might be observing me and would guess my
secret. Moved by this thought, I made a circuit of the place, and
ascended a knoll to reconnoiter. Solitude. No creature was near. Then I
returned to my mine, fortifying myself against possible disappointment,
but my fears were groundless—the shining scales were still there. I set
about scooping them out, and for an hour I toiled down the windings of
the stream and robbed its bed. But at last the descending sun warned me
to give up the quest, and I turned homeward laden with wealth. As I
walked along I could not help smiling at the thought of my being so
excited over my fragment of silver when a nobler metal was almost under
my nose. In this little time the former had so fallen in my estimation
that once or twice I was on the point of throwing it away.
The boys were as hungry as usual, but I could eat nothing. Neither could
I talk. I was full of dreams and far away. Their conversation
interrupted the flow of my fancy somewhat, and annoyed me a little, too.
I despised the sordid and commonplace things they talked about. But as
they proceeded, it began to amuse me. It grew to be rare fun to hear
them planning their poor little economies and sighing over possible
privations and distresses when a gold mine, all our own, lay within
sight of the cabin and I could point it out at any moment. Smothered
hilarity began to oppress me, presently. It was hard to resist the
impulse to burst out with exultation and reveal everything; but I did
resist. I said within myself that I would filter the great news through
my lips calmly and be serene as a summer morning while I watched its
effect in their faces. I said:
“Where have you all been?”
“Prospecting.”
“What did you find?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? What do you think of the country?”
“Can’t tell, yet,” said Mr. Ballou, who was an old gold miner, and had
likewise had considerable experience among the silver mines.
“Well, haven’t you formed any sort of opinion?”
“Yes, a sort of a one. It’s fair enough here, may be, but overrated.
Seven thousand dollar ledges are scarce, though.
“That Sheba may be rich enough, but we don’t own it; and besides, the
rock is so full of base metals that all the science in the world can’t
work it. We’ll not starve, here, but we’ll not get rich, I’m afraid.”
“So you think the prospect is pretty poor?”
“No name for it!”
“Well, we’d better go back, hadn’t we?”
“Oh, not yet—of course not. We’ll try it a riffle, first.”
“Suppose, now—this is merely a supposition, you know—suppose you could
find a ledge that would yield, say, a hundred and fifty dollars a
ton—would _that_ satisfy you?”
“Try us once!” from the whole party.
“Or suppose—merely a supposition, of course—suppose you were to find a
ledge that would yield two thousand dollars a ton—would that satisfy
you?”
“Here—what do you mean? What are you coming at? Is there some mystery
behind all this?”
“Never mind. I am not saying anything. You know perfectly well there are
no rich mines here—of course you do. Because you have been around and
examined for yourselves. Anybody would know that, that had been around.
But just for the sake of argument, suppose—in a kind of general
way—suppose some person were to tell you that two-thousand-dollar ledges
were simply contemptible—contemptible, understand—and that right yonder
in sight of this very cabin there were piles of pure gold and pure
silver—oceans of it—enough to make you all rich in twenty-four hours!
Come!”
“I should say he was as crazy as a loon!” said old Ballou, but wild with
excitement, nevertheless.
“Gentlemen,” said I, “I don’t say anything—_I_ haven’t been around, you
know, and of course don’t know anything—but all I ask of you is to cast
your eye on _that_, for instance, and tell me what you think of it!” and
I tossed my treasure before them.
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There was an eager scramble for it, and a closing of heads together over
it under the candle-light. Then old Ballou said:
“Think of it? I think it is nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and
nasty glittering mica that isn’t worth ten cents an acre!”
So vanished my dream. So melted my wealth away. So toppled my airy
castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn.
Moralizing, I observed, then, that “all that glitters is not gold.”
Mr. Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my
treasures of knowledge, that _nothing_ that glitters is gold. So I
learned then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull,
unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration
of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of
the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of
mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.
CHAPTER XXIX.
True knowledge of the nature of silver mining came fast enough. We went
out “prospecting” with Mr. Ballou. We climbed the mountain sides, and
clambered among sage-brush, rocks and snow till we were ready to drop
with exhaustion, but found no silver—nor yet any gold. Day after day we
did this. Now and then we came upon holes burrowed a few feet into the
declivities and apparently abandoned; and now and then we found one or
two listless men still burrowing. But there was no appearance of silver.
These holes were the beginnings of tunnels, and the purpose was to drive
them hundreds of feet into the mountain, and some day tap the hidden
ledge where the silver was. Some day! It seemed far enough away, and
very hopeless and dreary. Day after day we toiled, and climbed and
searched, and we younger partners grew sicker and still sicker of the
promiseless toil. At last we halted under a beetling rampart of rock
which projected from the earth high upon the mountain. Mr. Ballou broke
off some fragments with a hammer, and examined them long and attentively
with a small eye-glass; threw them away and broke off more; said this
rock was quartz, and quartz was the sort of rock that contained silver.
_Contained_ it! I had thought that at least it would be caked on the
outside of it like a kind of veneering. He still broke off pieces and
critically examined them, now and then wetting the piece with his tongue
and applying the glass. At last he exclaimed:
“We’ve got it!”
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We were full of anxiety in a moment. The rock was clean and white, where
it was broken, and across it ran a ragged thread of blue. He said that
that little thread had silver in it, mixed with base metal, such as lead
and antimony, and other rubbish, and that there was a speck or two of
gold visible. After a great deal of effort we managed to discern some
little fine yellow specks, and judged that a couple of tons of them
massed together might make a gold dollar, possibly. We were not
jubilant, but Mr. Ballou said there were worse ledges in the world than
that. He saved what he called the “richest” piece of the rock, in order
to determine its value by the process called the “fire-assay.” Then we
named the mine “Monarch of the Mountains” (modesty of nomenclature is
not a prominent feature in the mines), and Mr. Ballou wrote out and
stuck up the following “notice,” preserving a copy to be entered upon
the books in the mining recorder’s office in the town.
“NOTICE.”
“We the undersigned claim three claims, of three hundred feet each (and
one for discovery), on this silver-bearing quartz lead or lode,
extending north and south from this notice, with all its dips, spurs,
and angles, variations and sinuosities, together with fifty feet of
ground on either side for working the same.”
We put our names to it and tried to feel that our fortunes were made.
But when we talked the matter all over with Mr. Ballou, we felt
depressed and dubious. He said that this surface quartz was not all
there was of our mine; but that the wall or ledge of rock called the
“Monarch of the Mountains,” extended down hundreds and hundreds of feet
into the earth—he illustrated by saying it was like a curb-stone, and
maintained a nearly uniform thickness—say twenty feet—away down into the
bowels of the earth, and was perfectly distinct from the casing rock on
each side of it; and that it kept to itself, and maintained its
distinctive character always, no matter how deep it extended into the
earth or how far it stretched itself through and across the hills and
valleys. He said it might be a mile deep and ten miles long, for all we
knew; and that wherever we bored into it above ground or below, we would
find gold and silver in it, but no gold or silver in the meaner rock it
was cased between. And he said that down in the great depths of the
ledge was its richness, and the deeper it went the richer it grew.
Therefore, instead of working here on the surface, we must either bore
down into the rock with a shaft till we came to where it was rich—say a
hundred feet or so—or else we must go down into the valley and bore a
long tunnel into the mountain side and tap the ledge far under the
earth. To do either was plainly the labor of months; for we could blast
and bore only a few feet a day—some five or six. But this was not all.
He said that after we got the ore out it must be hauled in wagons to a
distant silver-mill, ground up, and the silver extracted by a tedious
and costly process. Our fortune seemed a century away!
But we went to work. We decided to sink a shaft. So, for a week we
climbed the mountain, laden with picks, drills, gads, crowbars, shovels,
cans of blasting powder and coils of fuse and strove with might and
main. At first the rock was broken and loose and we dug it up with picks
and threw it out with shovels, and the hole progressed very well. But
the rock became more compact, presently, and gads and crowbars came into
play. But shortly nothing could make an impression but blasting powder.
That was the weariest work! One of us held the iron drill in its place
and another would strike with an eight-pound sledge—it was like driving
nails on a large scale. In the course of an hour or two the drill would
reach a depth of two or three feet, making a hole a couple of inches in
diameter. We would put in a charge of powder, insert half a yard of
fuse, pour in sand and gravel and ram it down, then light the fuse and
run. When the explosion came and the rocks and smoke shot into the air,
we would go back and find about a bushel of that hard, rebellious quartz
jolted out. Nothing more. One week of this satisfied me. I resigned.
Clagget and Oliphant followed. Our shaft was only twelve feet deep. We
decided that a tunnel was the thing we wanted.
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So we went down the mountain side and worked a week; at the end of which
time we had blasted a tunnel about deep enough to hide a hogshead in,
and judged that about nine hundred feet more of it would reach the
ledge. I resigned again, and the other boys only held out one day
longer. We decided that a tunnel was not what we wanted. We wanted a
ledge that was already “developed.” There were none in the camp.
We dropped the “Monarch” for the time being.