Roughing It
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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
It was somewhere in the neighborhood of Mono Lake that the marvellous
Whiteman cement mine was supposed to lie. Every now and then it would be
reported that Mr. W. had passed stealthily through Esmeralda at dead of
night, in disguise, and then we would have a wild excitement—because he
must be steering for his secret mine, and now was the time to follow
him. In less than three hours after daylight all the horses and mules
and donkeys in the vicinity would be bought, hired or stolen, and half
the community would be off for the mountains, following in the wake of
Whiteman. But W. would drift about through the mountain gorges for days
together, in a purposeless sort of way, until the provisions of the
miners ran out, and they would have to go back home. I have known it
reported at eleven at night, in a large mining camp, that Whiteman had
just passed through, and in two hours the streets, so quiet before,
would be swarming with men and animals. Every individual would be trying
to be very secret, but yet venturing to whisper to just one neighbor
that W. had passed through. And long before daylight—this in the dead of
Winter—the stampede would be complete, the camp deserted, and the whole
population gone chasing after W.
The tradition was that in the early immigration, more than twenty years
ago, three young Germans, brothers, who had survived an Indian massacre
on the Plains, wandered on foot through the deserts, avoiding all trails
and roads, and simply holding a westerly direction and hoping to find
California before they starved, or died of fatigue. And in a gorge in
the mountains they sat down to rest one day, when one of them noticed a
curious vein of cement running along the ground, shot full of lumps of
dull yellow metal. They saw that it was gold, and that here was a
fortune to be acquired in a single day. The vein was about as wide as a
curbstone, and fully two thirds of it was pure gold. Every pound of the
wonderful cement was worth well-nigh $200.
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Each of the brothers loaded himself with about twenty-five pounds of it,
and then they covered up all traces of the vein, made a rude drawing of
the locality and the principal landmarks in the vicinity, and started
westward again. But troubles thickened about them. In their wanderings
one brother fell and broke his leg, and the others were obliged to go on
and leave him to die in the wilderness. Another, worn out and starving,
gave up by and by, and laid down to die, but after two or three weeks of
incredible hardships, the third reached the settlements of California
exhausted, sick, and his mind deranged by his sufferings. He had thrown
away all his cement but a few fragments, but these were sufficient to
set everybody wild with excitement. However, he had had enough of the
cement country, and nothing could induce him to lead a party thither. He
was entirely content to work on a farm for wages. But he gave Whiteman
his map, and described the cement region as well as he could and thus
transferred the curse to that gentleman—for when I had my one accidental
glimpse of Mr. W. in Esmeralda he had been hunting for the lost mine, in
hunger and thirst, poverty and sickness, for twelve or thirteen years.
Some people believed he had found it, but most people believed he had
not. I saw a piece of cement as large as my fist which was said to have
been given to Whiteman by the young German, and it was of a seductive
nature. Lumps of virgin gold were as thick in it as raisins in a slice
of fruit cake. The privilege of working such a mine one week would be
sufficient for a man of reasonable desires.
A new partner of ours, a Mr. Higbie, knew Whiteman well by sight, and a
friend of ours, a Mr. Van Dorn, was well acquainted with him, and not
only that, but had Whiteman’s promise that he should have a private hint
in time to enable him to join the next cement expedition. Van Dorn had
promised to extend the hint to us. One evening Higbie came in greatly
excited, and said he felt certain he had recognized Whiteman, up town,
disguised and in a pretended state of intoxication. In a little while
Van Dorn arrived and confirmed the news; and so we gathered in our cabin
and with heads close together arranged our plans in impressive whispers.
We were to leave town quietly, after midnight, in two or three small
parties, so as not to attract attention, and meet at dawn on the
“divide” overlooking Mono Lake, eight or nine miles distant. We were to
make no noise after starting, and not speak above a whisper under any
circumstances. It was believed that for once Whiteman’s presence was