Roughing It
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CHAPTER LII.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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