"You certainly started young enough in the prospecting game," said Owens, when Jim told of his birth in a mining camp, "and have you been at it all your life?" "Ever since I was big enough to twirl a pan or rock a cradle!" "How do you mean rock a cradle?" queried Clem. "I thought you were in the cradle!" "Not that kind, boy," Jim answered, "what I'm meanin' is a miner's cradle, or a rocker, as some calls it. I gradooated from one to t'other." "What's a miner's cradle, then?" "It's a scheme to make pannin' easier. Pannin' is durn hard work, Clem. You're squattin' on your hams beside a river all the day long, you got to hold a pan full o' earth an' water at arm's length an' down at an angle what nigh tears your arms out o' their sockets, an' then keep revolvin' the mixture with a circular twist "Not only that, but you got to work the sodden lumps o' dirt soft wi' your fingers, so's the grit gets right into the skin. Your hands are wet nigh all the time. The grit an' the constant washin' o' the water, in all weathers, cracks the skin all over, so's it's bleedin' most o' the time. You got to have hands like a bit o' rawhide to stand it. "The cradle does the work quicker'n' easier, but it takes three men to work it right. It looks like a child's cradle from the outside, though most o' them I've seen was made pretty rough. About six inches from the top there's a drawer, or sometimes jest a tray, with a bottom o' iron, punched wi' holes o' different sizes, accordin' to the kind o' dirt you're workin' in. If your pannin' out don't show no big grains o' gold-dust, why, you keep the holes o' the cradle small, otherwise, you got to have 'em bigger. Below that drawer is another one, slopin' like. It hasn't got no holes. It has cross-bars or cleats, what we call 'riffles,' to keep the gold from washin' away. "One man digs up the pay dirt an' chucks it in at the top o' the cradle. Another dips up "But I should think a good deal of gold would be washed away by that system," objected Clem, "surely the rocking must dash some of it over the riffles." "Some does go," Jim agreed, "but a gang can handle so much more pay dirt in a day that it more'n makes up. Three men with a cradle can handle twice as much dirt as the three men workin' separately would, each with a pan. Team work pays, in minin'—if you can trust your pardners. "Just about the time I was born, Father made pardners with five other prospectors, all pannin' on the Carson. Their claims were all in a string, one after the other, so they figures on makin' a sluice. That's jest a long trough. In richer an' more settled camps they're made of iron, length after length, all ready to be fixed together like a stove-pipe, but on the Carson, they was jest hollowed-out logs. "Bein' there was six o' them, the pardners worked three shifts, eight hours each. One man dug the dirt, wheeled it in a barrow to the head o' the sluice an' dumped it on a wooden platform. The other shoveled it into the sluice, stirred it up, an' broke up the lumps when they got pasty. Eight hours o' that was a day's work, I'm tellin'! Mother, she cooked an' washed for all six men, aside lookin' after me. Wi' meals to be got for all three shifts, she was kep' busy. "The sluice didn't stop runnin', day nor night, for a month at a stretch. Then the water in the flume was turned off, the sluice, riffles an' platform were scraped clean wi' knives, an' all six pardners panned the scrapin's. That was the clean-up. It was divided by weight o' dust into "Didn't they use any mercury at all on the Carson?" queried Owens. "After a bit, our gang did. Not until each man had a bag o' dust set aside, big enough to buy a few weeks' grub, though. They'd all got badly bit in Californy, an' quicksilver cost a lot o' money in them days." "What's the quicksilver for?" queried Clem. "To catch the gold. If you spread it on the riffles it seems to grab a hold o' 'color' like glue, an', what's more, nothin' but gold'll stick to it." "Why is that?" "I don't know," Jim answered, a bit irritably, "it does, that's all." Owens interposed. "You can't blame Jim for not knowing why, Clem," he said. "So far as that goes, I don't believe any chemist in the world can tell you exactly why quicksilver catches gold. It does, though, sure enough. But I can show you how it does it, in a way. "You know that if iron is exposed to damp air, it turns red with rust? That is due to the chumminess or the affinity of iron with oxygen. You know if silver is exposed to city air, where the "It's the same way with mercury, or, as it is generally called, quicksilver. Gold and quicksilver are chums, and the minute they get together they join to form a mixture which is called an amalgam. That's one of the great discoveries of the age. Gold-mining has taken a big jump forward since that was found out. "You can see yourself how that would work. Whether with a pan, a cradle, or a sluice, the only thing that enables a miner to separate the gold from the worthless dirt is that the gold is smaller and heavier. But suppose the gold dust is so fine as to be invisible, it will be so light as to wash away easily; if it is in fine flakes, the flakes will almost float. All that light gold would be lost in the dirt that flows out of the bottom of the sluice, the tailings, as they are called. "In the days that Jim is describing, two-thirds of the gold was lost that way. Every one, absolutely every single one of the forty-niners would have made a fortune, if the chemistry of gold had "Suppose, now, you make your sluice, cover the bottom of it and the riffles with copper plates to hold the quicksilver better, and then cover your copper with quicksilver. What happens when the dirt and water come flowing down the sluice? The riffles will catch your heavy gold, just as well as before, and the quicksilver will catch a lot of the light gold that used to escape. You've got your gold in the riffles, then, and you've got a mixture of gold and quicksilver which has formed an amalgam. "Now, the mixture has to be made to give back that gold. First of all it is pressed through canvas or buckskin in order to get rid of the liquid quicksilver, which will pass through the weave of the first and the pores of the second, leaving inside only such of it as has firmly allied itself with the gold to form the amalgam. "The next thing to do is to put this amalgam into a retort, out of which leads a long pipe, and to subject this retort to intense heat. Quicksilver is vaporized at a comparatively low temperature—for a metal. It is driven from the "But, even with the use of quicksilver on the sluice there was still 40 per cent. of the gold that got away. For many years there was no practical way of recovering this loss, and the chemists of the world tore their hair in despair. What was needed was to find some other chum of gold, even more affectionate than mercury. The chemists found this new friend, at last, in cyanide, which is a salt of prussic acid. Cyanide, Clem, is an arrant flirt, as I'll show you, in a minute. "Nowadays, the tailings, after passing over the long sluice or flume, and after having dropped the heavy gold in the riffles and given some of the light gold to the quicksilver, are led to a huge churn. There the earth and water are pounded together into a sort of slime. A wheel lifts this slime into a movable chute from which it is poured into a series of vats or tanks. These tanks con "But cyanide likes gold even better than it does potassium, and, as soon as the slime strikes the vat, the cyanide lets go the potassium and clings to the gold. Cyanide of gold is formed. So far, so good. But what the miner wants is pure gold. "The cyanide is pumped up out of those tanks into another chute, which pours it into a second lot of tanks, fastened to the side of which are large bundles of zinc shavings. The cyanide liked the gold better than the potassium, but it has the bad taste to prefer zinc even to gold. It releases the gold and flies to the embrace of the zinc. The gold, suddenly deserted of the friendship of the cyanide, powders down to the bottom of the tank, in absolutely pure form, ready to be melted down into bars. By other processes, which I won't bother you by describing now, the zinc is released from the cyanide, and the cyanide is led to its old friend the potassium, ready to begin work anew. So, you see, nothing is wasted. "This process, and this only, has made the astounding wealth of South Africa, for, as I told you, the reefs there are of very low-grade ore, so "If I'd known all that, forty years ago, I'd be a rich man now," said Jim, regretfully. "You'd have been a millionaire, ten times over," Owens agreed, "but, since it hadn't been found out, you couldn't have known it. But did you always stick to gold, Jim? That Carson River country has got more silver in it than it has gold." "Don't I know it? 'Ain't it been rubbed into me, good an' hard? Father wasn't a cussin' man, noways, but he couldn't keep his tongue in order like a man should, when he got to talkin' about silver. He threw away any amount o' high-grade silver ore, while huntin' for gold. The richest silver mine in the whole world, I reckon, was found less'n a hundred yards from where he'd been pannin'. "It was the same ol' story—he didn't know enough! Workin' hard may bring a man some money, but havin' savvy will bring him a lot more. "Right where Father was workin', he was "Every mining man has heard of the Comstock," the mine-owner replied. "Personally, I don't know a great deal about silver, although the Broken Hill mine, New South Wales, which is nearly as rich as the great Nevada deposit, is located not far from my home. I went straight from gold to coal. So I never did hear the real story of the Comstock. But you ought to know about it, Jim. Was it found by accident, too?" "Rank good luck an' rotten bad luck mixed," Jim answered. "Do I know that story! The first week's pay I ever drew was on the Comstock. An' I was born, as I told you, near enough to throw a stone right on to the Comstock outcrop. This was how it begun! "There was two prospectors, Patrick McLaughlin an' Peter O'Riley, Irishmen both, what The Miner's Sluice. Such a device as this was being worked by Jim's father when the Comstock Lode was discovered. Courtesy of Netman & Co. "Now a prospector'll wash any durn dirt he sees, an' O'Riley, while waitin' for some bacon to fry, chucked some o' the yellow an' black sand in a pan an' give it a twirl or two. You can reckon he jumped some when the pan showed color. He yelled to McLaughlin an' the two o' them got busy. Every pan showed color, not big, but enough. The cleanin' up wasn't what you'd call rich but it was steady, an' there was any amount o' pay dirt in sight. The two begin to fill their buckskin bags wi' dust, right smartly. "Then a low-down, dirty, ornery coyote of a man, Henry Comstock by name, come amblin' along. A shifty critter was Comstock, trapper, fur-trader, gambler, claim-jumper, mine-salter, sneak-thief, an' everything else. He see O'Riley "One or two other prospectors drifted up that way, though the pickin's was small. One o' them, wonderin' what the black rock might be, an' havin' a hunch it might be lead it was so heavy, put a chunk in the hands of an assayer in Placerville. "The expert couldn't believe his eyes, at first, an' thought some one was playin' a joke on him. His assay showed a value o' $3,000 per ton in silver an' $800 per ton in gold. He assayed one or two other bits, wi' the same result. Here was millions, jest beggin' to be picked up! Folks got wind of it, right away. That was in November, 1859, too late in the winter to cross the high Sierras into Nevada. "From Sacramento up the old emigrant trail to Placerville weren't no gentle stroll in winter time! From Placerville to the bottom o' Johnson Pass was a trail for timber wolves, not for humans. Snow lay thick. Winds, fit to freeze a b'ar, come a-howlin' down the high Sierras. A few men got through an' froze to death on Mount Davidson, the silver actooally ticklin' the soles o' their feet. Some got caught in slow-slides in the Johnson Pass an' their bodies didn't show up till June. A lot more died o' starvation an' exposure on the way. "That didn't keep the rest from comin'. They fair stormed the Pass. In March there was a thaw, an' the flood o' men broke through. "It was a bad crowd. Aside from decent prospectors and miners, there was a pack o' gamblers, saloon-keepers, 'bad men,' fake speculators, an' all the rest o' the human buzzards that follow on the heels of a rush. They remembered the first days o' the forty-niners, an' every bad egg in "That wasn't a minin' camp, it was a hell-hole. I've seen tough joints in my day, but Virginia City beat all. It wasn't jest the miners lost their heads, but experts, geologists, an' all, went plumb crazy. 'Twasn't much wonder. That black rock was jest one continooal bonanza. A gold mine was a fool to it. "The ore in one of the shafts—the Potosi Chimney, it was called—was rangin' steadily over a hundred dollars a ton silver, an' that shaft alone was bringin' up 650 tons a day. Three prospectors tapped the big lode at another point, near Esmeralda, worked a week an' took six thousand dollars apiece for their claims. The man who bought first rights on Esmeralda, sold them before the end or that summer, for a quarter of a million. An' yet McLaughlin an' O'Riley havin' given up their claims to Comstock, got nothin' out of it. As for Comstock, he filed a false claim of ownership which the courts wouldn' give him, an' he went down an' out. "A telegraph line was run through an' that made Virginia City ten times worse. It weren't a town o' miners, rightly, not like a gold placer camp. Silver ore needs capital to work it, an' Virginia City become a town o' loose fish, speculators, crooked brokers, an' suckers. One man sold the Eureka mine to eight different people at the same time, an' he'd never even seen the place an' didn't own a claim in it. He pocketed eighty thousand dollars in eight days an' was strung up to the limb of a pine-tree the ninth! "There was some good work done, though. Durin' 1861 an' 1862 road-makers was busy, though laborers was gettin' fancy prices. But "Then come the 'year o' nabobs,' that was '63. The Comstock Lode put out over $26,000,000 in silver bullion alone, half-a-million dollars o' silver every week in the year. By that time there was forty big minin' plants operatin' wi' steam machinery. There weren't no place for a small man any more, unless he wanted to do minin' on days' wages, an' mighty few o' the early prospectors ever got any o' the later wealth o' the Comstock. Father, he wouldn't touch silver, nohow, but he made more'n the miners did by pannin' the dirt the mines were throwin' away. They were makin' so much money out o' silver that they wouldn't bother to take out the gold. "What was worse, the big mines got down to the rock water-level. At first, they run little tunnels, what they called 'adits' from the side o' the mountain an' drained that way. That wasn't no good, much. They soon got below that. The lode got richer the farther down they went an' some o' the big companies took to pumpin' out the water. Right away, they started in to lose money. It cost more to pump than the silver was worth. The boom dropped with a thud. "Then Adolph Sutro come along. He was a big man was Sutro, one o' these here engineers folks talk about. He offered to build a drainage tunnel from the foot-hills o' the Carson Valley, just above the river smack into the heart o' the lode, a distance o' four miles, tappin' all the mines. He figured that, if it weren't done, all "Seein' things were going' so bad, the mine-owners balked at first. After a while, though, the water come in so free that they all agreed to give him two dollars a ton for all the ore raised from the mines, providin' his tunnel drained 'em all, an' providin' he fixed it so that they could get men an' material through the tunnel, instead o' having to pull it all up the shaft. It took Sutro six years to get the capital, but he got it. He begun work in '71. Toward the end o' the job the work was so hot an' tough that he doubled his rate o' wages, an' in '77, bein' eighteen years old then, I started operatin' a drill in the tunnel. I was thar on the day that we broke through." Few engineering feats in the history of mining are more famous than the making of the Sutro Tunnel. In one of the publications of the U.S. Geological Survey, Eliot Lord has told its story of perseverance and triumph. "Sutro's untiring zeal," wrote Lord, "kindled a like spirit in his co-workers. Changing shifts urged the drills on without ceasing; skilled timberers followed up the attack on the breast and "The dump at the mouth of the tunnel grew rapidly to the proportions of an artificial plateau raised above the surrounding valley slope; yet the speed of the electric currents which exploded the blasts scarcely kept pace with the impatient anxiety of the tunnel owners to reach the lode, when the extent of the great Consolidated Virginia Bonanza was reported; for every ton raised from the lode was a loss to them of two dollars, as they thought. "Urged on by zeal, pride, and natural covetousness, the miners cut their way indomitably towards the goal, though, at every step gained the work grew more painful and more dangerous. "The temperature at the face of the heading, had risen from 72° (Fahr.) at the close of the year 1873 to 83° during the two following years; though in the summer of 1875 two powerful Root blowers were constantly employed in forcing air into the tunnel. At the close of the year 1876, the indicated temperature was 90° and, on the 1st of January, 1878, the men were working in a temperature of 96°. "In spite of the air currents from the blowers, "During the months preceding the junction with the Savage Mine, the heading was cut with almost passionate eagerness. The miners were then two miles from the nearest ventilating shaft, and the heat of their working chamber was fast growing too intense for human endurance. "The pipe which applied compressed air to the drills was opened at several points and the blowers were worked to their utmost capacity. Still the mercury rose from 98° on the 1st of March 1878 to 109° on the 22nd of April, and the temperature of the rock face of the heading increased from 110° to 114°. Four shifts a day were worked instead of three, and the men could only work during a small portion of their nominal hours of labor. "Even the tough, wiry mules of the car train could hardly be driven up to the end of the tunnel and sought for fresh air not less ardently than the men. Curses, blows, and kicks could scarcely force them away from the blower-tube "Neither men nor animals could long endure work so distressing. Fortunately, the compressed air drills knew neither weariness nor pain, and churned their way to the mines without ceasing. "A blast from the Savage Mine tore an opening through the wall, in the evening of that day. The goal for which Sutro had striven so many years was in sight. He was waiting at the breach, impatient of delay, and crawled, half-naked, through the jagged opening, while the foul air of the heading was still gushing into the mine." Meanwhile, over the heads of the workers of the Sutro tunnel, a not less marvelous change had come over the Comstock Lode. This was the discovery of the Great Bonanza. After the slump of 1864 and the terrible handicap of the Then, just as two Irishmen had first found the Comstock, two other Irishmen forged to the front. These were John W. Mackay, who had begun work as a day-laborer in the mine, and James G. Fair, a young fellow who had come to Virginia City with only a few hundred dollars' capital. They made a daring team. Seizing the opportunities of the dull times, they bought property after property as it was abandoned by the owners, who declared that the great lode had "pinched out." With a third Irishman, Wm. O'Brien, and a 'Frisco miner, James C. Flood, they bought the entire stretch between the two famous mines—the Ophir and the Gould & Curry—thus forming what became known to history as the Virginia Consolidated. The four men paid $50,000 for this huge property; risking their all on the chance that deeper mining might reach the supposedly "pinched out" vein. "No discovery," wrote Lord, "to match this one had ever been made on this earth from the time when the first miner struck a ledge with his rude pick. The plain facts are as marvelous as a Persian tale, for the young Aladdin did not see in the glittering cave of the genii such fabulous riches as were lying in the dark womb of the rock. "The wonder grew as the depths were searched out foot by foot. The Bonanza was cut at a point 1167 feet below the surface, and, as the The wealth revealed was beyond believing. This Bonanza, alone, yielded $3,000,000 of silver every month for the first three years. Yet it was hard to win. Mackay believed in high wages and paid more than double the wages given to any miners in any place in the history of the world. All were picked men, who had passed a severe medical test. The hours were short. The men worked naked save for a loin-cloth and shoes to protect them from the hot rocks. The heat reached 110°. Three men, who stepped accidentally into a deep pool of water, were Yet ever, the deeper they went, the richer grew the ore. When, at last, Mackay, Fair, O'Brien, and Flood sold their holdings, the Bonanza had yielded more than $150,000,000 worth of silver, one-third of which had passed directly into the pockets of the four men. But what of the first discoverers, McLaughlin and Riley? They had found the silver, but the Bonanza was not for them. McLaughlin worked for a while as a laborer and then was thrown out of the mine by a foreman who said he was too old. He tried a dozen small ventures and not only lost in everything he touched, but caused his partners to lose, also. Bad fortune dogged him steadily. An old man, worn out and hopelessly dispirited, died in a hospital and was buried in a pauper's grave. Later, it was learned that this was McLaughlin. O'Riley fared no better. He refused to work for others, believing that luck would turn, and that he, who had once discovered so rich a prize, would, some day or other, discover another. One night, in a dream, he heard what he took to be the voices of the fairies of the mountain bidding him For days, for weeks, for years, he dug, ever hearing the fancied voices leading him on, deeper and deeper still. Mackay offered him money, but O'Riley refused to accept it, demanding that he be given an equal share in the mine, or nothing. He starved and suffered, sometimes finding pieces of pure silver and pure gold in his tunnel, which he ascribed to his fairies (but which rumor says Mackay had arranged to be placed there) and, in old age, his tunnel fell in and crippled him. From the hospital he was taken to an insane asylum, where he died. Henry Comstock met the fate he deserved. For years he swaggered about Virginia City claiming to be its founder and the discoverer of the Comstock Lode, living on the charity of luckier men who threw him a bar of silver as one throws a bone to a dog, or else selling wild-cat shares to greenhorns. More than once he was justly accused of being in league with the disorderly elements of the city and having taken part in robberies. But a certain rough sense of pity |