University of Virginia Library

52. 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. 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.[1] 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

[ILLUSTRATION]

TIMBER SUPPORTS.

[Description: 504EAF. Page 379. In-line image of a multi-storied building in which a man stands on the bottom level.] 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

[ILLUSTRATION]

FROM GALLERY TO GALLERY.

[Description: 504EAF. Page 380. In-line image of a mining shaft with people at the bottom and top and on the latter.] 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 feel-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:

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.[2]
Silver mining was her sole productive industry.