29. 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!"
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.
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.
Meantime the camp was filling up with people, and there was
a constantly growing excitement about our Humboldt mines. We
fell victims to the epidemic and strained every nerve to acquire
more "feet." We prospected and took up new claims, put "notices"
on them and gave them grandiloquent names. We traded some of
our "feet" for "feet" in other people's claims. In a little while we
owned largely in the "Gray Eagle," the "Columbiana," the "Branch
Mint," the "Maria Jane," the "Universe," the "Root-Hog-or-Die,"
the "Samson and Delilah," the "Treasure Trove," the "Golconda,"
the "Sultana," the "Boomerang," the "Great Republic," the "Grand
Mogul," and fifty other "mines" that had never been molested by a
shovel or scratched with a pick. We had not less than thirty
thousand "feet" apiece in the "richest mines on earth" as the
frenzied cant phrased it—and were in debt to the butcher. We were
stark mad with excitement—drunk with happiness—smothered
under mountains of prospective wealth—arrogantly compassionate
toward the plodding millions who knew not our marvellous
canyon—but our credit was not good at the grocer's.
It was the strangest phase of life one can imagine. It was a
beggars' revel. There was nothing doing in the district—no
mining—no milling—no productive effort—no income—and not
enough money in the entire camp to buy a corner lot in an eastern
village, hardly; and yet a stranger would have supposed he was
walking among bloated millionaires. Prospecting parties swarmed
out of town with the first flush of dawn, and swarmed in again at
nightfall laden with spoil—rocks. Nothing but rocks. Every man's
pockets were full of them; the floor of his cabin was littered with
them; they were disposed in labeled rows on his shelves.