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 fo 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.
*
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.
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
through a tunnel about haft 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:
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 the horizontal
ones three inches, compressing and bending the upright beam till it
curved like a bow. Before the Spanish caved in, some of their
twelve-inch horizontal timbers were
compressed in this way until they were only five inches thick!
Imagine the power it must take to squeeze a solid log together in
that way. Here, also, was a range of timbers, for a distance of
twenty feet, tilted six inches out of the perpendicular by the weight
resting upon them from the caved galleries above. You could hear
things cracking and giving way, and it was not pleasant to know
that the world overhead was slowly and silently sinking down upon
you. The men down in the mine do not mind it, however.
Returning along the fifth gallery, we struck the safe part of the
Ophir incline, and went down it to the sixth; but we found ten
inches of water there, and had to come back. In repairing the
damage done to the incline, the pump had to be stopped for two
hours, and in the meantime the water gained about a foot.
However, the pump was at work again, and the flood-water was
decreasing. We climbed up to the fifth gallery again and sought a
deep shaft, whereby we might descend to another part of the sixth,
out of reach of the water, but suffered disappointment, as the men
had gone to dinner, and there was no one to man the windlass. So,
having seen the earthquake, we climbed out at the Union incline
and tunnel, and adjourned, all dripping with candle grease and
perspiration, to lunch at the Ophir office.
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.* Silver
mining was her sole productive industry.
[*]
[p. 377] 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 throught 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.]
[*]
[p. 381] Since the above was in type, I learn
from an official source that the above figure is too high, and that
the yield for 1863 did not exceed $20,000,000. However, the day
for large figures is approaching; the Sutro Tunnel is to plow
through the Comstock lode from end to end, at a depth of two
thousand feet, and then mining will be easy and comparatively
inexpensive; and the momentous matters of drainage, and hoisting
and hauling of ore will cease to be burdensome. This vast work
will absorb many years, and millions of dollars, in its completion;
but it will early yield money, for that desirable epoch will begin as
soon as it strikes the first end of the vein. The tunnel will be some
eight miles long, and will develop astonishing riches. Cars will
carry the ore through the tunnel and dump it in the mills and thus
do away with the present costly system of double handling and
transportation by mule teams. The water from the tunnel will
furnish the motive power for the mills. Mr. Sutro, the originator of
this prodigious enterprise, is one of the few men in the world who
is gifted with the pluck and perseverance necessary to follow up
and hound such an undertaking to its completion. He has
converted several obstinate Congresses to a deserved friendliness
toward his important work, and has gone up and down and to and
fro in Europe until he has enlisted a great moneyed interest in it
there.