I had already learned how hard and long and dismal
a task it is to burrow down into the bowels of the
earth and get out the coveted ore; and now I learned
that the burrowing was only half the work; and that
to get the silver out of the ore was the dreary and
laborious other half of it. We had to turn out
at six in the morning and keep at it till dark.
This mill was a six-stamp affair, driven by steam.
Six tall, upright rods of iron, as large as a man’s
ankle, and heavily shod with a mass of iron and steel
at their lower ends, were framed together like a gate,
and these rose and fell, one after the other, in a
ponderous dance, in an iron box called a “battery.”
Each of these rods or stamps weighed six hundred
pounds. One of us stood by the battery all day
long, breaking up masses of silver-bearing rock with
a sledge and shoveling it into the battery.
The ceaseless dance of the stamps pulverized the rock
to powder, and a stream of water that trickled into
the battery turned it to a creamy paste. The
minutest particles were driven through a fine wire
screen which fitted close around the battery, and were
washed into great tubs warmed by super-heated steam—amalgamating
pans, they are called. The mass of pulp in the
pans was kept constantly stirred up by revolving “mullers.”
A quantity of quicksilver was kept always in the battery,
and this seized some of the liberated gold and silver
particles and held on to them; quicksilver was shaken
in a fine shower into the pans, also, about every
half hour, through a buckskin sack. Quantities
of coarse salt and sulphate of copper were added,
from time to time to assist the amalgamation by destroying
base metals which coated the gold and silver and would
not let it unite with the quicksilver.
All these tiresome things we had to attend to constantly.
Streams of dirty water flowed always from the pans
and were carried off in broad wooden troughs to the
ravine. One would not suppose that atoms of gold
and silver would float on top of six inches of water,
but they did; and in order to catch them, coarse blankets
were laid in the troughs, and little obstructing “riffles”
charged with quicksilver were placed here and there
across the troughs also. These riffles had to
be cleaned and the blankets washed out every evening,
to get their precious accumulations—and
after all this eternity of trouble one third of the
silver and gold in a ton of rock would find its way
to the end of the troughs in the ravine at last and
have to be worked over again some day. There
is nothing so aggravating as silver milling.
There never was any idle time in that mill.
There was always something to do. It is a pity
that Adam could not have gone straight out of Eden
into a quartz mill, in order to understand the full
force of his doom to “earn his bread by the
sweat of his brow.” Every now and then,
during the day, we had to scoop some pulp out of the
Copyrights
Roughing It from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
