CHAPTER XIII
MINERAL WEALTH. ROMANCE AND ACTUALITY.
Forced labour in the mines—Silver and bloodshed—History of discovery—Guanajuato—the veta Madre—Spanish methods—Durango—Zacatecas—Pachuca—The patio process—Quicksilver from Peru—Cornish miners' graves—Aztec mining—Spanish advent—Old mining methods—Romance of mining—The Cerro de Mercado—Guanajuato and Hidalgo—Real del Monte—Religion and mining—Silver and churches—Subterranean altars—Mining and the nobility—Spanish mining school—Modern conditions—The mineral-bearing zone—Distribution of minerals geographically—Silver—The patio process—Gold-mining and production—El Oro and other districts—Copper—Other minerals—General mineral production—Mining claims and laws.
| "Grant me, oh! rock-ribbed matrix, here to know |
| Thy minerall'd sanctuary; |
| To none but me the sesame disclose, |
| Un-oped since chaos fled!" |
There is much of interest and something of pathos and romance attending the old mines of Spanish-American countries—Mexico, Peru, and others. They are so interwoven with the history of these countries, so redolent of the past, and of the hope, despair, piety, greed of the old taskmasters who worked them, and of the generations of toiling Indian workers who spent their lives in wresting treasure from the bowels of the earth. Religion, superstition, cruelty have marked their exploitation in past ages, and as we explore their grim abandoned corridors, and pass half fearfully their yawning pits, our imagination might conjure up some phantoms of those who toiled amid these old scenes of man's sweat and avarice.
The cruelty innate in the Spanish race has been shown in their mining methods, and the native population of Mexico, and in a larger scale of Peru, suffered severely at their hands. Guanajuato, one of the most famous and richest of the mining centres of Mexico—in past times as to-day—bears in its archives the stories of oppression which marked the methods of the Spaniards, and may be taken as a concrete example. It was a system of slavery under which these mines were worked—an atrocious system of forced labour which took no heed of Indian life, save as it might most cheaply extract a given quantity of gold or silver ore from the pits and adits beneath the ground. Thousands of peones were impressed into this forced labour; armed soldiers were stationed at the entrances of these labyrinths to see that each wretched serf deposited his sack of rock, under the load of which he had toiled up fathoms of notched pole, or ladder, from the infernal regions below, panting, sweating, expiring, and presently driven down again by the brutal taskmasters, jealous lest he might enjoy too much of the light of day and so sacrifice some moments in the delving amid the rocks which furnished the wealth. In 1619, a law was promulgated in Guanajuato—it remains upon the archives to this day—prohibiting the branding of slaves upon the face!
But these inhuman methods brought about their own punishment. The great Valenciana mine, opened in 1760, which for fifty years was worked at a sacrifice of human life by these methods, producing more than 300 million dollars, became at last the scene of a terrible vengeance, for the serfs rose in rebellion and massacred every white man upon the place. Indeed, the brutalities practised by the Spanish mine-owners largely influenced the revolution and secession from the mother country.
For more than three centuries there flowed from the mines of Mexico and Peru, millions and millions of silver and gold, which went to fill the needy coffers of Spain, to enrich a distant and callous or careless monarch, and to prop up a moribund nation. The appalling system of the mitad and the encomenderos, by which silver and gold were extracted with indecent haste, form such pages as can never be erased from the history of metallurgy in the New World.
Yet there is another light in which to regard the picture of Mexican mining, and remembering that mining operations, whether in the sixteenth or the twentieth century, whether in Spanish-America or elsewhere, ever embody conditions of usury and oppression, we may turn to this more pleasing aspect. For unless under grave oppression, the native miner, be it on the plateau of Anahuac, or in the Andine Cordillera, has been a zealous worker. His picturesque surroundings, simple mode of life, and easy-going disposition, together with the pervading sentimental attributes which his religion lent, and the sunny skies under which he toiled, took from mining much of the material brutality and grey atmosphere which enshroud it in Anglo-Saxon communities.
Mining was a source of enrichment which appealed strongly to the Spanish nature, and it must not be forgotten that to the efforts of the men of Spain the science of mining owes much. And, indeed, these remote waste places of the earth owe the civilisation they possess to the early work of these Conquistadores. The Anglo-Saxon world prides itself on the great discoveries and exploitations which have marked epochs in its gold- and silver-getting history, Australia, California, Nevada, Africa; but we shall not forget that Mexico and Peru were yielding up stores of gold and silver centuries before Captain Cook sailed, or before those historic nuggets were found by accident in Sutter's mill-stream, in the Californian Sierra region. Scarcely six years after the Conquest the silver of Mexico was being eagerly sought, and easily found, with that remarkable olfato possessed by the Spaniards. Shakespeare was at work, and Drake was voyaging under the Elizabethan ægis at the time when the great silver mines of the Mexican Sierra Madre were giving up their rich ores to treatment.