Peter O’Riley held his interest until it brought him about $50,000, a part of which he received in the shape of dividends. He erected a stone hotel on B Street, Virginia City, called the Virginia House. He then began dealing in mining stocks and soon lost everything. Under the guidance of spirits—he was a Spiritualist—he finally began running a tunnel into a bald and barren granite spur of the Sierras, near Genoa, in Douglas County, expecting to strike a richer vein than the Comstock. However, the spirits talked so much to him about caverns of gold and silver that he became insane and was sent to a private asylum at Woodbridge, California, where he soon died.
The men who made millions were those who came after the mines had been pretty well prospected, as Mackay, Fair, Sharon, Jones, and others.
Early Mining and Milling.
Once people became convinced of the richness, extent, and permanency of the ore deposits on the Comstock, towns were built up on the lode and at points in the valleys as if by enchantment. Machinery was brought over the Sierras under all manner of difficulties by teams, and soon mills for working the ores were built by scores. In 1859 the Americans, as a people, knew nothing about silver mining. At that time there were probably not a dozen American miners on the Pacific Coast who had ever even seen a sample of silver ore. In the California placer mines, however, were quite a number of Mexicans who had worked in silver mines in their own country. These men at once deserted their gold placers in California and came flocking over to the Sierras when the cry of “Plata! mucha plata!” was raised among them. “A gold placer,” said they, “is soon worked out, but a silver mine lasts for generations and generations.”
At first the word of the Mexicans was law in the new silver mines, both as regarded ore and the methods of mining and working it. Every American miner endeavored to secure a Mexican partner, or at least a Mexican foreman to take charge of his mine. Mexican methods, however, soon proved to be too slow for the Americans. Their arastras, patios, and little adobe smelting furnaces were the primitive contrivances of a non-mechanical people, and of a race of miners working as individuals, and on a very small scale at that.
The Americans at once introduced stamp mills for crushing the ore, and next introduced pans to hasten the process of amalgamation. The operation of amalgamating the crushed ore, which required days by the patio process, was reduced to hours by the use of steam-heated iron pans.
The Mexican miners were no better underground at working in the vein than they were on the surface, at extracting the precious metals after the ore was mined. In the Mexican mine, where everything was managed according to their own notions—the owner being a Mexican named Gabriel Maldanado—they carried the ore out of the mine in rawhide sacks, the miners climbing to the surface by means of a series of notched poles. Their timbering was also very defective. In ore bodies so large as those of the Comstock, they did not know how to support the ground.
Among the miners working in the gold placers of California at the time of the discovery of silver on this side of the Sierras, were a few Germans who had worked in the silver mines of their “Vaterland,” and among these were some half dozen who had been educated in the mining academy of Freyberg, and had received regular scientific and practical training in the art of mining. The mining and metallurgical knowledge of these men was the best then existing in any part of the world, as regarded the working of argentiferous ores. The Germans introduced the barrel process of amalgamation and the roasting of ores. While the barrel process was a great improvement on the patio, it was found not so well adapted to the rapid working of the Comstock ores as the newly invented pan process. It has also been found that the free milling ores of the lode do not require to be roasted.
Philip Deidesheimer, a German who had been appointed superintendent of the Ophir Mine, however, invented a method of timbering in “square sets,” which is perfect in every respect, and which is still in use in all Comstock mines. By this method of building up squares of framed timbers an ore vein of any width may be safely worked to any height or depth; a vein 300 feet in width may as rapidly be worked as one only 10 or 20 feet wide.