History of the big bonanza

by Dan De Quille

WASTE ROCK DUMPS.
(Challar, Potosi, Savage, Hale & Norcross Mines.)

The Savage Company are prepared to sink the incline of their present shaft to the great depth of four thousand feet. For this purpose they have set up new hoisting machinery of novel construction and of the most powerful description. The reel on which the hoisting-cable winds is a novelty for the first time introduced on the Comstock lode, and a brief description of it and the cable used upon it may not be without interest for the general reader.

The reel is fifteen feet in length, and at the larger end is twenty-two feet in diameter, while at the smaller end the diameter is but thirteen feet. It is suspended upon a wrought iron shaft about sixteen inches in diameter, the ends of which revolve in ponderous bearings supported by foundations of cut stone reaching into the earth to solid rock. The shell of the reel is covered with thick wooden staves, and the whole somewhat resembles a great tapering cask. Over the staves are securely bolted heavy iron plates forming a strong armor outside of the wooden structure. In this iron armor is a deep groove which, starting at the smaller end of the great conical drum, runs in a spiral manner to the larger end; just as the groove between the threads of a screw is seen to run. In this groove winds the cable as the incline-car (“giraffe”) is let down into or drawn up out of the mine.

When the car is at the bottom of the incline, the greater part of the cable is off the reel, and when the hoisting begins it is wound up on the smaller end of the drum, where the engines have greater purchase on the load. As the hoisting proceeds, and the weight to be raised becomes momentarily lighter, on account of the heavy steel cable being wound up, the lifting force is steadily moved toward the larger end of the drum, and each revolution adds to the swiftness of the ascent of the car that is being raised. The cable is round, and is made of the best steel wire. It is 4,000 feet in length, and weighs 25,190 pounds. The upper part, for a distance of 1,500 feet down, is two inches in diameter; for the remainder of its length, 2,000 feet, it gradually tapers till at the lower end its diameter is one and three-quarter inches. The taper is not made by dropping wires in the several strands of the rope, but by drawing each wire (as it is manufactured) slightly tapering for the last 2,500 feet of its length.

The incline hoisting-works stand a short distance from the building in which is contained the hoisting machinery of the vertical shaft, and the cable, after entering the latter building, is carried over a large iron pulley or sheave that is placed over the main shaft. Thence it passes down a compartment of the main shaft a vertical distance of 1,300 feet, when it passes under a second sheave and continues down the incline to its bottom.

The car used in the incline runs on an iron track, holds about five tons of rock, and is capable of hoisting (easily) from 480 to 500 tons per 24 hours. The car is made wholly of iron and steel.

When this incline car has been hauled up as far as the bottom of the vertical shaft, that is, to within 1,300 feet of the surface, it there dumps its load by means of a self-acting gate in its bottom. The rock thus dumped from the incline-car is then taken in smaller cars and sent to the surface on cages that ply up and down the hoisting-compartments of the main vertical shaft.

The engines for driving the huge reel, and thus hoisting this iron car or “giraffe,” with its load of ore and the 25,000 pounds of cable, are two in number and of 200-horse power each. A precisely similar hoisting apparatus has since been set up at the Ophir mine; indeed, the drawings for this powerful machinery were first made for the Ophir Company. The length and weight of cable at the Ophir is the same as that in use at the Savage mines.

Some of the old shafts opened on and about the first or upper line of bonanzas have quite gone to decay. They still stand, but the timbers in many places, far down in the bowels of the earth, are racked and rotten; while the timbers built up in the mine to support the chambers from which ore was extracted, and set up in the galleries, drifts, cross-cuts, and chutes, millions on millions of feet in all, have quite gone to decay. It is perilous to undertake the exploration of these old worked-out levels. In many places they are caved in every direction, the old floors are rotten, water drips from above, a hot musty atmosphere and almost stifles the explorer, and in places, the air is so foul that his candle is almost extinguished.

Down in these deserted and dreary old levels, hundreds of feet beneath the surface, are encountered fungi of monstrous growth and most uncouth and uncanny form. They cover the old posts in great moist, dew-distilling masses, and depend from the timbers overhead in broad slimy curtains, or hang down like long squirming serpents or the twisted horns of the ram. Some of these take most fantastic shapes, almost exactly counterfeiting things seen on the surface. Specimens of these are to be seen in most of the cabinets of curiosities in Virginia City. Some of the fungi that grow up from the bottoms of old disused drifts are wholly mineral and are composed of minute crystals of such salts as are contained in the earth from which they spring.