It has been the custom to open a level at every hundred and ten feet; but hereafter the distance between levels in the Treadwell mine will be one hundred and fifty feet.
At each level a station, or chamber, is cut out, as wide as the shaft, from forty to sixty feet in length, and having an average height of eight feet. A drift is run from the shaft for a distance of twenty-five feet, varying in height from fifteen feet in front to seven at the back. The main crosscut is then started at right angles to the station drift.
From east and west the "drifts" run into this crosscut, like little creeks into a larger stream.
No one has ever accused me of being shy in the matter of asking questions. It was the first time I had been down in one of the famous gold mines of the world, and I asked as many questions as a woman trying to rent a forty-dollar house for twenty dollars. Between shafts, stations, ore bins, crosscuts, stopes, drifts, levels, and winzes, it was less than fifteen minutes before I felt the cold moisture of despair breaking out upon my brow. Winzes proved to be the last straw. I could get a glimmering of what the other things were; but winzes!
The manager had been polite in a forced, friend-of-the-captain kind of way. He was evidently willing to answer every question once, but whenever I forgot and asked the same question twice, he balked instantly. Exerting every particle of intelligence I possessed, I could not make out the difference between a stope and a station, except that a stope had the higher ceiling.
"I have told you the difference three times already," cried the manager, irritably.
The captain, back in the shadow, grinned sympathetically.
"Nor'-nor'-west, nor'-by-west, a-quarter-nor'," said he, sighing. "She'll learn your gold mine sooner than she'll learn my compass."
Then they both laughed. They laughed quite a while, and my disagreeable friend laughed with them. For myself, I could not see anything funny anywhere.
I finally learned, however, that a station is a place cut out for a stable or for the passage of cars, or other things requiring space; while a stope is a room carried to the level of the top of the main crosscut. It is called a stope because the ore is "stoped" out of it.