“Prospectors went everywhere seeking for carbonates, radiating from this center up all the gulches, and over the foot-hills, delving almost everywhere at a venture. One day, at a hitherto unheard-of point, wealth comes up by the bucketful out of the deep narrow hole, that has been pierced so unostentatiously. Instantly the transformation begins, and the lately green hill-side, refreshing to the townsman’s eye, becomes forlorn in its ragged exposure of rock and soil where the forest has been swept away, while trial-mines grow as thickly upon its surface as pits on the rind of a strawberry. All these young mines, good or bad, looked much alike, and were equally inaccessible and unkempt. There were no roads, hardly any wagon-tracks and few paths. Every man went across lots, the shortest way, pushing through the remnant of the woods, clambering over the prostrate trunks and discarded tree-tops, whose straight trunks had been felled and dragged away to the saw-mill, or chopped into six-foot lengths for posts and logging. Teams must go around, but life was too short for the man afoot to follow them; holding his painful breath, he scaled straight up the steep and slippery ascent.
“But it is time to say something of the processes of getting out the ores, and perhaps the best way is at once to attack the geological structure of the region.
“Leadville appears to lie upon the eastern edge of the lava area of the state. The last of the trachyte peaks are at the head of Mosquito pass. Underneath the camp, and on all the hills where her riches are stored, the soil is found to be a porphyritic overflow overlying a highly silicified dolomite, that goes by the common name of ‘limestone.’ Between these two formations (i.e., under the porphyry and above the dolomite) are found the mineral beds. Various theories have been advanced as to the reason for their position, so novel in the experience of silver mining, and some of the explanations are a burlesque of geology, though uttered in dead earnest. Those who are best qualified to decide, although confessing limited observation, suggest what seems to me the simplest theory and the one nearest the truth. The mineral constituents of the ores are carbonate of lead in large quantity, silica, oxides of iron and manganese, and the precious chloride of silver. Sometimes the lead occurs as a sulphide, and there are some other insignificant components. Now it is possible that the original constituent parts of all these minerals should be contained in a porphyritic eruption. Deposits of galena and some other minerals are now occasionally found buried in the porphyry, or occupying slender fissure-veins through it. Moreover, all these minerals are capable of solution in water charged with carbonic acid, which, of course, was present in abundance, and the suggestion is that they have leached downward through the porphyry until they struck the limestone floor, which became in time so highly silicified, as to admit no further penetration of water, whereupon the valuable deposits that we are now prying out gradually accumulated. The silicified surface of the lime, and the semi-saturated line of the porphyry, next the carbonate, are known as the ‘contacts;’ and when the miners strike this, they have good cause to be hopeful of near success. The presence of great beds of kaolin (hydrated silicate of alumina), derived from the thorough decomposition of porphyry or granite, or both together, and the presence of hydrate of magnesia with beds of semi-opal (always an aqueous production), argue in favor of the truth of this explanation.
“The general fact of this position of the ores being understood, let me suppose that our prospectors have been more than ordinarily successful; that they have dug not more than a hundred feet, have curbed their shaft securely with timber, have struck the greenish-white porphyry, and finally have met with the longed-for ‘contact,’ which separates the mineral bearing rock from the barren gangue. They have been little troubled by water, and they have done all their work with the help of one man, and the ordinary windlass. There being every indication that wealth is just beneath their picks, they erect over the shaft a frame-work of heavy timbers, called a ‘gallows,’ and hang in it a large pulley. A little at one side, close to the ground, is fixed a second pulley. Under this, and over the upper one is reeved the bucket-rope, and a mule is hired to walk away with it, when the bucket is to be drawn up, creeping back when the bucket goes down. This is a ‘whip.’ The next advance in machinery is the ‘whim,’ which consists of the same arrangement of gallows and pulleys as before; but instead of a mule walking straight out and back, the mule travels round and round a huge revolving drum, that carries the hoisting-rope. If you care to go down one of these shafts you may stand in the bucket, or you may unhook it, and, placing your foot in a noose, be lowered away in the bucket’s place. If your head is strong there is no great danger.
“When the miner really ‘strikes it,’ and the brown, crumbling, ill-looking ore begins to fill the bucket to the exclusion of all else, assaying fifty or a hundred or four hundred ounces to the ton, a house is built over the shaft, and a steam-engine supersedes the patient mule.
“The depth at which a mine may be found (if at all) can hardly even be guessed at. Paying ‘mineral’ has been met with from the surface to more than three hundred and fifty feet in depth. Usually the shafts are over a hundred feet deep.
“The deposit having been tapped, digging out the ore begins. This is done by means of horizontal passage-ways or tunnels, known as ‘drifts,’ which are driven into the rock from the bottom of the shaft.
“As the ores are brought to the surface they are scanned by an experienced person, and the best pieces thrown in a heap by themselves, while the ordinary ore is cast upon the ‘dump’ or pile which accumulates at the mouth of the mine, and makes a little ruddy terrace on the green or snowy hill-side. From this dump wagons haul the ore away to be sold, the best part often being put in hundred-pound sacks, about as large as quarter-barrel flour-bags, before being sold. Very rich ore is likely to be bought by regular purchasers, who either have them smelted in Leadville or forward them to smelting-works at Pueblo, Denver, St. Louis, and Eastern cities. The inferior grades are sold by the ton to some one of the dozen smelters here in town, the price being governed by the market quotations of silver in New York on the day of the sale, less several deductions amounting in all to about twenty-five per cent. as the reducer’s margin for profit, and plus three to five cents per pound for all the lead above twenty-one per cent. which the ore carries. Silver and gold are estimated in ounces; lead and copper in percentages; but allowance is not made for both of the latter metals in the same ore. The ore is hauled to the smelting-works by four or six-mule teams, for the most part, the driver not sitting on the wagon, but riding the nigh wheeler, guiding his team by a single very strong rein which goes to the bits of the leaders, and handling the brake by another strap. He is in the position of a steersman in the middle of his craft, and his ‘bridge’ is the saddle. Every load is set upon the scales, recorded, and then shoveled into its proper bin. A thin-faced, dusty-haired youth leaned half asleep against a shady corner at one of these mills, recording the tons and fractions of a ton in each load as he lazily adjusted the balance. His air was of one so utterly listless and bored that I was moved to remark cheerily as I went by:
“‘You haven’t chosen the most exciting part of this business.’
“‘No,’ he answered dryly, while an indescribable twinkle came into his carbonated countenance. ‘No, but I’m trying to do my duty. You know the poet says, “They also serve who only stand and weigh it.”’