“Day after day, night after night, these monsters are fed with this diet, varied in proportions according to the richness and metallurgical qualities of the ore that is being smelted. It requires very good judgment to determine just how much foreign material and lime is needed to produce the best results with the constantly varying ores. Luck may find the silver ore but science must extract the bullion. Most profit accrues to the smelter when the ore produces from seventy-five to two hundred ounces of silver, and contains a goodly proportion of iron and lead.
“Leaving the dungeons, we pick our way down the slope of a small mountain of ore, and enter below, where the engine and boilers throb, and the openings at the bottom of the furnaces give exit to the silver and the slag we saw shoveled in above as ore. And what an exit! The low roof shuts down close and dark upon the huge black cylinder of iron and bricks that holds in its heart the molten metal. There are pipes and valves, and draft-ways, and beams and braces, but they show indistinct in the gloom, and are nothing beside that great central mass, begrimed with soot and the dust of arsenic and oxides of lead. Watch that workman. He lifts a lance and stepping near the base of the furnace, where a single spark directs his aim, gives two or three quick thrusts. How mighty an effect the simple act evokes! The gloomy and ghost-haunted chamber becomes a home of fire; the grim furnace breathes out gaseous flames of blue and green, with tongues of light which hover playfully over a cataract of melted red metal bubbling, spouting, plunging out of that Plutonic throat and falling in hissing streams into the iron bowl waiting to catch its hot flood. The little lady who is with us, seeing the sparks fly, draws timidly outside the doorway and none too soon, for without warning the whole place becomes volcanic. No longer a steady stream of artificial lava rolls down the iron channel, but the liquid metal bursts its bounds and becomes a fountain. The furnace is hidden in lurid gases out of which spring volley upon volley of burning fragments that scatter showers of fire over the whole foreground.
“The slag-pot is a conical vessel, with a rounded apex, poised, base uppermost, on four little legs; when it is full, an iron frame work of a cart runs up, seizes it on opposite sides as though with two hands, and wheels it, glowing and fuming, out where a mole of slag is pushing itself over into the white gravel of the gulch, and where it is deposited red and crackling among heaps of like cones, some fading into the ashy hues of spent heat, some black and shining like inverted crucibles of polished iron. It was an uncanny vision: the huge rough outlines of the great mill, with its high chimneys and beacons of flame and smoke; the blaze within, the wan moonlight outside, and the sinewy men with skeleton carts leaping about in the glare of the spouting slag, handling shapely burdens of fiery refuse.
“While the worthless slag is doing so much sputtering and making so lively a show of itself, the silver and lead have quietly sunk to the bottom as fast as the heat liberated them from the mass of the boiling ore, and now come oozing up from a small exit far below the slag-spout, into a well at the side of the furnace. As fast as needful, this liquid ‘bullion’ is ladled out and poured into iron moulds, where it remains until it cools into solid ‘pigs’ or bars of lead weighing about fifty pounds each, and carrying about two per cent. of silver. These pigs, when cool, are stamped with the smelter’s name and the number of the car-load to which they will belong. Then from each one is cut a fragment, and these pieces—when the whole ‘run’ of the furnace has been made—are collected and re-cast and assayed to determine the value and selling-price of the bullion.”
The foregoing paragraphs, culled without indicating the omissions, and so, perhaps reading abruptly, it must be remembered, were written in the early summer of 1879. Yet, to a great degree, the picture outlined in that (now old) magazine article holds good to-day. There are many more people here, and the coming of the Denver and Rio Grande railway has brought the world nearer and multiplied the means of trade. It has reduced prices, afforded ready transportation out and in, civilized the town. Harrison avenue has become a metropolitan street, crowded with fine business houses, where you can buy almost as many things as in Denver, and the hills in the outskirts are crowded with more mine-houses and riddled with more tunnels than formerly. But all this is an advance in degree, not an addition of a new kind. The paving of the central streets, the erection of large business buildings, the introduction of public water and gas, the police, the fire-patrol, the morning and evening papers, the telephone and what not, are all indications of the thrift and prosperity of the people but render the city less characteristic and peculiar. The Leadville of ’79 in which we took a keen interest is now a thing of the past.
After dinner, the Madame and I go up as of yore, to a cottage we wot of that commands a pleasant view, and sit watching the night put the shading into the picture. But I tell her it is not the picture I used to see and enjoy. That was a great map of new, bare houses spread out before us, seemingly without arrangement or form. The steady drone of late planing mills and the subdued, eager rasp of steam-saws begrudging the approach of darkness, told how grew the magic town that was overrunning the plateau, exploring the gulches, and swarming up the flanks of the half-cleared foothills. It was a town without high buildings or towers, church-spires or foliage. In the clearness with which every detail is seen at a great distance, the houses looked smaller than they really were. It was all rough and ragged, yet all the more picturesque.
Slowly the long, sober twilight deepens in the valley into gloaming, and sinks thence into a gloom out of which, one by one, peep the lights. Still, outlines are not lost, and the massive figures of the foothills thrust themselves hugely through the veil that night is dropping, solid and blue and forbidding. It is a picture of perfect sweetness and peace,—a poetic picture in which one can imagine nothing that is harsh, or selfish, or mean. And overhead the mountains tower, rank behind rank, peak crowding peak, the pinnacles vying in being the last to hold the lingering rays of the sun, whose light now enkindles the heights until all the wide snow fields burn rosily. Then one by one the glittering banks fade into the softest of ash-tints as the reluctant sun bows itself away, and the shadows of the blackening ridges fall athwart the arctic panorama that fills the horizon. Keeping pace, the lights of the city increase, shining duskily through a purple haze of smoke and mist. Clearer above this ethereal stratum of haze, gleam the jewel-points that show where huge engines are tirelessly at work, and where prospectors and campers have built their fires on the hill-sides, and sit about them boiling their coffee and gossiping on the events of the day and the prospects of the morrow. Then the Madame and I saunter homeward—for our comfortable cars seem very homelike to us these frosty evenings—breathing the resinous flavor of the crisply fragrant spruce, and watching the stars spring hastily over the coruscant line that traces the serrated crest of the snowy range.
