The gold hunters

by John David Borthwick

There were several quartz veins in the neighborhood of Nevada, some of which were very rich, and yielded a large amount of gold; but, generally speaking, they were so unscientifically and unprofitably worked that they turned out complete failures.

Quartz mining is a scientific operation, of which many of those who undertook to work the veins had no knowledge whatever, nor had they sufficient capital to carry on such a business. The cost of erecting crushing-mills, and of getting the necessary iron castings from San Francisco, was very great. A vast deal of labor had to be gone through in opening the mine before any returns could be received; and, moreover, the method then adopted of crushing the quartz and extracting the gold was so defective that not more than one half of it was saved.

There is a variety of diggings here, but the richest are deep diggings in the hills above the town, and are worked by means of shafts, or coyote holes, as they are called. In order to reach the gold-bearing dirt, these shafts have to be sunk to the depth of nearly a hundred feet, which requires the labor of at least two men for a month or six weeks; and when they have got down to the bottom, perhaps they may find nothing to repay them for their perseverance.

The miners always calculate their own labor at five dollars a day for every day they work, that being the usual wages for hired labor; and if a man, after working for a month in sinking a hole, finds no paydirt at the bottom of it, he sets himself down as a loser of a hundred and fifty dollars.

They make up heavy bills of losses against themselves in this way, but still there are plenty of men who prefer devoting themselves to this speculative style of digging, in hopes of eventually striking a rich lead, to working steadily at surface diggings, which would yield them, day by day, sure though moderate pay.

But mining of any description is more or less uncertain, and any man “hiring out,” as it is termed, steadily throughout the year, and pocketing his five dollars a day, would find at the end of the year that he had done as well, perhaps, as the average of miners working on their own hook, who spend a considerable portion of their time in prospecting, and frequently, in order to work a claim which may afford them a month’s actual washing, have to spend as long a time in stripping off top-dirt, digging ditches, or performing other necessary labor to get their claim into working order; so that the daily amount of gold which a man may happen to be taking out, is not to be taken in itself as the measure of his prosperity. He may take a large sum out of a claim, but may also have spent as much upon it before he began to wash, and half the days of the year he may get no gold at all.

There were plenty of men who, after two years’ hard work, were not a bit better off than when they commenced, having lost in working one claim what they had made in another, and having frittered away their time in prospecting and wandering about the country from one place to another, always imagining that there were better diggings to be found than those they were in at the time.

Under any circumstances, when a man can make as much, or perhaps more, by working for himself, he has greater pleasure in doing so than in working for others; and among men engaged in such an exciting pursuit as gold-hunting, constantly stimulated by the success of some one of their neighbors, it was only natural that they should be loath to relinquish their chance of a prize in the lottery, by hiring themselves out for an amount of daily wages which was no more than any one, if he worked steadily, could make for himself.

Those who did hire out were of two classes—cold-blooded philosophers, who calculated the chances, and stuck to their theory unmoved by the temptations around them; and men who had not sufficient inventive energy to direct their own labor and render it profitable.

The average amount of gold taken out daily at that time by men who really did work, was, I should think, not less than eight dollars; but the average daily yield of the mines to the actual population was probably not more than three or four dollars per head, owing to the great number of “loafers,” who did not work more than perhaps one day in the week, and spent the rest of their time in bar-rooms, playing cards and drinking whisky. They led a listless life of mild dissipation, for they never had money enough to get very drunk. They were always in debt for their board and their whisky at the boarding-house where they lived; and when hard pressed to pay up, they would hire out for a day or two to make enough for their immediate wants, and then return to loaf away their existence in a bar-room, as long as the boarding-house keeper thought it advisable to give them credit. I never, in any part of the mines, was in a store or boarding-house that was not haunted by some men of this sort.