And it is a long process, and a costly one, before the lumps of heavy dirt which the miner pecks out of the inside of a hill are transformed into those hundredweight blocks of silver bullion which the train from Park City carries every morning of the year into Salt Lake City. From first to last it is pretty much as follows. Remember I am not writing for those who live inside mines; very much on the contrary. I am writing for those who have never been down a mine in their lives, but who may care to read an unscientific description of "mining," and the Ontario mine in particular.
In 1872 a couple of men made a hole in the ground, and finding silver ore in it offered the hole for sale at $30,000. A clever man, R. C. Chambers by name, happened to come along, and liking the look of the hole, joined a friend in the purchase of it. The original diggers thus pocketed $30,000 for a few days' work, and no doubt thought they had done a good thing. But alas! that hole in the ground which they were so glad to get rid of ten years ago now yields every day a larger sum in dollars than they sold it for! The new owners of the hole, which was christened "The Ontario Mine," were soon at work, but instead of following them through the different stages of development, it is enough to describe what that hole looks like and produces to-day.
A shaft, then, has been sunk plumb down into the mountain for 900 feet, and from this shaft, at every 100 feet as you go down, you find a horizontal tunnel running off to right and left. If you stop in your descent at any one of these "stages" and walk through the tunnel—water rushing all the way over your feet, and the vaulted rock dripping over-head—you will find that a line of rails has been laid down along it, and that the sides and roofs are strongly supported by timbers of great thickness. These timbers are necessary to prevent, in the first place, the rock above from crushing down through the roof of the tunnel, and, in the next, from squeezing in its sides, for the rock every now and then swells and the sides of the tunnels bulge in. The rails are, of course, for the cars which the miners fill with ore, and push from the end of the tunnel to the "stage." A man there signals by a bell which communicates with the engineer at the big wheel in the shed I have already spoken of, and there being a regular code of signals, the engineer knows at once at which stage the car is waiting, and how far therefore he is to let the cage down. Up goes the car with its load of ore into the daylight,—and then its troubles begin.
But meanwhile let us stay a few minutes more in the mine. Walking along any one of the main horizontal tunnels, we come at intervals to a ladder, and going up one of them we find that a stope, or smaller gallery, is being run parallel with the tunnel in which we are walking, and of course (as it follows the same direction of the ore), immediately over that tunnel, so that the roof of the tunnel is the floor of the stope. The stopes are just wide enough for a man to work in easily, and are as high as he can reach easily with his pickaxe, about seven feet. If you walk along one of these stopes you come to another ladder, and find it leads to another stope above, and going up this you find just the same again, until you become aware that the whole mountain above you is pierced throughout the length of the ore vein by a series of seven-foot galleries lying exactly parallel one above the other, and separated only by a sufficient thickness of pine timber to make a solid floor for each. But at every hundred feet, as I have said, there comes a main tunnel, down to which all the produce of the minor galleries above it is shot down by "shoots," loaded into cars and pushed along to the "stage." But silver ore is not the only thing that the Company gets out of its mine, for unfortunately the mountain in which the Ontario is located is full of springs, and the miner's pick is perpetually, therefore, letting the water break into the tunnels, and in such volume, too, that I am informed it costs as much to rid the works of the water as to get out the silver! Streams gurgle along all the tunnels, and here and there ponderous bulkheads have been put up to keep the water and the loosened rock from falling in. Pumps of tremendous power are at work at several levels throwing the water up towards the surface—one of these at the 800-foot level throwing 1500 gallons a minute up to the 500-foot level.
Following a car-load of ore, we find it, having reached the surface, being loaded into waggons, in which it is carried down the hill to the mills, weighed, and then shot down into a gigantic bin—in which, by the way, the Company always keeps a reserve of ore sufficient to keep the mills in full work for two years. From this hour, life becomes a burden to the ore, for it is hustled about from machine to machine without the least regard to its feelings. No sooner is it out of the waggon than a brutal crusher begins smashing it up into small fragments, the result of this meanness being that the ore is able to tumble through a screen into cars that are waiting for it down below. These rush upstairs with it again and pour it into "hoppers," which, being in the conspiracy too, begin at once to spill it into gigantic drying cylinders that are perpetually revolving over a terrific furnace fire, and the ore, now dust, comes streaming out as dry as dry can be, is caught in cars and wheeled off to batteries where forty stampers, stamping like one, pound and smash it as if they took a positive delight in it. There is an intelligent, deliberate determination about this fearful stamping which makes one feel almost afraid of the machinery. Some pieces, however, actually manage to escape sufficient mashing up and slip away with the rest down into a "screw conveyor," but the poor wretches are soon found out, for the fiendish screw conveyor empties itself on to a screen, through which all the pulverized ore goes shivering down, but the guilty lumps still remaining are carried back by another ruthless machine to those detestable stamps again. They cannot dodge them. For these machines are all in the plot together. Or rather, they are the honest workmen of good masters, and they are determined that the work shall be thoroughly done, and that not a single lump of ore shall be allowed to skulk so without any one to look after them these cylinders and stampers, hoppers and dryers, elevators and screens go on with their work all day, all night, relentless in their duty and pitiless to the ore. Let a lump dodge them as it may, it gets no good by it, for the one hands it over to the other, just as constables hand over a thief they have caught, and it goes its rounds, again and again, till the end eventually overtakes it, and it falls through the screen in a fine dust.
For its sins it is now called "pulp," and starts off on a second tour of suffering—for these Inquisitors of iron and steel, these blind, brutal Cyclops-machines, have only just begun, as it were, their fun with their victim. Its tortures are now to be of a more searching and refined description. As it falls through the screen, another screw-conveyor catches sight of it and hurries it along a revolving tube into which salt is being perpetually fed from a bin overhead—this salt, allow me to say for the benefit of those as ignorant as myself, is "necessary as a chloridizer"—and thus mixed up with the stranger, falls into the power of a hydraulic elevator, which carries it up forty feet to the top of a roasting furnace and deliberately spills the mixture into it! Looking into the solid flame, I appreciated for the first time in my life the courage of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
The mixture which fell in at the top bluish-grey comes out at the bottom yellowish-brown—I only wonder at its coming out all—and is raked into heaps that have a wicked, lurid colour and give out such fierce short flames of brilliant tints, and such fierce, short blasts of a poisonous gas, that I could not help thinking of the place where bad men go to, and wondering if a Dante could not get a hint or two for improving his Inferno by a visit to the Ontario roasting-furnace. The men who stir these heaps use rakes with prodigious handles, and wear wet sponges over their mouths and noses, and as I watched them I remembered the poet's devils who keep on prodding up the damned and raking them about over the flames.
But the ore submits without any howling or gnashing of teeth, and is dragged off dumb, and soused into great churns, kept at a boiling heat, in which quicksilver is already lying waiting, and the ore and the quicksilver are then churned up together by revolving wheels inside the pans, till the contents look like huge caldrons of bubbling chocolate. After some hours they are drained off into settlers and cold water is let in upon the mess, and lo! silver as bright as the quicksilver with which it is mixed comes dripping out through the spout at the bottom into canvas bags.
Much of the quicksilver drips through the canvas back into the pans, and the residue, silver mixed with quicksilver, makes a cold, heavy, white paste called "amalgam," which is carried off in jars to the retorts. Into these it is thrown, and while lying there the quicksilver goes on dripping away from the silver, and after a time the fires are lighted and the retort is sealed up. The intense heat that is obtained volatilizes the quicksilver; but this mercurial vapour is caught as it is escaping at the top of the retort, again condensed into its solid form, and again used to mix with fresh silver ore. Its old companion, the silver, goes on melting inside the retort all the time, till at last when the fires are allowed to cool down, it is found in irregular lumps of a pink-looking substance. These lumps are then taken to the crucibles, and passing from them, molten and refined, fall into moulds, each holding about a hundred-weight of bullion.
And all this bother and fuss, reader, to obtain these eight or ten blocks of metal!