"Take, for example," said their entertainer, "the mill in which the ores are crushed. It is a rude affair, with two wheels of stone at the end of a horizontal bar moved by an upright shaft. The propelling force is an ox, a mule, or possibly a stream of water, and sometimes the mill is worked by the power of men. The apparatus somewhat resembles an old-fashioned cider-mill in the Northern States of America, but the roughest cider-mill you ever saw is a piece of cabinet-maker's work compared with a Bolivian arastra. The broken ore is placed in a trough in which the stone wheels move slowly around, crushing, perhaps, half a ton of ore daily. Modern mills, such as are used by the miners of California and Nevada, would crush twenty times as much ore at little more than the same cost!
ARASTRA, WITH MULE-POWER.
"From the beginning to the end of the work the whole business is very slow and primitive. The ore is broken out of the veins by sheer force of labor, powder or other blasting material being rarely employed. It is carried on the backs of men to the surface of the ground; the tanateros, or ore-carriers, load the substance into baskets or bags of rawhide, and climb patiently upwards along perpendicular logs that are notched to give holding-places for the feet.
BREAKING ORE.
"With a hammer a native breaks the ore into pieces suitable for the crushing-wheels; then it is reduced to mud by the slow operation I have described; it is roasted or treated with quicksilver according to its requirements; and finally the pure silver is obtained, and smelted into bars for transportation to the coast.
"Now, here is the difference between this way of working and the modern methods. The American or English miner would hoist the ore from the mine by machinery instead of carrying it out by man-power. Then he would use machinery for reducing it to powder, allowing none to be wasted, and after the reduction he would extract the silver from the rock in such a way as to save every grain of metal it contained, and preserve all the quicksilver to be used over and over again. A great part of the silver is lost at present, together with much of the quicksilver used in the work of amalgamation. Where there is a profit of ten dollars by the old process in working a ton of ore there would be fifty dollars of profit under the new. And yet it is hard to convince these people that it is worth their while to try the new system!