The Trail Boys of the Plains; Or, The Hunt for the Big Buffalo

by W. Bert Foster

“No. Our tunnel isn’t going head-on into the Crayton drift. I understood father to say that Number Two tunnel passed the old diggings by. My goodness! if he only remembers it, and knows just where the Crayton tunnel is, maybe he and the boys will start digging that way at once. Come on, Dig! Let’s ride over.”

Chet ran to the tool shed and seized a pick and shovel; the latter he tossed to his chum and then sprang astride Hero with the pick in his hand. This time his friend had no trouble in getting Poke, for he had fastened that uneasy animal.

There was so much excitement around the mouth of the shaft that nobody noticed the two boys riding away into the woods trail. They knew the way perfectly. Indeed, there were not many trails in the vicinity of Silver Run and the mountain that towered over it which were not familiar to Chet Havens and Dig Fordham.

This mountain had been deeply scarred by the miners of the old days. One side of the hill had been eaten away by the hydraulic mining which was carried on when gold was first discovered here. How much of the rich silver ore, which the early prospectors did not recognise, had been wasted in the first excitement of finding gold, will never be known.

For this really was a hill of silver. The veins of ore streaked it like the arteries in a human body. The Silent Sue claim chanced to contain seemingly exhaustless veins; while the old Crayton mine soon petered out.

Once the wall of the forest had shut out the view of the shaft buildings, the boys were likewise out of sight of all human habitations. The old trail was rough and in places washed away, or filled up with leaves or other litter.

Now and again as they rode along they came to deep excavations in the hillside, old pits which had been abandoned almost as soon as dug. There was neither gold nor silver in these places, although the indications on the surface had toled the early miners on to make the excavations.

At first the prospectors had been after gold, and gold alone. The gold dust was mixed with a black, rotten ore that the early miners did not recognise as sulphuret of silver, which is nothing more than the pure metal in a decomposed state. The prospectors complained loudly of the “nuisance” of this black stuff. It was worse than the black sand found always in gold diggings, for such sand does not interfere with the amalgamation of the gold ore.

This “black stuff” interfered with the mining of gold, and the diggings got a bad name because of it. It was some years after the cessation of gold digging in the mountain above Silver Run (which was not then on the map) that the nature of this rotten silver ore began to be understood. The Comstock Lode had then excited world-wide attention, and men who had been among those who had worked the claims on this mountain remembered that the same kind of ore that proved so rich in the Comstock claim had been thrown aside and anathematised by the miners in these old diggings.

So there was another “rush.” Silver Run was established. In some relocated claims the silver ore was seen to be almost inexhaustible, as in the Silent Sue, the mine owned by the fathers of Chet and Digby.