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<h2> CHAPTER XXXVI. </h2>
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<p>I had already learned how hard and long and dismal a task it is to burrow
down into the bowels of the earth and get out the coveted ore; and now I
learned that the burrowing was only half the work; and that to get the
silver out of the ore was the dreary and laborious other half of it. We
had to turn out at six in the morning and keep at it till dark. This mill
was a six-stamp affair, driven by steam. Six tall, upright rods of iron,
as large as a man's ankle, and heavily shod with a mass of iron and steel
at their lower ends, were framed together like a gate, and these rose and
fell, one after the other, in a ponderous dance, in an iron box called a
"battery." Each of these rods or stamps weighed six hundred pounds. One of
us stood by the battery all day long, breaking up masses of silver-bearing
rock with a sledge and shoveling it into the battery. The ceaseless dance
of the stamps pulverized the rock to powder, and a stream of water that
trickled into the battery turned it to a creamy paste. The minutest
particles were driven through a fine wire screen which fitted close around
the battery, and were washed into great tubs warmed by super-heated steam—amalgamating
pans, they are called. The mass of pulp in the pans was kept constantly
stirred up by revolving "mullers." A quantity of quicksilver was kept
always in the battery, and this seized some of the liberated gold and
silver particles and held on to them; quicksilver was shaken in a fine
shower into the pans, also, about every half hour, through a buckskin
sack. Quantities of coarse salt and sulphate of copper were added, from
time to time to assist the amalgamation by destroying base metals which
coated the gold and silver and would not let it unite with the
quicksilver.</p>
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<p>All these tiresome things we had to attend to constantly. Streams of dirty
water flowed always from the pans and were carried off in broad wooden
troughs to the ravine. One would not suppose that atoms of gold and silver
would float on top of six inches of water, but they did; and in order to
catch them, coarse blankets were laid in the troughs, and little
obstructing "riffles" charged with quicksilver were placed here and there
across the troughs also. These riffles had to be cleaned and the blankets
washed out every evening, to get their precious accumulations—and
after all this eternity of trouble one third of the silver and gold in a
ton of rock would find its way to the end of the troughs in the ravine at
last and have to be worked over again some day. There is nothing so
aggravating as silver milling. There never was any idle time in that mill.
There was always something to do. It is a pity that Adam could not have
gone straight out of Eden into a quartz mill, in order to understand the
full force of his doom to "earn his bread by the sweat of his brow." Every
now and then, during the day, we had to scoop some pulp out of the pans,
and tediously "wash" it in a horn spoon—wash it little by little
over the edge till at last nothing was left but some little dull globules
of quicksilver in the bottom. If they were soft and yielding, the pan
needed some salt or some sulphate of copper or some other chemical rubbish
to assist digestion; if they were crisp to the touch and would retain a
dint, they were freighted with all the silver and gold they could seize
and hold, and consequently the pan needed a fresh charge of quicksilver.
When there was nothing else to do, one could always "screen tailings."
That is to say, he could shovel up the dried sand that had washed down to
the ravine through the troughs and dash it against an upright wire screen
to free it from pebbles and prepare it for working over.</p>
<p>The process of amalgamation differed in the various mills, and this
included changes in style of pans and other machinery, and a great
diversity of opinion existed as to the best in use, but none of the
methods employed, involved the principle of milling ore without "screening
the tailings." Of all recreations in the world, screening tailings on a
hot day, with a long-handled shovel, is the most undesirable.</p>
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<p>At the end of the week the machinery was stopped and we "cleaned up." That
is to say, we got the pulp out of the pans and batteries, and washed the
mud patiently away till nothing was left but the long accumulating mass of
quicksilver, with its imprisoned treasures. This we made into heavy,
compact snow-balls, and piled them up in a bright, luxurious heap for
inspection. Making these snow-balls cost me a fine gold ring—that
and ignorance together; for the quicksilver invaded the ring with the same
facility with which water saturates a sponge—separated its particles
and the ring crumbled to pieces.</p>
<p>We put our pile of quicksilver balls into an iron retort that had a pipe
leading from it to a pail of water, and then applied a roasting heat. The
quicksilver turned to vapor, escaped through the pipe into the pail, and
the water turned it into good wholesome quicksilver again. Quicksilver is
very costly, and they never waste it. On opening the retort, there was our
week's work—a lump of pure white, frosty looking silver, twice as
large as a man's head. Perhaps a fifth of the mass was gold, but the color
of it did not show—would not have shown if two thirds of it had been
gold. We melted it up and made a solid brick of it by pouring it into an
iron brick-mould.</p>
<p>By such a tedious and laborious process were silver bricks obtained. This
mill was but one of many others in operation at the time. The first one in
Nevada was built at Egan Canyon and was a small insignificant affair and
compared most unfavorably with some of the immense establishments
afterwards located at Virginia City and elsewhere.</p>
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<p>From our bricks a little corner was chipped off for the "fire-assay"—a
method used to determine the proportions of gold, silver and base metals
in the mass. This is an interesting process. The chip is hammered out as
thin as paper and weighed on scales so fine and sensitive that if you
weigh a two-inch scrap of paper on them and then write your name on the
paper with a course, soft pencil and weigh it again, the scales will take
marked notice of the addition.</p>
<p>Then a little lead (also weighed) is rolled up with the flake of silver
and the two are melted at a great heat in a small vessel called a cupel,
made by compressing bone ashes into a cup-shape in a steel mold. The base
metals oxydize and are absorbed with the lead into the pores of the cupel.
A button or globule of perfectly pure gold and silver is left behind, and
by weighing it and noting the loss, the assayer knows the proportion of
base metal the brick contains. He has to separate the gold from the silver
now. The button is hammered out flat and thin, put in the furnace and kept
some time at a red heat; after cooling it off it is rolled up like a quill
and heated in a glass vessel containing nitric acid; the acid dissolves
the silver and leaves the gold pure and ready to be weighed on its own
merits. Then salt water is poured into the vessel containing the dissolved
silver and the silver returns to palpable form again and sinks to the
bottom. Nothing now remains but to weigh it; then the proportions of the
several metals contained in the brick are known, and the assayer stamps
the value of the brick upon its surface.</p>
<p>The sagacious reader will know now, without being told, that the
speculative miner, in getting a "fire-assay" made of a piece of rock from
his mine (to help him sell the same), was not in the habit of picking out
the least valuable fragment of rock on his dump-pile, but quite the
contrary. I have seen men hunt over a pile of nearly worthless quartz for
an hour, and at last find a little piece as large as a filbert, which was
rich in gold and silver—and this was reserved for a fire-assay! Of
course the fire-assay would demonstrate that a ton of such rock would
yield hundreds of dollars—and on such assays many an utterly
worthless mine was sold.</p>
<p>Assaying was a good business, and so some men engaged in it, occasionally,
who were not strictly scientific and capable. One assayer got such rich
results out of all specimens brought to him that in time he acquired
almost a monopoly of the business. But like all men who achieve success,
he became an object of envy and suspicion. The other assayers entered into
a conspiracy against him, and let some prominent citizens into the secret
in order to show that they meant fairly. Then they broke a little fragment
off a carpenter's grindstone and got a stranger to take it to the popular
scientist and get it assayed. In the course of an hour the result came—whereby
it appeared that a ton of that rock would yield $1,184.40 in silver and
$366.36 in gold!</p>
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<p>Due publication of the whole matter was made in the paper, and the popular
assayer left town "between two days."</p>
<p>I will remark, in passing, that I only remained in the milling business
one week. I told my employer I could not stay longer without an advance in
my wages; that I liked quartz milling, indeed was infatuated with it; that
I had never before grown so tenderly attached to an occupation in so short
a time; that nothing, it seemed to me, gave such scope to intellectual
activity as feeding a battery and screening tailings, and nothing so
stimulated the moral attributes as retorting bullion and washing blankets—still,
I felt constrained to ask an increase of salary. He said he was paying me
ten dollars a week, and thought it a good round sum. How much did I want?</p>
<p>I said about four hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was about
all I could reasonably ask, considering the hard times.</p>
<p>I was ordered off the premises! And yet, when I look back to those days
and call to mind the exceeding hardness of the labor I performed in that
mill, I only regret that I did not ask him seven hundred thousand.</p>
<p>Shortly after this I began to grow crazy, along with the rest of the
population, about the mysterious and wonderful "cement mine," and to make
preparations to take advantage of any opportunity that might offer to go
and help hunt for it.</p>
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