Part 22

"Meanwhile an almost continuous procession of mule and ox trains were striving to haul across that frightful hundred miles of mountains the food, machinery and furniture which the new settlement so sorely needed, and which it seemed so impossible to supply. Ten cents and more a pound was charged for freight, and prices ranged correspondingly high, with an exorbitant profit added. Hay, for example, reached $200 per ton.

"Nor were all who came rough or even hardy characters. There were among them men of wealth and brains, young graduates of colleges eager for a business opening, engineers and surveyors, lawyers, doctors, and a thousand soft-handed triflers who hoped to make a living in some undefined way out of the general excitement. Many of these gentlemen went to stay and took their wives, or, more usually, waited until they had prepared some sort of a home, and then sent for them. What stories some of these ladies tell of their stage-journey through those wintry mountains! How many wagons, heavily loaded with freight, did they see overturned by the roadside! How many dead mules and horses did they count! How many snow-banks did they fall through! how many precipices escape! how many upsettings avoid by the merest margin of consummate good driving! I knew of three ladies who for twenty-four hours were packed in a stage with a lot of drunken men, who could only be kept within the bounds of decorum and safety by being sung to sleep. The driver was utterly powerless to control them, and had as much as he could do to steer his six horses over that icy road. The crazy men said, 'Sing to us, we like it, and if you don't we'll dump you into the snow!' and sing they did, all night long. Whether this incident be considered laughable or pathetic, it is literally true. In the summer the stage passenger was not frozen, but was choked to slow death by impenetrable clouds of dust, and in the seasons between he was engulfed in mud. Verily that hundred miles of staging at fifteen cents a mile, with only thirty pounds of baggage allowed free, was the Purgatory of Leadville, and helped wonderfully to make one contented with his reception.

"With the beginning of 1879, the steady current that had flagged somewhat during the tempestuous last months of 1878, burst into a perfect freshet of travel. Log huts, board shanties, canvas tents, kennels dug into the side hill and roofed with earth and pine boughs, were filled to repletion with men and women, and still proved insufficient to shield the eager immigrants from the arctic air and pitiless storms of this plateau in the high Sierras. Men were glad to pay for the privilege of spreading their overcoats or blankets on the floor of a saloon and sleeping in stale smoke and the fumes of bad whisky--an atmosphere where the sooty oil lamps burned with a weak and yellow flame. Perhaps the dice rattled on till morning above the sleepers' heads, the monotonous call-song of the dealers lulling them to an unquiet doze in the murky air, only to be awakened by the loud profanity of some brawler or sent cowering under the blankets to escape the too free pistol-balls that fly across the billiard table. Even the sawdust floors of these reeking bar-rooms were not spacious enough to hold the two hundred persons a day who rushed into Leadville, and every dry-goods box upon the curbstone, every pile of hay-bales in the alley, became a bedroom for some belated traveler.

"But the era of saloon-floors and empty barrels did not last long. Enterprising men built huge hotels, and opened restaurants and great lodging-tents and barracks; strangers joined in twos and threes, cut logs and planted cabins as thick as corn.... Every day chronicled some new accession of wealth, some additional tapping of the silver deposits which were firmly believed to underlie every square foot of the region. It seemed all a matter of luck, too, and skilled prospecting found itself at fault. The spots old miners had passed by as worthless, 'tenderfeet' from Ohio dug down upon, and showed to be rich in 'mineral.' One of the first mines opened--the Camp Bird--was discovered by the Gallagher brothers, two utterly poor Irishmen. Another early piece of good fortune was that of Fryer, from whom Fryer Hill, one of the most productive districts, derives its name. He lived in a squatty little cabin on the side-hill, where the dirt floor had become as hilly as a model of the main range, and the rough stone fire-place in the corner was hardly fit to fry a rasher of bacon; but one day he dug a hole up near the top of the hill, hiding himself among the secret pines, saying nothing to anybody, and a few yards below the surface struck a mine which has already yielded millions of dollars without being urged. Innumerable incidents might be related of the patience and expense and hardship which resulted in failure; of the equal pluck and endurance that brought success; of happy chance or perfect accident divulging a fortune at the most unexpected point. The miners have a proverb, 'Nobody can see into the ground,' and the gamblers an adage, 'The only thing sure about luck is that it's bound to change!'

"One of the grimmest of these tales is that attached to the Dead Man claim, which is briefly as follows: It was winter. Scotty had died, and the boys, wanting to give him a right smart of a burial, hired a man for twenty dollars to dig a grave through ten feet of snow and six feet of hard ground. Meanwhile, Scotty was stuffed into a snow bank. Nothing was heard of the grave-digger for three days, and the boys, going out to see what had happened to him, found him in a hole which, begun as a grave, proved to be a sixty-ounce mine. The _quasi_ sexton refused to yield, and was not hard pushed, for Scotty was forgotten and staid in the snow-bank till the April sun searched him out, the boys meanwhile sinking prospect-holes in his intended cemetery.

"One mine had its shaft down one hundred and thirty-five feet and the indications of success were good. Some capitalists proposed to purchase an interest in it, and a half of the mine was offered them for $10,000, if taken before five o'clock. At half-past four, rich silver ore was struck, and when at half-past five the tardy men of money came leisurely up and signified their consent to the bargain, the manager pointed at the clock, and quietly remarked:

"'The price of a half interest in this mine now, gentlemen, is sixty thousand dollars.'

"Prospectors went everywhere seeking for carbonates, radiating from this center up all the gulches, and over the foot-hills, delving almost everywhere at a venture. One day, at a hitherto unheard-of point, wealth comes up by the bucketful out of the deep narrow hole, that has been pierced so unostentatiously. Instantly the transformation begins, and the lately green hill-side, refreshing to the townsman's eye, becomes forlorn in its ragged exposure of rock and soil where the forest has been swept away, while trial-mines grow as thickly upon its surface as pits on the rind of a strawberry. All these young mines, good or bad, looked much alike, and were equally inaccessible and unkempt. There were no roads, hardly any wagon-tracks and few paths. Every man went across lots, the shortest way, pushing through the remnant of the woods, clambering over the prostrate trunks and discarded tree-tops, whose straight trunks had been felled and dragged away to the saw-mill, or chopped into six-foot lengths for posts and logging. Teams must go around, but life was too short for the man afoot to follow them; holding his painful breath, he scaled straight up the steep and slippery ascent.

"But it is time to say something of the processes of getting out the ores, and perhaps the best way is at once to attack the geological structure of the region.

"Leadville appears to lie upon the eastern edge of the lava area of the state. The last of the trachyte peaks are at the head of Mosquito pass. Underneath the camp, and on all the hills where her riches are stored, the soil is found to be a porphyritic overflow overlying a highly silicified dolomite, that goes by the common name of 'limestone.' Between these two formations (_i.e._, under the porphyry and above the dolomite) are found the mineral beds. Various theories have been advanced as to the reason for their position, so novel in the experience of silver mining, and some of the explanations are a burlesque of geology, though uttered in dead earnest. Those who are best qualified to decide, although confessing limited observation, suggest what seems to me the simplest theory and the one nearest the truth. The mineral constituents of the ores are carbonate of lead in large quantity, silica, oxides of iron and manganese, and the precious chloride of silver. Sometimes the lead occurs as a sulphide, and there are some other insignificant components. Now it is possible that the original constituent parts of all these minerals should be contained in a porphyritic eruption. Deposits of galena and some other minerals are now occasionally found buried in the porphyry, or occupying slender fissure-veins through it. Moreover, all these minerals are capable of solution in water charged with carbonic acid, which, of course, was present in abundance, and the suggestion is that they have leached downward through the porphyry until they struck the limestone floor, which became in time so highly silicified, as to admit no further penetration of water, whereupon the valuable deposits that we are now prying out gradually accumulated. The silicified surface of the lime, and the semi-saturated line of the porphyry, next the carbonate, are known as the 'contacts;' and when the miners strike this, they have good cause to be hopeful of near success. The presence of great beds of kaolin (hydrated silicate of alumina), derived from the thorough decomposition of porphyry or granite, or both together, and the presence of hydrate of magnesia with beds of semi-opal (always an aqueous production), argue in favor of the truth of this explanation.

"The general fact of this position of the ores being understood, let me suppose that our prospectors have been more than ordinarily successful; that they have dug not more than a hundred feet, have curbed their shaft securely with timber, have struck the greenish-white porphyry, and finally have met with the longed-for 'contact,' which separates the mineral bearing rock from the barren gangue. They have been little troubled by water, and they have done all their work with the help of one man, and the ordinary windlass. There being every indication that wealth is just beneath their picks, they erect over the shaft a frame-work of heavy timbers, called a 'gallows,' and hang in it a large pulley. A little at one side, close to the ground, is fixed a second pulley. Under this, and over the upper one is reeved the bucket-rope, and a mule is hired to walk away with it, when the bucket is to be drawn up, creeping back when the bucket goes down. This is a 'whip.' The next advance in machinery is the 'whim,' which consists of the same arrangement of gallows and pulleys as before; but instead of a mule walking straight out and back, the mule travels round and round a huge revolving drum, that carries the hoisting-rope. If you care to go down one of these shafts you may stand in the bucket, or you may unhook it, and, placing your foot in a noose, be lowered away in the bucket's place. If your head is strong there is no great danger.

"When the miner really 'strikes it,' and the brown, crumbling, ill-looking ore begins to fill the bucket to the exclusion of all else, assaying fifty or a hundred or four hundred ounces to the ton, a house is built over the shaft, and a steam-engine supersedes the patient mule.

"The depth at which a mine may be found (if at all) can hardly even be guessed at. Paying 'mineral' has been met with from the surface to more than three hundred and fifty feet in depth. Usually the shafts are over a hundred feet deep.

"The deposit having been tapped, digging out the ore begins. This is done by means of horizontal passage-ways or tunnels, known as 'drifts,' which are driven into the rock from the bottom of the shaft.

"As the ores are brought to the surface they are scanned by an experienced person, and the best pieces thrown in a heap by themselves, while the ordinary ore is cast upon the 'dump' or pile which accumulates at the mouth of the mine, and makes a little ruddy terrace on the green or snowy hill-side. From this dump wagons haul the ore away to be sold, the best part often being put in hundred-pound sacks, about as large as quarter-barrel flour-bags, before being sold. Very rich ore is likely to be bought by regular purchasers, who either have them smelted in Leadville or forward them to smelting-works at Pueblo, Denver, St. Louis, and Eastern cities. The inferior grades are sold by the ton to some one of the dozen smelters here in town, the price being governed by the market quotations of silver in New York on the day of the sale, less several deductions amounting in all to about twenty-five per cent. as the reducer's margin for profit, and plus three to five cents per pound for all the lead above twenty-one per cent. which the ore carries. Silver and gold are estimated in ounces; lead and copper in percentages; but allowance is not made for both of the latter metals in the same ore. The ore is hauled to the smelting-works by four or six-mule teams, for the most part, the driver not sitting on the wagon, but riding the nigh wheeler, guiding his team by a single very strong rein which goes to the bits of the leaders, and handling the brake by another strap. He is in the position of a steersman in the middle of his craft, and his 'bridge' is the saddle. Every load is set upon the scales, recorded, and then shoveled into its proper bin. A thin-faced, dusty-haired youth leaned half asleep against a shady corner at one of these mills, recording the tons and fractions of a ton in each load as he lazily adjusted the balance. His air was of one so utterly listless and bored that I was moved to remark cheerily as I went by:

"'You haven't chosen the most exciting part of this business.'

"'No,' he answered dryly, while an indescribable twinkle came into his carbonated countenance. 'No, but I'm trying to do my duty. You know the poet says, "They also serve who only stand and weigh it."'

"That fellow had a history, but I haven't time to tell it. Leadville is full of such characters, and it only needs to put one's self _en rapport_ with their happy-go-lucky good humor and stoicism under all sorts of fortune to find these miners, at heart, the best fellows in the world. They have a high regard for a gentleman, but a hatred of a swell; no objection to good clothes, but a horror of 'frills;' a high respect for genuine virtue, but boundless hatred of cant; an admiration for nerve amounting to worship, but a contempt of braggadocio that often results in an impulsive puncturing of both the braggart and his boasts. A 'tender-foot,' that is, a new arrival from the East, green in the ways of mountain life, they consider fair game for tricks and chaff. Usually they attempt to frighten him, and his behavior at such initiatory moments determines, to a large extent, his future standing in the camp.

"But this is a digression from the subject in hand, which is the reduction of the ores. The smelters cannot be allowed to cool off, and so are run the twenty four hours through. One evening we made up a party and visited one of the great smelters. Its chimney-stacks pour noxious smoke over a nest of cabins down on the bank of the creek, and guide us, by scent as well as sight, through the streets and across the vacant lots. The broad upper floor is divided along one side into a series of bins, opening outwardly into a shed, under which the teams drive that bring the ore. Each owner's lot is put into a bin and kept separate until sampled and paid for. This sampling is a process akin to homeopathy. Supposing one hundred tons are to be sold at the smelter. Every tenth ton, as fast as delivered, is set aside to be sampled. This ten tons is then subdivided,--perhaps by being carried from one part of the floor to the other in wheelbarrows,--every tenth load being set aside. The single ton thus remaining contains many large, hard lumps. These are roughly screened out and put through a crusher, which chews them into fragments no larger than walnuts. The heap of a ton of broken material thus formed is now separated in a very ingenious way, by catching a few lumps of the ore from each shovelful in a 'scoop,' which a man holds above the wheelbarrow wherein the main portion is carted back to the original pile in the bin. The saved portion, which has happened to fall into the scoop, constitutes a new sample, to be further reduced, by successive crushings and screenings, until finally there remains only a pound of earth as the perfect representation of the average quality of the five hundred tons of rocky ore offered from the mine. This pound is then ground to powder on the bucking board, and a tenth or twentieth is taken for the scientific fire-test, or 'assay,' which shall determine its value. All these processes go on at night as well as by day.

"The red-brown ores lay in little heaps about the floor when we entered, divided from one another by low partitions. Men with spidery wheelbarrows were cruising about, dumping a pile of precious earth here, shoveling up another there, with seemingly aimless purposes, and the bins were only like so many openings to a mine, so deep were the shadows hiding their recesses. Across the room, lanterns showed four great circular chambers of iron, from whose depths hoarse rumblings drowned in a deep, steady bass the energetic crunch-crunch of the insatiate ore-chewers. Wide door-ways admitted into these dungeons, where surging volumes of murky vapors were confined, and through their hot portals red-shirted men hurled the raw material that should be digested, and the worthy part of which should issue from the furnaces below in a bright and costly stream: first a barrow load of carbonate ore, next one of charcoal, then a third of iron and limestone-flux.

"Day after day, night after night, these monsters are fed with this diet, varied in proportions according to the richness and metallurgical qualities of the ore that is being smelted. It requires very good judgment to determine just how much foreign material and lime is needed to produce the best results with the constantly varying ores. Luck may find the silver ore but science must extract the bullion. Most profit accrues to the smelter when the ore produces from seventy-five to two hundred ounces of silver, and contains a goodly proportion of iron and lead.

"Leaving the dungeons, we pick our way down the slope of a small mountain of ore, and enter below, where the engine and boilers throb, and the openings at the bottom of the furnaces give exit to the silver and the slag we saw shoveled in above as ore. And what an exit! The low roof shuts down close and dark upon the huge black cylinder of iron and bricks that holds in its heart the molten metal. There are pipes and valves, and draft-ways, and beams and braces, but they show indistinct in the gloom, and are nothing beside that great central mass, begrimed with soot and the dust of arsenic and oxides of lead. Watch that workman. He lifts a lance and stepping near the base of the furnace, where a single spark directs his aim, gives two or three quick thrusts. How mighty an effect the simple act evokes! The gloomy and ghost-haunted chamber becomes a home of fire; the grim furnace breathes out gaseous flames of blue and green, with tongues of light which hover playfully over a cataract of melted red metal bubbling, spouting, plunging out of that Plutonic throat and falling in hissing streams into the iron bowl waiting to catch its hot flood. The little lady who is with us, seeing the sparks fly, draws timidly outside the doorway and none too soon, for without warning the whole place becomes volcanic. No longer a steady stream of artificial lava rolls down the iron channel, but the liquid metal bursts its bounds and becomes a fountain. The furnace is hidden in lurid gases out of which spring volley upon volley of burning fragments that scatter showers of fire over the whole foreground.

"The slag-pot is a conical vessel, with a rounded apex, poised, base uppermost, on four little legs; when it is full, an iron frame work of a cart runs up, seizes it on opposite sides as though with two hands, and wheels it, glowing and fuming, out where a mole of slag is pushing itself over into the white gravel of the gulch, and where it is deposited red and crackling among heaps of like cones, some fading into the ashy hues of spent heat, some black and shining like inverted crucibles of polished iron. It was an uncanny vision: the huge rough outlines of the great mill, with its high chimneys and beacons of flame and smoke; the blaze within, the wan moonlight outside, and the sinewy men with skeleton carts leaping about in the glare of the spouting slag, handling shapely burdens of fiery refuse.

"While the worthless slag is doing so much sputtering and making so lively a show of itself, the silver and lead have quietly sunk to the bottom as fast as the heat liberated them from the mass of the boiling ore, and now come oozing up from a small exit far below the slag-spout, into a well at the side of the furnace. As fast as needful, this liquid 'bullion' is ladled out and poured into iron moulds, where it remains until it cools into solid 'pigs' or bars of lead weighing about fifty pounds each, and carrying about two per cent. of silver. These pigs, when cool, are stamped with the smelter's name and the number of the car-load to which they will belong. Then from each one is cut a fragment, and these pieces--when the whole 'run' of the furnace has been made--are collected and re-cast and assayed to determine the value and selling-price of the bullion."

The foregoing paragraphs, culled without indicating the omissions, and so, perhaps reading abruptly, it must be remembered, were written in the early summer of 1879. Yet, to a great degree, the picture outlined in that (now old) magazine article holds good to-day. There are many more people here, and the coming of the Denver and Rio Grande railway has brought the world nearer and multiplied the means of trade. It has reduced prices, afforded ready transportation out and in, civilized the town. Harrison avenue has become a metropolitan street, crowded with fine business houses, where you can buy almost as many things as in Denver, and the hills in the outskirts are crowded with more mine-houses and riddled with more tunnels than formerly. But all this is an advance in degree, not an addition of a new kind. The paving of the central streets, the erection of large business buildings, the introduction of public water and gas, the police, the fire-patrol, the morning and evening papers, the telephone and what not, are all indications of the thrift and prosperity of the people but render the city less characteristic and peculiar. The Leadville of '79 in which we took a keen interest is now a thing of the past.