Nevada is one of the very youngest and wildest of the States;
nevertheless it is already strewn with ruins that seem as gray and
silent and time-worn as if the civilization to which they belonged had
perished centuries ago. Yet, strange to say, all these ruins are
results of mining efforts made within the last few years. Wander where
you may throughout the length and breadth of this mountain-barred
wilderness, you everywhere come upon these dead mining towns, with
their tall chimney stacks, standing forlorn amid broken walls and
furnaces, and machinery half buried in sand, the very names of many of
them already forgotten amid the excitements of later discoveries, and
now known only through tradition—tradition ten years old.
While exploring the mountain ranges of the State during a considerable
portion of three summers, I think that I have seen at least five of
these deserted towns and villages for every one in ordinary life. Some
of them were probably only camps built by bands of prospectors, and
inhabited for a few months or years, while some specially interesting
cañon was being explored, and then carelessly abandoned for more
promising fields. But many were real towns, regularly laid out and
incorporated, containing well-built hotels, churches, schoolhouses,
post offices, and jails, as well as the mills on which they all
depended; and whose well-graded streets were filled with lawyers,
doctors, brokers, hangmen, real estate agents, etc., the whole
population numbering several thousand.
A few years ago the population of Hamilton is said to have been nearly
eight thousand; that of Treasure Hill, six thousand; of Shermantown,
seven thousand; of Swansea, three thousand. All of these were
incorporated towns with mayors, councils, fire departments, and daily
newspapers. Hamilton has now about one hundred inhabitants, most of
whom are merely waiting in dreary inaction for something to turn up.
Treasure Hill has about half as many, Shermantown one family, and
Swansea none, while on the other hand the graveyards are far too full.
In one cañon of the Toyabe range, near Austin, I found no less than
five dead towns without a single inhabitant. The streets and blocks of
“real estate” graded on the hillsides are rapidly falling back into the
wilderness. Sagebrushes are growing up around the forges of the
blacksmith shops, and lizards bask on the crumbling walls.
While traveling southward from Austin down Big Smoky Valley, I noticed
a remarkably tall and imposing column, rising like a lone pine out of
the sagebrush on the edge of a dry gulch. This proved to be a
smokestack of solid masonry. It seemed strangely out of place in the
desert, as if it had been transported entire from the heart of some
noisy manufacturing town and left here by mistake. I learned afterwards
that it belonged to a set of furnaces that were built by a New York
company to smelt ore that never was found. The tools of the workmen are
still lying in place beside the furnaces, as if dropped in some sudden
Indian or earthquake panic and never afterwards handled. These imposing
ruins, together with the desolate town, lying a quarter of a mile to
the northward, present a most vivid picture of wasted effort. Coyotes
now wander unmolested through the brushy streets, and of all the busy
throng that so lavishly spent their time and money here only one man
remains—a lone bachelor with one suspender.
Mining discoveries and progress, retrogression and decay, seem to have
been crowded more closely against each other here than on any other
portion of the globe. Some one of the band of adventurous prospectors
who came from the exhausted placers of California would discover some
rich ore—how much or little mattered not at first. These specimens fell
among excited seekers after wealth like sparks in gunpowder, and in a
few days the wilderness was disturbed with the noisy clang of miners
and builders. A little town would then spring up, and before anything
like a careful survey of any particular lode would be made, a company
would be formed, and expensive mills built. Then, after all the
machinery was ready for the ore, perhaps little, or none at all, was to
be found. Meanwhile another discovery was reported, and the young town
was abandoned as completely as a camp made for a single night; and so
on, until some really valuable lode was found, such as those of Eureka,
Austin, Virginia, etc., which formed the substantial groundwork for a
thousand other excitements.
Passing through the dead town of Schellbourne last month, I asked one
of the few lingering inhabitants why the town was built. “For the
mines,” he replied. “And where are the mines?” “On the mountains back
here.” “And why were they abandoned?” I asked. “Are they exhausted?”
“Oh, no,” he replied, “they are not exhausted; on the contrary, they
have never been worked at all, for unfortunately, just as we were about
ready to open them, the Cherry Creek mines were discovered across the
valley in the Egan range, and everybody rushed off there, taking what
they could with them—houses machinery, and all. But we are hoping that
somebody with money and speculation will come and revive us yet.”
The dead mining excitements of Nevada were far more intense and
destructive in their action than those of California, because the
prizes at stake were greater, while more skill was required to gain
them. The long trains of gold-seekers making their way to California
had ample time and means to recover from their first attacks of mining
fever while crawling laboriously across the plains, and on their
arrival on any portion of the Sierra gold belt, they at once began to
make money. No matter in what gulch or cañon they worked, some measure
of success was sure, however unskillful they might be. And though while
making ten dollars a day they might be agitated by hopes of making
twenty, or of striking their picks against hundred- or thousand-dollar
nuggets, men of ordinary nerve could still work on with comparative
steadiness, and remain rational.
But in the case of the Nevada miner, he too often spent himself in
years of weary search without gaining a dollar, traveling hundreds of
miles from mountain to mountain, burdened with wasting hopes of
discovering some hidden vein worth millions, enduring hardships of the
most destructive kind, driving innumerable tunnels into the hillsides,
while his assayed specimens again and again proved worthless. Perhaps
one in a hundred of these brave prospectors would “strike it rich,”
while ninety-nine died alone in the mountains or sank out of sight in
the corners of saloons, in a haze of whiskey and tobacco smoke.
The healthful ministry of wealth is blessed; and surely it is a fine
thing that so many are eager to find the gold and silver that lie hid
in the veins of the mountains. But in the search the seekers too often
become insane, and strike about blindly in the dark like raving madmen.
Seven hundred and fifty tons of ore from the original Eberhardt mine on
Treasure Hill yielded a million and a half dollars, the whole of this
immense sum having been obtained within two hundred and fifty feet of
the surface, the greater portion within one hundred and forty feet.
Other ore masses were scarcely less marvelously rich, giving rise to
one of the most violent excitements that ever occurred in the history
of mining. All kinds of people—shoemakers, tailors, farmers, etc., as
well as miners—left their own right work and fell in a perfect storm of
energy upon the White Pine Hills, covering the ground like
grasshoppers, and seeming determined by the very violence of their
efforts to turn every stone to silver. But with few exceptions, these
mining storms pass away about as suddenly as they rise, leaving only
ruins to tell of the tremendous energy expended, as heaps of giant
boulders in the valley tell of the spent power of the mountain floods.
In marked contrast with this destructive unrest is the orderly
deliberation into which miners settle in developing a truly valuable
mine. At Eureka we were kindly led through the treasure chambers of the
Richmond and Eureka Consolidated, our guides leisurely leading the way
from level to level, calling attention to the precious ore masses which
the workmen were slowly breaking to pieces with their picks, like
navvies wearing away the day in a railroad cutting; while down at the
smelting works the bars of bullion were handled with less eager haste
than the farmer shows in gathering his sheaves.
The wealth Nevada has already given to the world is indeed wonderful,
but the only grand marvel is the energy expended in its development.
The amount of prospecting done in the face of so many dangers and
sacrifices, the innumerable tunnels and shafts bored into the
mountains, the mills that have been built—these would seem to require a
race of giants. But, in full view of the substantial results achieved,
the pure waste manifest in the ruins one meets never fails to produce a
saddening effect.
The dim old ruins of Europe, so eagerly sought after by travelers, have
something pleasing about them, whatever their historical associations;
for they at least lend some beauty to the landscape. Their picturesque
towers and arches seem to be kindly adopted by nature, and planted with
wild flowers and wreathed with ivy; while their rugged angles are
soothed and freshened and embossed with green mosses, fresh life and
decay mingling in pleasing measures, and the whole vanishing softly
like a ripe, tranquil day fading into night. So, also, among the older
ruins of the East there is a fitness felt. They have served their time,
and like the weather-beaten mountains are wasting harmoniously. The
same is in some degree true of the dead mining towns of California.
But those lying to the eastward of the Sierra throughout the ranges of
the Great Basin waste in the dry wilderness like the bones of cattle
that have died of thirst. Many of them do not represent any good
accomplishment, and have no right to be. They are monuments of fraud
and ignorance—sins against science. The drifts and tunnels in the rocks
may perhaps be regarded as the prayers of the prospector, offered for
the wealth he so earnestly craves; but, like prayers of any kind not in
harmony with nature, they are unanswered. But, after all, effort,
however misapplied, is better than stagnation. Better toil blindly,
beating every stone in turn for grains of gold, whether they contain
any or not, than lie down in apathetic decay.
The fever period is fortunately passing away. The prospector is no
longer the raving, wandering ghoul of ten years ago, rushing in random
lawlessness among the hills, hungry and footsore; but cool and
skillful, well supplied with every necessary, and clad in his right
mind. Capitalists, too, and the public in general, have become wiser,
and do not take fire so readily from mining sparks; while at the same
time a vast amount of real work is being done, and the ratio between
growth and decay is constantly becoming better.