Visit to Pachuca and Real del Monte.--Otumba and Tulanzingo.--The grand
Canal of Huehuetoca.--The Silver Mines of Pachuca.--Hakal Silver
Mines.--Real del Monte Mines.--The Anglo-Mexican Mining Fever.--My
Equipment to descend a Mine.--The great Steam-pump.--Descending the
great Shaft.--Galleries and Veins of Ore.--Among the Miners one
thousand Feet under Ground.--The Barrel Process of refining
Silver.--Another refining Establishment.
An opposition line of stages upon the road that extends sixty miles
from the city of Mexico to the northern extremity of the valley has
brought down the fare to $3. It is a hard road to travel in the wet
season, and not a very interesting one at any time. Three miles of
causeway across the salt marsh brought us to the church and village of
our Lady of Guadalupe Hidalgo. From this place we passed for several
leagues along the barren tract that lies between the two salt-ponds of
San Cristobal and Tezcuco, and soon arrived at Tulanzingo, where the
great battle of the Free-masons was fought, and where eight poor
fellows lost their lives in the bloody encounter. This, and the
horrible battle of Otumba, which Cortez fought a little way east of
this spot, are memorable events in the history of Mexico--more
memorable than they deserve to have been.
As we rode along the eastern rim of the valley, the sun was shining
brightly on the western hill that inclosed it. The opening made by the
canal of Huehuetoca was plain in sight. To read about this canal and to
derive an idea of it from books is to get an impression that here, at
least, the Spaniards did a wonderful work. But to look at it is to
dissipate all such complimentary notions. The engineer who planned it
may have been a skillful man, but the government that fettered his
movements, like all Spanish governments of those times, consisted of a
cross between fools and priests. Even those pious gamblers, the
Franciscans, had a finger in the business. After absorbing, for near a
hundred years, the revenue appropriated to completing the work, they
abandoned it to the merchants of Mexico, who finally finished it. The
pond that was to be drained by it, the Zumpango, was certainly an
insignificant affair. There was nothing farther of interest until we
arrived at Pachuca.
Pachuca is the oldest mining district in Mexico. In its immediate
vicinity are the most interesting silver mines of the republic. These
mines were the first that were worked in the country, and immediately
after the Conquest they were very productive. They were worked for
generations, and then abandoned; again resumed after lying idle for
nearly a century, and worked for almost another hundred years; and then
once more abandoned, and resumed again while I was in Mexico. They now
produce that princely revenue to Escandon and Company of which I have
already spoken.
THE HAKAL MINE.
The Hakal (_Haxal_) mine in part belonged to the number of those which
the English Real del Monte Company worked on shares, with poor success,
for twenty-five years. It lies about three fourths of a mile from the
village of Pachuca. That company devoted their chief attention to the
mines upon the top of the mountain, at an elevation of 9057 feet, and
seven miles distant from this place, and these mines were comparatively
neglected. The new company, immediately upon taking possession, devoted
particular attention to the Hakal, which resulted in their striking a
_bonanza_,[72] in the Rosario shaft, which was yielding, from a single
small shaft, about $80,000 a month, if I recollect rightly.[73] The ore
of this mine is of a peculiar quality, and its silver is best separated
from the scoria by the smelting process, of which I shall treat more
fully when I come to speak of the mines of Regla. The Guadalupe shaft,
close by the Rosario, was doing but little when I was there, as it does
not belong to the same proprietors. On the night of my arrival they had
just completed the work of pumping the water out of the San Nicholas
shaft, famous for the immense amount of silver taken from it in the
early period of the mining history of Mexico.
Mounted on a good horse, and followed by a lackey, I rode up the zigzag
carriage-road which the English company constructed a quarter of a
century since in order to convey their immense steam machinery to the
top of the mountain, some seven miles distant. This road is still kept
in a good state of repair, and forms a romantic drive for those who
keep carriages in the mountains. The sun was shining upon the
cultivated hills and rolling lands far below us as we jogged along our
winding way up the mountain. At every turn in the road new beauties
presented themselves. But it was getting too chilly for moralizing, and
both lackey and I were pleased when we reached the village upon the top
of the mountain, which bears the name of Real del Monte. The house of
entertainment here is kept by an English woman, who seems to be a part
of the mining establishment. While in her domicile, I found no occasion
to regret that I was again elevated into a cold latitude.
THE MINING MANIA.
More than thirty years have passed since that second South Sea
delusion, the Anglo-Spanish American mining fever, broke out in
England. It surpassed a thousand-fold the wildest of all the New York
and California mining and quartz mining organizations of the last five
years. Prudent financiers in London ran stark mad in calculating the
dividends they must unavoidably realize upon investments in a business
to be carried on in a distant country, and managed and controlled by a
debating society or board of directors in London. Money was advanced
with almost incredible recklessness, and agents were posted off with
all secrecy to be first to secure from the owner of some abandoned mine
the right to work it before the agent of some other company should
arrive on the ground. No mine was to be looked at that was not named in
the volumes of Humboldt, and any mine therein named was valued above
all price. In the end, some $50,000,000 of English capital ran out, and
was used up in Mexico. It was one of those periodical manias that
regularly seize a commercial people once in ten years, and for which
there is no accounting, and no remedy but to let it have its way and
work out its own cure in the ruin of thousands. It is the same in our
own country.[74]
DESCENT INTO A MINE.
After a hearty breakfast at the tavern, I called at the office, or, as
it is here called, "the Grand House" (_Casa Grande_), and was
introduced by Mr. Auld, the director, to the foreman, who took me to
the dressing-room, where I was stripped, and clad in the garb of a
miner except the boots, which were all too short for my feet. My rig
was an odd one; a skull-cap formed like a fireman's, a miner's coat and
pants, and my own calf-skin boots. But in California I had got used to
uncouth attire, and now thought nothing of such small matters. We
therefore walked on without comments to the house built over the great
shaft, where my good-natured English companion, the foreman, stopped me
to complete my equipment, which consisted of a lighted tallow candle
stuck in a candlestick of soft mud, and pressed till it adhered to the
front of my miner's hat. Having fixed a similar appendage to his own
hat and to the hat of the servant that was to follow us, we were
considered fully equipped for descending the mine.
While standing at the top of the shaft, I was astonished at the size
and perfect finish of a steam-pump that had been imported from England
by the late English mining company. With the assistance of balancing
weights, the immense arms of the engine lifted, with mathematical
precision, two square timbers, the one spliced out to the length of a
thousand, the other twelve hundred feet, which fell back again by their
own weight: these were the pumping-rods, which lifted the water four
hundred feet to the mouth of a tunnel, or _adit_, which carried it a
mile and a quarter through the mountain, and discharged it in the creek
above the stamping-mill. There is a smaller pump, which works
occasionally, when the volume of water in the mines is too great for
the power of a single pump.
A trap-door being lifted, we began to descend by small ladders that
reached from floor to floor in the shaft, or, rather, in the half of
the shaft. The whole shaft was perhaps fifteen or twenty feet square,
with sides formed of solid masonry, where the rock happened to be soft,
while in other parts it consisted of natural porphyry rock cut smooth.
Half of this shaft was divided off by a partition, which extended the
whole distance from the top to the bottom of the mine. Through this the
materials used in the work were let down, and the ore drawn up in large
sacks, consisting each of the skin of an ox. The other half of the
shaft contained the two pumping timbers, and numerous floorings at
short distances; from one to another of these ran ladders, by which men
were continually ascending and descending, at the risk of falling only
a few feet at the utmost. The descent from platform to platform was an
easy one, while the little walk upon the platform relieved the muscles
exhausted by climbing down. With no great fatigue I got down a thousand
feet, where our farther progress was stopped by the water that filled
the lower galleries.
Galleries are passages running off horizontally from the shaft, either
cut through the solid porphyry to intersect some vein, or else the
space which a vein once occupied is fitted up for a gallery by
receiving a wooden floor and a brick arch over head. They are the
passages that lead to others, and to transverse galleries and veins,
which, in so old a mine as this, are very numerous. When a vein
sufficiently rich to warrant working is struck, it is followed through
all its meanderings as long as it pays for digging. The opening made in
following it is, of course, as irregular in form and shape as the vein
itself. The loose earth and rubbish taken out in following it is thrown
into some abandoned opening or gallery, so that nothing is lifted to
the surface but the ore. Sometimes several gangs of hands will be
working upon the same vein, a board and timber floor only separating
one set from another. When I have added to this description that this
business of digging out veins has continued here for near three hundred
years, it can well be conceived that this mountain ridge has become a
sort of honey-comb.
THE MINERS.
When our party had reached the limit of descent, we turned aside into a
gallery, and made our way among gangs of workmen, silently pursuing
their daily labor in galleries and chambers reeking with moisture,
while the water trickled down on every side on its way to the common
receptacle at the bottom. Here we saw English carpenters dressing
timbers for flooring by the light of tallow candles that burned in soft
mud candlesticks adhering to the rocky walls of the chamber. Men were
industriously digging upon the vein, others disposing of the rubbish,
while convicts were trudging along under heavy burdens of ore, which
they supported on their backs by a broad strap across their foreheads.
As we passed among these well-behaved gangs of men, I was a little
startled by the foreman remarking that one of those carriers had been
convicted of killing ten men, and was under sentence of hard labor for
life. Far from there being any thing forbidding in the appearance of
these murderers, now that they were beyond the reach of intoxicating
drink, they bore the ordinary subdued expression of the Meztizo.
According to custom, they lashed me to a stanchion as an intruder; but,
upon the foreman informing them that I would pay the usual forfeit of
cigaritos on arriving at the station-house, they good-naturedly
relieved me. Then we journeyed on and on, until my powers of endurance
could sustain no more. We sat down to rest, and to gather strength for
a still longer journey. At length we set out again, sometimes climbing
up, sometimes climbing down; now stopping to examine different
specimens of ores that reflected back the glare of our lights with
dazzling brilliancy, and to look at the endless varieties in the
appearance of the rock that filled the spaces in the porphyry matrix.
Then we walked for a long way on the top of the aqueduct of the adit,
until we at last reached a vacant shaft, through which we were drawn up
and landed in the prison-house, from whence we walked to the
station-house, where we were dressed in our own clothes again.
REFINING SILVER.
When my underground wanderings were ended, and dinner eaten, it was too
late in the day to visit the refining works; but on the next morning,
bright and early, I was in the saddle, on my way to visit the different
establishments connected with this mine. First, upon the river, at the
mouth of the adit, was a stamping-mill, where gangs of stamps were
playing in troughs, and reducing the hard ore to a coarse powder. A
little way farther down the stream the ore was ground, and then, in
blast ovens or furnaces, was heated until all the baser metals in the
ore became charged with oxygen to such a degree that they would not
unite with quicksilver. The ore was then carried and placed in the
bottom of large casks, and water and quicksilver were added, and then
they were set rolling by machinery for several days, until the silver
had formed an amalgam with the mercury, while the baser metals in the
ore were disengaged from the silver. The whole mass being now poured
out into troughs, the scoria was washed off from the amalgam, which was
gathered and put into a stout leathern bag with a cloth bottom, and the
unabsorbed mercury drained out. The amalgam, resembling lead in
appearance, being now cut up into cakes, and placed under an immense
retort, fire was applied; the mercury, in form of vapor, was driven
through a hole in the bottom of the platform into water, where it was
condensed, while the silver remained pure in the retort. This is called
the barrel process, and is used for certain kinds of ore.
I had come self-introduced to the Real del Monte, but that had not
prevented my receiving the accustomed hospitality of the establishment.
A groom and two of their best horses were at my service during my stay.
As the weather was fine, and the roads of the first class of English
carriage-ways, I heartily enjoyed the ride down the mountain gorge
until it opened upon the broad plain where the second refining
establishment, that of Vincente, is situated. Except that the iron
floors of their blast ovens were made to revolve while in a state of
red heat, all was substantially the same as at the last place.
Following the meanderings of the stream, I had been gradually
descending from the sharp air of early spring to the more appropriate
temperature of the tropics, as I had occasion to notice in looking into
the fine garden of the English director, which exhibited both the
fertilizing effects of irrigation upon English flowers, and the
advantages of tropical heat upon native varieties.
[72] A very rich portion of a vein is called a _bonanza_.
[73] Mr. Thomas Auld, the director of the company, furnished me
very accurate data in relation to affairs, but these are with my
other losses at New Orleans.
[74] Before leaving California, a young man in my office, who had
been using some of my money which he could not replace, proposed
to repay me in a certificate printed in red ink, which
certificate declared that I had paid $2000 toward the capital
stock of ---- Mining Company; Capital Stock, $250,000; signed
Col. ----, President, a gentleman a little in arrears at his
boarding-house, and my defaulting young man was secretary. Rather
an unpromising show that, as the property consisted of a tavern,
built of canvas upon Colonel Fremont's Maraposa grant, on the
principle of squatter sovereignty. Near by the squatter had dug a
promising hole, and if only money and machinery could be had,
_perhaps_ he might realize something from it. The young man
assured me that they had an agent in New York negotiating for
machinery, and in a few months they would be able to declare
dividends. Biting my lips to suppress a hearty laugh, I put the
paper printed with red ink into my pocket.
On my arrival in New York, I was thunderstruck at seeing a gilded
sign stuck up on the Merchants' Exchange: "---- MINING COMPANY
OFFICE." Not over-troubled by modesty, I ventured in, and
inquired if that machinery had been sent out. I was requested to
be seated in a fine cushioned chair. As I love entertainment, I
sat down, and took a survey of the desks, the Brussels carpet,
the ledgers, and the piles of pamphlets, which clearly
demonstrated that a man would get his money back many times over
before he paid it in. It seemed strange how all this could he
supported on the supposed future earnings of a hole in the
ground. The Board of Directors assembled. Many of them, I was
assured, were the leading men of New York, and things went off
with all solemnity. When all was ready, an immense piece of the
richest gold quartz was taken from a desk, such as used to be
sold at good prices in San Francisco for this very purpose. But
not a man in that august assembly dreamed of the manner in which
such things are gotten up, except perhaps the said agent sent out
to get machinery, but now figuring as a director. I was easily
prevailed on to sign an argumentative certificate, and was shown
one signed by Robert J. Walker on a much worse hole in the ground
than this. I was also informed that New York was not the proper
market, which I understand to mean that machinery could not be
obtained in New York on the credit of a quartz vein; and in
London they would not look at a scheme that did not embrace a
million at least, said the agent aforesaid. Therefore he proposed
to give me an engraved certificate, declaring that I had paid
$8000, which of course I readily accepted when I found that there
was no machinery in the case, and that all I had to rest my
engraved certificate upon was the one hundredth part of the said
hole in the ground, with a doubtful title. The last I heard of
this agent was, that he was traveling with his wife upon the
Rhine. Whether he was in search of machinery or not, I did not
stop to inquire.
Instead of the above being an extraordinary case, I understand
that it is about a fair average of the California gold schemes
that have been brought upon the stock-market of New York. If the
papers are only drawn up in the proper form, the most prudent men
in Wall Street are sometimes found to embark their capital before
the question has ever been settled whether gold can be
successfully obtained from quartz in California.