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.
[Illustration: MOUNT OF THE HOLY CROSS.]
"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.
After dinner, the Madame and I go up as of yore, to a cottage we wot of
that commands a pleasant view, and sit watching the night put the
shading into the picture. But I tell her it is not the picture I used to
see and enjoy. That was a great map of new, bare houses spread out
before us, seemingly without arrangement or form. The steady drone of
late planing mills and the subdued, eager rasp of steam-saws begrudging
the approach of darkness, told how grew the magic town that was
overrunning the plateau, exploring the gulches, and swarming up the
flanks of the half-cleared foothills. It was a town without high
buildings or towers, church-spires or foliage. In the clearness with
which every detail is seen at a great distance, the houses looked
smaller than they really were. It was all rough and ragged, yet all the
more picturesque.
Slowly the long, sober twilight deepens in the valley into gloaming, and
sinks thence into a gloom out of which, one by one, peep the lights.
Still, outlines are not lost, and the massive figures of the foothills
thrust themselves hugely through the veil that night is dropping, solid
and blue and forbidding. It is a picture of perfect sweetness and
peace,--a poetic picture in which one can imagine nothing that is harsh,
or selfish, or mean. And overhead the mountains tower, rank behind rank,
peak crowding peak, the pinnacles vying in being the last to hold the
lingering rays of the sun, whose light now enkindles the heights until
all the wide snow fields burn rosily. Then one by one the glittering
banks fade into the softest of ash-tints as the reluctant sun bows
itself away, and the shadows of the blackening ridges fall athwart the
arctic panorama that fills the horizon. Keeping pace, the lights of the
city increase, shining duskily through a purple haze of smoke and mist.
Clearer above this ethereal stratum of haze, gleam the jewel-points that
show where huge engines are tirelessly at work, and where prospectors
and campers have built their fires on the hill-sides, and sit about them
boiling their coffee and gossiping on the events of the day and the
prospects of the morrow. Then the Madame and I saunter homeward--for
our comfortable cars seem very homelike to us these frosty
evenings--breathing the resinous flavor of the crisply fragrant spruce,
and watching the stars spring hastily over the coruscant line that
traces the serrated crest of the snowy range.
[Illustration: MARSHALL PASS--EASTERN SLOPE.]
Leadville at night is a scene of wild hilarity, and yet of remarkable
order. The omnipresent six-shooters that used to outnumber the men of a
mining camp ten years ago are rarely seen here in public. If men carry
pistols, it is in their pockets; and the shoot-the lights out ruffianism
of the old frontier days rarely shows even a symptom of revival. You
find a city of twenty thousand people or so within the limits and up
the sides of the hills that overlook the town, where hundreds of
mine-houses, spouting ceaseless jets of steam from ever-laboring
engines, and hundreds of dumps of earth and ore brought to sudden
daylight from their beds in the heart of the hill, tell the story of
Leadville's prosperity. The rough old camp has crystallized into the
city she resolved to become.
As for these mines--what shall be said. Fryer Hill, which was the source
of Leadville's "boom," has gone into obscurity under the newer glory of
its rivals, Carbonate and Breece hills. It is said that Fryer Hill
proved a great collection of "pockets," very rich so long as they
lasted, but liable at any time to be exhausted. The other hills,
however, seem not to have suffered the geological turmoil through which
Fryer passed, and, therefore, when a deposit of ore is struck, one may
be reasonably sure of its holding out as long as any one man or
generation of men would be likely to feel an earthly interest in its
development. Men now know pretty well, or think they do, what ones of
the hundreds of "discovery shafts" sunk are really worth continuing, and
there is a constant tendency to the consolidation of adjacent properties
into the hands of large companies controlling vast capital, and pushing
operations with quiet dignity. The bullion-product of Leadville
increases year by year, and gives an annual output varying from
$17,000,000 to $19,000,000.
The yard of the Denver and Rio Grande railway, where our cars lay for a
whole week, is a scene of never ceasing activity. This is the terminus
not only of the main line from the east and south, but also of two
branches, one down the Blue river and the other over to the Eagle River
valley. Both have to cross the continental range, and abound in scenery
so picturesque that, in the phrase of the penny-a-liner, "to be
appreciated must be seen." That being the case, we propose to "see" it.
XXII
ACROSS THE TENNESSEE AND FREMONT'S PASSES.
'Unto the towne of Walfingham
'The way is hard for to be gon;
'And verry crooked are those pathes
'For you to find out all alone.'
--PERCY'S RELIQUES.
According to the virtuous intention of the last paragraph, we went one
day over to Red Cliff and the Eagle river. The branch of the railway
which runs thither, leaves the main line at Malta, and takes in some
very pretty scenery.
From Malta the line skirts the wide hay-meadows between the village and
the Arkansas river; I saw men spreading manure there, too, and was told
they had raised oats successfully. The whole mouth of California gulch,
here, is a vast bed of clean, drifted gravel, the result of the gold
hydraulic operations above, the placers having been worked more or less
continuously for twenty years.
Rising along a tortuous path cut at a heavy grade, as usual, into the
side hills, we mount slowly into Tennessee Pass, which feeds the head of
the Eagle river on one side and one source of the Arkansas on the other.
It is a comparatively low and easy pass, covered everywhere with dense
timber, and a wagon-road has long been followed through it. There was
nothing to be seen except an occasional pile of ties, or a charcoal
oven, save that now and then a gap in the hills showed the gray rough
summits of Galena, Homestake, and the other hights that guard the Holy
Cross. At each end of the Pass is a little open glade or "park," where
settlers have placed their cabins and fenced off a few acres of level
ground whereon to cut hay, for nothing else will grow at this great
elevation.
One of the side-valleys, coming down to the track at right angles from
the southwestward--I think it is Homestake gulch--leads the eye up
through a glorious alpine avenue to where the cathedral crest of a noble
peak pierces the sky. It is a summit that would attract the eye
anywhere,--its feet hidden in verdurous hills, guarded by knightly
crags, half-buried in seething clouds, its helmet vertical, frowning,
plumed with gleaming snow,--
"Ay, every inch a king."