DOWN THE ONTARIO MINE.
"Been down a mine! What on earth did you do that for?" said the elder
Sheridan to the younger.
"Oh, just to say that I had done it," was the reply.
"To say that you had done it! Good gracious! Couldn't you have said
that without going down a mine?"
No, Mr. Sheridan, you could not; at least not in these latter days. Too
many people do it now for the impostor to remain undiscovered. Take my
own case, for instance. I had often read descriptions of mine descents,
and thought I knew how it happened, and how ore was got out. But no one
ever told me that you had to go paddling about in water half the time,
or that mines were excavated upwards. Now, then, if I had tried to
pretend that I had been down a mine I should have been promptly found
out, by my ignorance of the two first facts that strike one. Again, it
is very simple work imagining the descent of a "shaft" in a "cage."
But unfortunately a cage is only a platform to stand on without either
sides or top, and not, therefore, such a cage as one would buy to keep
a bird in, or as would keep a bird in if one did buy it. Nor, without
actually experiencing it, could anybody guess that the first sensation
of whizzing down a pipe, say 800 feet, is that of seeming to lose all
your specific gravity, and that the next (after you had partially
collected your faculties) is that you are stationary yourself, but that
the dripping timbers that line the shaft are all flying upwards past
you like sparks up a chimney.
Mines, of course, differ from one another just as the men who go down
them do, but as far as I myself am concerned all mines are puddly
places, and the sensations of descent are ridiculous--for I have only
been down two in my life, and both "demned, damp, moist, unpleasant"
places. But the mine to which I now refer is the "Ontario," in Utah,
which may be said, in the preposterous vernacular of the West, to be
a "terrible fine" mine, or, in other words, "a boss mine," that is to
say, "a daisy."
As for daisies, anything that greatly takes the fancy or evokes
especial admiration is called a daisy. Thus I heard a very much
respected Mormon Bishop, who is also a director of a railway, described
by an enthusiastic admirer as "a daisy!"
Finding myself in Park "City" one evening--it is a mining camp
dependent chiefly upon the Ontario--I took a walk up the street with
a friend. Every other house appeared to be a saloon, with a doctor's
residence sandwiched in between--a significantly convenient arrangement
perhaps in the days when there was no "Protective Committee" in Park
City, but--so I am told--without much practical benefit to the public
in these quiet days, when law-abiding citizens do their own hanging,
without troubling the county sheriff, who lives somewhere on the other
side of a distance. The result of this is that bad characters do not
stay long enough in Park City now to get up free fights, and make work
for the doctors. The Protective Committee invites them to "git" as soon
as they arrive, and, to do them credit, they do "git."
However, as I was saying, I took a walk with a friend along the street,
and presently became aware above me, high up on the hillside, of a
great collection of buildings, with countless windows (I mean that
I did not try to count them) lit up, and looking exactly like some
theatrical night-scene. These were the mills of the Ontario, which work
night and day, and seven days to the week, a perpetual flame like that
of the Zoroastrians, and as carefully kept alive by stalwart stokers as
ever was Vestal altar-fire by the girl-priestesses of Rome. It was a
picturesque sight, with the huge hills looming up black behind, and the
few surviving pine-trees showing out dimly against the darkening sky.
Next morning I went up to the mine--and down it.
Having costumed myself in garments that made getting dirty a perfect
luxury, I was taken to the shaft. Now, I had expected to see an
unfathomably black hole in the ground with a rope dangling down it,
but instead of that I found myself in a spacious boarded shed, with
a huge wheel standing at one end and a couple of iron uprights with
a cross-bar standing up from the floor at the other. Round the wheel
was coiled an enormous length of a six-inch steel-wire band, and the
disengaged end of the band, after passing over a beam, was fastened
to the cross-bar above mentioned. On the bridge of the wheel stood an
engineer, the arbiter of fates, who is perpetually unwinding victims
down from stage to stage of the Inferno, and winding up the redeemed
from limbo to limbo. Having propitiated him by an affectation of
intelligence as to the machinery which he controlled, we took our
places under the cross-bar, between the stanchions, and suddenly the
floor--as innocent-looking and upright-minded a bit of boarded floor
as you could wish to stand on--gave way beneath us, and down we shot
apud inferos, like the devils in "Der Freischütz." We had our lamps in
our hands, and they gave just light enough for me to see the dripping
wooden walls of the shaft flashing past, and then I felt myself
becoming lighter and lighter--a mere butterfly--imponderable. But it
doesn't take many seconds to fall down 800 feet, and long before I had
expected it I found we were "at the bottom."
Our explorations then began; and very queer it all was, with the
perpetual gushing of springs from the rock, and the bubble and splash
of the waters as they ran along on either side the narrow tunnels; the
meetings at corners with little cars being pushed along by men who
looked, as they bent low to their work, like those load-rolling beetles
that Egypt abounds in; the machinery for pumping, so massive that it
seemed much more likely that it was found where it stood, the vestiges
of a long-past subterranean civilization, than that it had been brought
down there by the men of these degenerate days; the sudden endings of
the tunnels which the miners were driving along the vein, with a man
at each ending, his back bent to fit into the curve which he had made
in the rock, and reminding one of the frogs that science tells us are
found at times fitted into holes in the middle of stones; the climbing
up hen-roost ladders from tunnel to tunnel, from one darkness into
another; the waiting at different spots till "that charge had been
blasted," and the dull, deadened roar of the explosion had died away;
the watching the solitary miners at their work picking and thumping at
the discoloured strips of dark rock that looked to the uninitiated only
like water-stained, mildewy accidents in the general structure, but
which, in reality, was silver, and yielding, it might be, $1600 to the
ton!
"This is all very rich ore," said my guide, kicking a heap that I was
standing on. I got off it at once, reverentially.
But reverence for the Mother of the Dollar gradually dies out,
for everything about you, above you, beneath you, is silver or
silverish--dreadful rubbish to look at, it is true, but with the spirit
of the great metal in it all none the less; that fairy Argentine
who builds palaces for men, and gives them, if they choose, all the
pleasures of the world, and the leisure wherein to enjoy them. And
there they stood, these latter-day Cyclops, working away like the
gnomes of the Hartz Mountains, or the entombed artificers of the
Bear-Kings of Dardistan, with their lanterns glowing at the end of
their tunnels like the Kanthi gem which Shesh, the fabled snake-god,
has provided for his gloomy empire of mines under the Nagas' hills.
Useless crystals glittered on every side, as if they were jewels, and
the water dripping down the sides glistened as if it was silver, but
the pretty hypocrisy was of no avail. For though the ore itself was
dingy and ugly and uninviting, the ruthless pick pursued it deeper
and deeper into its retreat, and only struck the harder the darker
and uglier it got. It reminded me, watching the miner at his work,
of the fairy story where the prince in disguise has to kill the lady
of his love in order to release her from the enchantments which have
transformed her, and how the wicked witch makes her take shape after
shape to escape the resolute blows of the desperate lover. But at last
his work is accomplished, and the ugly thing stands before him in all
the radiant beauty of her true nature.
And it is a long process, and a costly one, before the lumps of heavy
dirt which the miner pecks out of the inside of a hill are transformed
into those hundredweight blocks of silver bullion which the train from
Park City carries every morning of the year into Salt Lake City. From
first to last it is pretty much as follows. Remember I am not writing
for those who live inside mines; very much on the contrary. I am
writing for those who have never been down a mine in their lives, but
who may care to read an unscientific description of "mining," and the
Ontario mine in particular.
In 1872 a couple of men made a hole in the ground, and finding silver
ore in it offered the hole for sale at $30,000. A clever man, R. C.
Chambers by name, happened to come along, and liking the look of the
hole, joined a friend in the purchase of it. The original diggers thus
pocketed $30,000 for a few days' work, and no doubt thought they had
done a good thing. But alas! that hole in the ground which they were
so glad to get rid of ten years ago now yields every day a larger sum
in dollars than they sold it for! The new owners of the hole, which
was christened "The Ontario Mine," were soon at work, but instead of
following them through the different stages of development, it is
enough to describe what that hole looks like and produces to-day.
A shaft, then, has been sunk plumb down into the mountain for 900
feet, and from this shaft, at every 100 feet as you go down, you find
a horizontal tunnel running off to right and left. If you stop in your
descent at any one of these "stages" and walk through the tunnel--water
rushing all the way over your feet, and the vaulted rock dripping
over-head--you will find that a line of rails has been laid down along
it, and that the sides and roofs are strongly supported by timbers
of great thickness. These timbers are necessary to prevent, in the
first place, the rock above from crushing down through the roof of the
tunnel, and, in the next, from squeezing in its sides, for the rock
every now and then swells and the sides of the tunnels bulge in. The
rails are, of course, for the cars which the miners fill with ore, and
push from the end of the tunnel to the "stage." A man there signals
by a bell which communicates with the engineer at the big wheel in
the shed I have already spoken of, and there being a regular code of
signals, the engineer knows at once at which stage the car is waiting,
and how far therefore he is to let the cage down. Up goes the car with
its load of ore into the daylight,--and then its troubles begin.
But meanwhile let us stay a few minutes more in the mine. Walking
along any one of the main horizontal tunnels, we come at intervals to
a ladder, and going up one of them we find that a stope, or smaller
gallery, is being run parallel with the tunnel in which we are
walking, and of course (as it follows the same direction of the ore),
immediately over that tunnel, so that the roof of the tunnel is the
floor of the stope. The stopes are just wide enough for a man to work
in easily, and are as high as he can reach easily with his pickaxe,
about seven feet. If you walk along one of these stopes you come to
another ladder, and find it leads to another stope above, and going
up this you find just the same again, until you become aware that the
whole mountain above you is pierced throughout the length of the ore
vein by a series of seven-foot galleries lying exactly parallel one
above the other, and separated only by a sufficient thickness of pine
timber to make a solid floor for each. But at every hundred feet, as I
have said, there comes a main tunnel, down to which all the produce of
the minor galleries above it is shot down by "shoots," loaded into cars
and pushed along to the "stage." But silver ore is not the only thing
that the Company gets out of its mine, for unfortunately the mountain
in which the Ontario is located is full of springs, and the miner's
pick is perpetually, therefore, letting the water break into the
tunnels, and in such volume, too, that I am informed it costs as much
to rid the works of the water as to get out the silver! Streams gurgle
along all the tunnels, and here and there ponderous bulkheads have been
put up to keep the water and the loosened rock from falling in. Pumps
of tremendous power are at work at several levels throwing the water up
towards the surface--one of these at the 800-foot level throwing 1500
gallons a minute up to the 500-foot level.
Following a car-load of ore, we find it, having reached the surface,
being loaded into waggons, in which it is carried down the hill to
the mills, weighed, and then shot down into a gigantic bin--in which,
by the way, the Company always keeps a reserve of ore sufficient
to keep the mills in full work for two years. From this hour, life
becomes a burden to the ore, for it is hustled about from machine
to machine without the least regard to its feelings. No sooner is
it out of the waggon than a brutal crusher begins smashing it up
into small fragments, the result of this meanness being that the ore
is able to tumble through a screen into cars that are waiting for
it down below. These rush upstairs with it again and pour it into
"hoppers," which, being in the conspiracy too, begin at once to spill
it into gigantic drying cylinders that are perpetually revolving over
a terrific furnace fire, and the ore, now dust, comes streaming out
as dry as dry can be, is caught in cars and wheeled off to batteries
where forty stampers, stamping like one, pound and smash it as if they
took a positive delight in it. There is an intelligent, deliberate
determination about this fearful stamping which makes one feel almost
afraid of the machinery. Some pieces, however, actually manage to
escape sufficient mashing up and slip away with the rest down into
a "screw conveyor," but the poor wretches are soon found out, for
the fiendish screw conveyor empties itself on to a screen, through
which all the pulverized ore goes shivering down, but the guilty
lumps still remaining are carried back by another ruthless machine
to those detestable stamps again. They cannot dodge them. For these
machines are all in the plot together. Or rather, they are the honest
workmen of good masters, and they are determined that the work shall
be thoroughly done, and that not a single lump of ore shall be allowed
to skulk so without any one to look after them these cylinders and
stampers, hoppers and dryers, elevators and screens go on with their
work all day, all night, relentless in their duty and pitiless to the
ore. Let a lump dodge them as it may, it gets no good by it, for the
one hands it over to the other, just as constables hand over a thief
they have caught, and it goes its rounds, again and again, till the end
eventually overtakes it, and it falls through the screen in a fine dust.
For its sins it is now called "pulp," and starts off on a second tour
of suffering--for these Inquisitors of iron and steel, these blind,
brutal Cyclops-machines, have only just begun, as it were, their fun
with their victim. Its tortures are now to be of a more searching
and refined description. As it falls through the screen, another
screw-conveyor catches sight of it and hurries it along a revolving
tube into which salt is being perpetually fed from a bin overhead--this
salt, allow me to say for the benefit of those as ignorant as myself,
is "necessary as a chloridizer"--and thus mixed up with the stranger,
falls into the power of a hydraulic elevator, which carries it up forty
feet to the top of a roasting furnace and deliberately spills the
mixture into it! Looking into the solid flame, I appreciated for the
first time in my life the courage of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
The mixture which fell in at the top bluish-grey comes out at the
bottom yellowish-brown--I only wonder at its coming out all--and is
raked into heaps that have a wicked, lurid colour and give out such
fierce short flames of brilliant tints, and such fierce, short blasts
of a poisonous gas, that I could not help thinking of the place where
bad men go to, and wondering if a Dante could not get a hint or two
for improving his Inferno by a visit to the Ontario roasting-furnace.
The men who stir these heaps use rakes with prodigious handles, and
wear wet sponges over their mouths and noses, and as I watched them I
remembered the poet's devils who keep on prodding up the damned and
raking them about over the flames.
But the ore submits without any howling or gnashing of teeth, and is
dragged off dumb, and soused into great churns, kept at a boiling heat,
in which quicksilver is already lying waiting, and the ore and the
quicksilver are then churned up together by revolving wheels inside the
pans, till the contents look like huge caldrons of bubbling chocolate.
After some hours they are drained off into settlers and cold water is
let in upon the mess, and lo! silver as bright as the quicksilver with
which it is mixed comes dripping out through the spout at the bottom
into canvas bags.
Much of the quicksilver drips through the canvas back into the pans,
and the residue, silver mixed with quicksilver, makes a cold, heavy,
white paste called "amalgam," which is carried off in jars to the
retorts. Into these it is thrown, and while lying there the quicksilver
goes on dripping away from the silver, and after a time the fires are
lighted and the retort is sealed up. The intense heat that is obtained
volatilizes the quicksilver; but this mercurial vapour is caught as it
is escaping at the top of the retort, again condensed into its solid
form, and again used to mix with fresh silver ore. Its old companion,
the silver, goes on melting inside the retort all the time, till at
last when the fires are allowed to cool down, it is found in irregular
lumps of a pink-looking substance. These lumps are then taken to the
crucibles, and passing from them, molten and refined, fall into moulds,
each holding about a hundred-weight of bullion.
And all this bother and fuss, reader, to obtain these eight or ten
blocks of metal!
True, but then that metal is silver, and with one single day's produce
from the Ontario Mine in the bank to his credit a man might live at his
leisure in London, like a nobleman in Paris, or like a prince among the
princes of Eulenspiegel-Wolfenbuttel-Gutfurnichts.