XLIII.
CALIFORNIA AND HER TERRESTRIAL TREASURES.
WONDERS OF THE PACIFIC COAST—CALIFORNIA IN 1835—CAUSE OF HER RAPID PROGRESS—THE HONEST MINER OF THE OLDEN TIME—FATE OF THE FORTY-NINERS—EFFORTS OF A NOVICE—RUSHES TO NEW PLACERS—CHANGE FROM PLACER TO QUARTZ MINING—GRASS VALLEY—EXTENT OF THE GOLD-BEARING RIDGE—AMALGAMATING PROCESSES—SPECULATIONS IN MINING STOCKS—HOW A SHARP NEW YORKER WAS SOLD—A LUCKY HIT—COPPER MINES IN CALIFORNIA AND ARIZONA—NEW ALMADEN AND ITS QUICKSILVER—BENEFITS OF AN EARTHQUAKE.
For a few years after the discovery of gold in California, little attention was given by her inhabitants to any other pursuit than mining. But in course of time the agricultural resources of the State were developed, and California soon made herself one of the grain-supplying regions of the world. The mines do not hold such a prominent place as they did fifteen years ago, but they are still an important source of wealth to the Pacific coast, and will so continue for a long time to come. Had there been no discovery of gold or other precious metal west of the Rocky Mountains up to the present time, California would to-day be but little advanced beyond the condition in which she was found by the author of “Two Years Before the Mast,” when he landed on her shores in 1835. The cities along the coast would have grown larger, and the number of ships trading to San Diego, San Francisco, and other parts would have steadily increased, but the traffic would be mainly in hides from California cattle, or in the very few articles that were then the produce of this region. San Francisco could not have become in a few years a great city, without the discovery of gold in the streams and on the hill-sides of California.
THE MINERS OF CALIFORNIA
The first rush of gold-seekers in 1849, and for two or three years, subsequent to that date, was to the diggings along the various rivers and their tributaries. Men came, with pick and shovel, to gather up a fortune by separating gold from the earth along the valleys. The honest miner, with the tools of his profession, with his bronzed and unshaven face, his hair unkempt and matted like locks of wool, his clothing of the roughest character, and utterly innocent of whisk-broom or cologne water, was a figure well known on both the Atlantic and the Pacific coast. In California he existed in reality, but in the East he was drawn in caricature as something that all California emigrants must become. He toiled in the sands of the Sacramento and its tributaries, now with a run of good luck that sent him rejoicing to his home in the East, or furnished the material for a “high old time,” and again, with ill fortune that left him, after long exertion, with very little of the valuable metal in his own right.
The race of miners has not become extinct, as any one who has visited the interior of California can testify, but it is by no means as numerous as of yore. A large number of men who now stand high in the business world, began their California life by working in the mines. Many of the former miners have gone to their homes in the East, or to those undiscovered regions where gold is said to be of no particular use. Many long since drifted to other gold-mining countries, and many others have taken to agriculture, or to some business more certain—though less seductive—than gold-hunting. Most of the placers have been washed out and abandoned to the Mexicans or Chinese. Localities that formerly supported a large mining population are now deserted, while others can still count a goodly number of inhabitants. Whenever a new region is opened up there are many persons ready to rush to it, in the belief that they will find the fortune they have so long sought. Fraser River, Washoe, Kern River, and other regions have all stood high in the bill of attractions, and all proved more or less delusive. Hardly a year passes without a new discovery somewhere, and a consequent rush of emigration. Humannature remains the same, and there is no probability of the arrival of a time when men will no longer be tempted by extravagant stories to go in quest of a fortune.
THE FIRST MINERS.
In the early days, thousands of persons landed at San Francisco with no definite knowledge of the country, and with the impression that the gold mines were within a few hours’ walk of the city, and possibly inside its corporate limits. The story is told of a party of emigrants who came ashore from a steamer, breakfasted at a cheap hotel, and then, with their mining tools, proceeded to the beach at the foot of Telegraph Hill, and began washing for gold. The Sacramento was the deposit of a greater wealth than that of the Indies; they argued that all the water in the bay of San Francisco had come from that river, and therefore all the earth that it touched must be auriferous. Only a day’s toil in that locality could convince them that their theories were incorrect.
There was very little geological or other science applied to the early mining, as very few of the miners had any knowledge in that direction beyond what they acquired by practice. Men dug where they could find pay-dirt, and abandoned places that did not pay for their labor, but they could not often give any reason why one spot in a valley was richer than another. Mining was almost wholly a matter of experiment, and to this day the theories of the school of mines are of comparatively little value in the eyes of many miners. Many of the ordinary rules of geology are overthrown in the formation of the Pacific coast, so that the scientific geologists who have gone to California, find themselves involved in perplexities at almost every step.
The revelations of General Sutter’s mill-race established the existence of gold in California, and the news spreading rapidly throughout the world, brought a large migration. The first miners were nearly all adventurers without capital, and though the bulk of the immigration continued of this character, the second and subsequent years saw men of capital and intelligence going there to give a better direction to the interest of the country. The pick and pan, the primitive rocker, the longtom, the sluice, the tunnel, and other accessories of placer mining, marked the successive development of means for robbing the earth of its treasures. These operations culminated in hydraulic mining, which may be fairly considered as the perfection of this branch of work.
Of course it was but a single step from the discovery of gold in the dirt of the valleys, to its discovery in the veins of rock that formed the hill-sides and mountains. The rock from these veins was carefully assayed, and its richness established. Mere hand work was of no avail, or would be unprofitable in reducing these ores and extracting the metal. Heavy machinery must be erected, deep mines must be opened; shafts and wheels and pits would be expensive, and so would be the erection and management of machinery. Hence the necessity for capital and intelligence in this kind of labor. Individuals and companies led off in this work, and so quartz mining followed upon placer mining, and became a business of magnitude.
QUARTZ MINING.
The best established gold mines in California are at Grass Valley, a neat little city in Nevada County, twelve miles from the Central Pacific Railway, and for some time the home of the once noted and notorious Lola Montez. The other quartz mining districts are scattered through the mountainous region of the State, but the localities where the mines are profitable are not very numerous. Further explorations will of course increase their number, but it is not very probable that the development will be rapid.
In placer mining, the object is to separate the gold from the dirt where it has been deposited, and to accomplish this, water and labor are the only necessities. The dirt or earth is to be carried away while the gold remains. This is the whole process, whether we employ the simple pan and rocker or some more elaborate means of working. But in quartz mining the process is more complicated. The rocks must be taken from the veins and brought to the surface. There it lies, solid rock, with the gold mixed into its whole mass, while in a fluid state, just as salt or soda are mixed with flour in makingbread. It must be reduced to powder, and for this purpose heavy machinery is employed. When reduced to a powder, the gold must be extracted, and this work requires more care and causes more perplexities than other labor connected with quartz mining. Besides the gold, there are various chemical compounds, some of which remain, while others may be washed away. Many men must be employed about a quartz mill; the monthly disbursements, provided the owners are honorable, are very large. Hence, while a man without capital may become a miner in the gulches and placers, the beginner in quartz mining requires both brains and capital.
The quartz district, which is from fifteen to a hundred miles in width, commences in Mariposa County, and extends along the western foot-hills of the Sierra Nevada for four or five hundred miles, disappearing somewhere in Oregon. The ledges of rocks lie at various angles, being in some places almost horizontal, while in others they vary little from the perpendicular. There are various theories touching the formation of the quartz ledges and their impregnation with gold, but none of them will apply to all cases. The mines that have been opened are along this ridge, and many shafts have been sunk for the purpose of reaching this rich rock. A considerable proportion of these shafts have been abandoned because they did not reach the ledge, while others have been forced to quit, because the ledge, though containing gold, was unprofitable. As before stated, those most generally successful are at Grass Valley, where the rock does not vary much in value, and where the profits of a year’s labor can be estimated beforehand with considerable accuracy. Year after year the work has gone on, and the town of Grass Valley has a more thrifty appearance than the majority of the mining centers of California.
There is very little difference in the character of the quartz mines and mills throughout California. Where the vein is perpendicular, or nearly so, the shaft is sunk directly through the vein; but where it lies at an angle, the shaft is sunk so as to strike the vein at a given distance from the surface. Ineither case, galleries, called levels, are run off from the shaft into the vein, sometimes for a long distance. At the surface, the vein may be but a few inches in thickness, but it gradually widens as it descends, so that some of the veins have a width of twenty-five feet or upwards. Along the levels the ore is brought to the shaft, and then sent, in buckets, up to daylight. In extensive operations, there are numerous shafts, galleries, and levels that connect with each other and form a subterranean network of streets and alleys. Once on the surface of the earth, the ore is sent to the mill, where it is first broken into small pieces and then reduced to powder by the action of the crushing machinery.
Various kinds of machinery have been devised for reducing the ore, the first being the stamp-mill, which consists of a row of heavy pestles, standing in troughs. These pestles or stamps are raised by steam power, and fall by their own weight. They are from four to eight in number, and sometimes there are twenty or more; they operate just as do the feet of the smiling maidens in the vineyards of France, when treading out the juices of the grape. No other mill has proved superior to this in reducing the ore; the testimony of miners and capitalists is almost unanimously in favor of the stamp-mill.
A stream of water pours into the trough where the ore is being crushed, each stamp falling from ten to eighty times a minute, and mixing the water and pulverized rock together. This runs upon blankets, which catch a portion of the gold; then it passes over a sloping surface, cut with horizontal crevices, filled with quicksilver, that catches all the gold it touches; then through a series of troughs and sluices, with occasional beds of quicksilver, and so on to a heap of wastes.
No perfect process of saving the gold has yet been invented, and much of it is still carried away in the sand or “tailing” of the mills. Rock that assays $40 or $50 to the ton will rarely yield more than half or two-thirds that amount, and sometimes falls far below it. Some of the mill owners claim to be satisfied with their present process, while others are constantly making experiments. Whoever succeeds in finding acheap and effective means of saving all the gold in the pulverized rock, has a sure fortune before him. Many of the ores contain sulphurets of various kinds, and these are nearly always more or less refractory. Many of the mills are reserving their “tailings,” to be worked down again when some successful inventor makes his appearance. Some mill owners save the sulphurets from the ores for the purpose of selling them to the agent of an English house, who buys them for shipment to Wales.
Most of the quartz mines in California are from one hundred and fifty to six hundred feet in depth. The deepest and richest gold mine in the State is that known as Hayward’s mine, on Sutter’s Creek, Amador County. Its owner was unable to make it pay expenses for a long time, but it grew richer as it descended, and for the past twelve years or so has paid a handsome profit. Sixty tons per day are taken out and crushed; the operation goes on constantly, night and day.
The history of this mine seems to settle the question about the profitableness of deep mining, as the ore grows richer the farther it gets from the surface. The mines at Grass Valley steadily increase in richness as they descend from the surface. The owners of one mine have been pocketing a profit of $200,000 per annum.
THE QUARTZ MINERS.
All the fortunes made in California mining operations have not come from actual work upon the ledges. A great many men who never saw a mine have become rich by speculation in mining stocks; some of them have kept their money, but the majority have been unable to hold to it, in consequence of their eagerness for more. It is safe to say that more fortunes have been made by lucky sales of stock in mining companies than by holding for dividends. There have been some very large speculations in this kind of property, and at one time Montgomery street in San Francisco rivaled Wall street in New York in the magnitude of its operations. It is still a scene of financial activity, though the speculation is less than of yore.
“CLEANING THEM OUT.”
The California speculators are up to all the tricks and equal to the smartest of the Wall street men. A New York capitalistwent there once with the laudable intention of “cleaning them out”. There had been a little flurry in the stock of a certain company, and it was well known who were the holders of the property. One day he received a telegram announcing that this mine had suddenly developed immense quantities of very rich ore, and the stock would consequently make an enormous advance. Other persons, who claimed to be his friends, received the same intelligence, and told him of it in the strictest confidence. The bait took, he bought all accessible stock of that company, paying a liberal price, and rejoicing at the reception of his news in advance of the market. The telegrams were all bogus; his pretended friends assisted in stacking the cards so as to win. The operators on the street used to speak of this as a very neat transaction, and declared that Wall street could not excel it.
A great deal depends upon knowing when to sell out. A friend of mine once bought fifteen feet of a mine, just opened, at ten dollars a foot, and sold it a year later at sixteen thousand dollars a foot. Three months later it could have been bought for not more than ten times the original cost. One man, who held on, is still keeping ten feet of the same mine, and is likely to do so.
Copper mining has been prosecuted to a considerable extent in California, and at one time was very profitable, owing to the war between Spain and Chili, which excluded the latter country from the copper market. The principal copper mines in California are at Copperopolis, in the foot-hills of the Sierra Nevadas, about forty miles from Stockton. The ore is extracted in the form of sulphurets, from a vein about twenty feet in width, which has reached a depth of more than six hundred feet. In consequence of the expense of smelting works, and the cost of fuel, it has been found more economical to send the ore to England, and to the Atlantic coast, for reduction. The sulphur is driven off by heat, and, after undergoing various manipulations to rid it of foreign matter, the fine copper remains. There are several mines at Copperopolis, all of them on the same vein. The most profitable of them employedat one time more than twenty ships in freighting its ore to the places where it was smelted. The net profit to the owners of the mine for one year, during the Chilian war, exceeded half a million dollars, but it fell off greatly with the return of peace.
COPPER AND SILVER MINES.
The ore contains an average of twenty to twenty-five per cent. of copper, the balance being sulphur and other chemicals, in combination with such earthy substances as are ordinarily encountered in sulphate veins. The richest copper mines of the coast are in Arizona, very near the California line. Specimens from a mine on “Bill Williams’ Fork,” eight miles from steamboat navigation, on the Colorado River, assayed from sixty to seventy per cent. of copper. The ore from these mines ought to yield from forty to fifty per cent. pure copper, and the miners are confident of a richer return than this as they descend into the earth.
Arizona is also rich in silver and gold, particularly the former, but the climate is so unhealthy, and the Indians have such a persistent habit of killing white men on frequent occasions, that a residence there is not as desirable as a home on the banks of the Hudson, or the Ohio. But as we are always ready to go wherever there is a prospect of money-making, this out-of-the-way territory bids fair to become peopled before many years have passed away. Steamboats are running on the Colorado, and the Southern Pacific Railway taps the country, so that the mines near it have a good prospect of development. Some of the companies now in operation in Arizona sell their ore to speculators, while the balance ship theirs to England for reduction.
The want of good coal mines is severely felt in California. Coal has been discovered, and is being taken out in considerable quantities at Mount Diabolo, thirty miles from San Francisco, but it is of inferior quality, and unfit for many purposes where coal is used. The same is the case with the coal from Bellingham Bay, British Columbia, and from nearly all other points on the Pacific coast where mines have been opened. The river steamers burn the California coal. Some of the founders use it, as well as all the establishments on land wherethe making of steam is the only object. It is said that ocean steamers cannot burn it, in consequence of its tendency to spontaneous combustion, when kept in the hold of a ship for any considerable time. Coal is taken there from the Atlantic seaboard, and from Sydney, New South Wales. If a mine, favorably located anywhere on the Pacific coast, furnishing a good quality of coal, could be found, it would yield a fortune to its owners.
CALIFORNIA QUICKSILVER.
I have spoken of gold, silver, and copper among the minerals, but there is another metal which is an important product of the coast, though the area of its production is somewhat limited. I allude to quicksilver, which exists in quantities worthy of note, only in Spain, California, and Peru. For a very long time the Almaden quicksilver mine in Spain was the only one known, and it held a rigid monopoly of the trade. The discoveries in Peru opened a new field, but, though it reduced the price for a time, it did not seriously affect it. The discovery in California threw such a quantity into the market, that the whole quicksilver trade of the world is now ruled by it.
The great mine is at New Almaden, sixty miles south from San Francisco. The ore is taken from a mine in the hills on the inside of the Coast Range of mountains, and is found in chambers, instead of veins. Some of the earthquakes that occasionally disturb San Francisco, put money in the pockets of the New Almaden owners, as they open up new and very rich chambers, not previously discovered. The ore from which the quicksilver is taken is about the color of a well-burned brick, and looks, when piled up for use, much like a heap of broken granite and bricks. The ore is placed in furnaces, a wood fire is built beneath, the quicksilver flies off in vapor, and is caught and condensed in air-tight rooms, partly filled with water. After condensation, it is bottled up in flasks containing 76-1/2 pounds, each of these being the same as the weight used at the Almaden mine in Spain.
This mine has been the subject of much litigation, as indeed has nearly everything valuable in California. The product inone year was 47,194 flasks, worth about $50 per flask, or a total value of $2,359,700. The cost of producing this result was about $800,000, leaving a very fair margin of profit. The ore averages from twelve to eighteen per cent. of quicksilver, and frequently exceeds the latter figure. A piece of the ore which I picked up at the mine, lies before me as I write. It is a deep red color, heavy, like a lump of lead, and is said to contain about twenty per cent. of quicksilver.
QUICKSILVER.
A large quantity of quicksilver is used in gold and silver mining on the Pacific coast, and the balance goes to various parts of the world. Of the production of the year I mentioned, fourteen thousand flasks were sent to China, ten thousand to London, five thousand to Peru, two thousand to Chili, seven thousand to New York, two thousand to Mexico, and two hundred to Australia.