Lander County
NVGenWeb
Here, five hundred
miles west of San Francisco, and two hundred from the Sierra Nevadas, huddled in
a narrow canyon with steep hill-sides, just out of the valley, was the most
representative mining town we had yet seen. Beginning in 1863, Austin had in a
year's time a population of six to eight thousand, fell away in 1865 to four
thousand, and now probably has no more than three thousand. Its houses are built
anywhere, everywhere, and then the streets get to them as best they can; one
side of a house will be four stories, the other one or two, — such is the lay of
the land; not a tree, not a flower, not a blade of green grass anywhere in town;
but the boot-blacks and baths and barbers are of European standards; it has a
first-class French restaurant and a daily newspaper; the handsomest woman,
physically, I ever saw presided, with almost comic queenliness, over one of its
lager beer saloons; gambling went on openly, amid music, in the area of every
"saloon" — miners risking to this chance at night the proceeds of the scarcely
less doubtful chance of the day; while the generally cultivated and classical
tone of the town may be inferred from this advertisement in the daily paper : —
"Mammoth Lager Beer Saloon, in the basement, corner Main and Virginia streets,
Austin, Nevada. Choice liquors, wines, lager beer and cigars, served by pretty
girls, who understand their business and attend to it. Votaries of Bacchus,
Gambrinus, Venus or Cupid can spend an evening agreeably at the Mammoth Saloon."
All this appealed, of course, to our scholarly appetites, and we went early in search of so classical a bower of the senses. Result, — a cellar, whitewashed and sawdusted; two fiddles and a clarionet in harsh action in one corner- a bar of liquors glaring in another; while a fat, coarse Jew girl proved the sole representative and servant of all these proclaimed gods and goddesses. "We blushingly apologized, and retired with our faces to Mistress Venus, Cupid, etc., as guests retire from mortal monarchs, — lest our pockets should be picked; and concluded we should take our mythology out of the dictionaries hereafter.
We stole a march by our rapid riding on Virginia City and Gold Hill, two hundred miles farther west than Austin, and got into town, had our bath, and were asleep in bed, when the patriotic citizens marshalled their procession, and were about to go out on the road, with brass band and welcoming speech, to give greeting to the distinguished visitors. We found in Virginia, the original "Washoe" of mining history, many contrasts to and improvements upon Austin. It is three or four years older; it puts its gambling behind an extra door; it is beginning to recognize the Sabbath, has many churches open, and closes part of its stores on that day; is exceedingly well built, in large proportion with solid brick stores and warehouses; and though the fast and fascinating times of 1862-63 are over, when it held from fifteen to twenty thousand people, and Broadway and Wall street were not more crowded than its streets, and there are tokens that its great mines are nearly dug out, it still has the air of permanence and of profit, and contains a population of seven or eight thousand, besides the adjoining town or extension of Gold Hill, which has about three thousand more.
The situation of Virginia is very picturesque; above the canyon or ravine, it is spread along the mountain side, like the roof of a house, about half way to the top. Directly above rises a noble peak, fifteen hundred feet higher than the town, itself about six thousand feet high; below stretches the foot-hill, bisected by the ravine; around on all sides, sister hills rise in varying hights, rich in roundness and other forms of beauty, but brown in barrenness, as if shorn for prize fight, and fading out into distant plain, with a sweet green spot to mark the rare presence of water and verdure.
A few miles now bring us within the freshness of the Mountains, and the Desert is over and past. Adjoining Virginia City and Gold Hill are fertile valleys, in one of which the capital of the State, Carson City, is located, feeding upon the overflow of the gold ores of the mines for reduction, and upon the agriculture that the neighboring market invites, and the surrounding meadows permit. Just here, in fact, in the valleys of the Truckee, the Washoe, and the Carson Rivers, coming down from the mountain, is the garden of the State. Before "Washoe" was, it was occupied by a few Mormon farmers, colonists from the central settlement at Salt Lake, the whole territory from the Rocky Mountains to the Sierras then being Utah. But now the Mormons are displaced by a more vigorous and varied population, prosperous with farming, with lumbering among the rich pines of the Sierras, and with quartz mills for reducing gold ores.
A not unfrequent phenomenon of the Great Basin lies just off the stage road in one of these valleys. For a mile or more along a little stream, underneath a thin crust of earth, water immeasurable is seething and boiling, and occasionally breaking through in columns of steam and in bubbling spouts and streams, — too hot to bear the hand in; — the waste drawn off to a neighboring bath-house where chronic rheumatisms and blood affections are successfully treated, or tempering the cool river below. The boiling springs are flavored with sulphur and soda, and are similar to the more celebrated Geysers in California. In the winter the vapor fills the valley, and from this and the rumbling, bubbling noise of the seething waters, comes the name of Steamboat Springs, which is given them. Similar but more pronounced springs lie in Whirlwind Valley, a few miles south of the railroad line in the Humboldt Valley. They seem to be the faint breathings of dying volcanoes, or the gathering mutterings of new ones.
Indeed this whole Basin region of the Continent is full of the strangest anomalies of nature, puzzling the science and defying the industry of man, and almost insulting the beneficence of God. The questions why, whence, and what? — why was it so constituted, whence the forbidding and incongruous elements thrown together here, and what can man do with it? — press themselves upon every observing traveler. Nature seems to be incomplete here. Man has entered before she was ready for him, and finds her unprepared for his reception. And yet, between the fanaticism of a religion and the passion for gold and silver, much has been done towards its settlement and subjugation. One State has grown up by agriculture, and another by mining, all within this strange desert land. And after learning her new conditions, her new laws here, Man comes to find Nature still a friend, still willing to minister to his wants. But she piques his curiosity, she challenges his flexibility of character and capacity as never before, as nowhere else. The great salt fields in the Basin are already put to use. A salt pasture of two thousand acres in the Smoky Valley, near the center of Nevada, furnishes all the neighboring settlements, including Austin, with salt for domestic purposes, and for reducing the ores. It gathers on the surface a thin deposit of half an inch to an inch, and is scraped off. The rain dissipates it; but the sun renews it. Perhaps the alkali fields will yet serve a practical purpose; and the deposits of sulphur around the bursting springs. But without an increase of rain, enlarging the areas of agriculture, no great population can be supported. There must be more grass and trees and grain, or even the rich deposits of minerals in the hills can never be worked with certain advantage.
…
At Austin, the second settlement of the State in size, we found the hill-sides dotted with huge ant-hills denoting discoveries. About six thousand locations had been made; yet no more than seventy-five mines have ever been worked up to the producing point, and probably not more than a dozen have really been profitable. The production of that district has been as high as one million a year, but it is not estimated now at above half that. The veins of precious deposit are very small, of inches, and rarely of feet in thickness, but lie near together all around. If they are ever extensively and at the same time profitably worked, it must be by running a tunnel in under the mountain which shall reach a large number of veins at once. The ore is rich; from fifty to four hundred dollars a ton; but the silver is closely held with sulphurets, and can only be got out by roasting the ore with salt, or by smelting, and the former process cost about one hundred dollars a ton when we were there in 1865. The Railroad, which lies ninety miles north of Austin, will bring to it cheaper labor, food and fuel; more likely it will take away its ores to be worked where all are cheaper still than they ever can be there.
If the reader has never seen the process of getting gold and silver out of the ores, he will be interested in a brief account of it, as we saw the work done at Austin. The precious metal can rarely be seen in the rock, and only the signs of its presence are detected by the practiced eye. After the quartz or rock has been extracted from the mine, it is taken to the mill, broken into pieces of from half a pound to two pounds in weight, thoroughly dried by the application of heat, and then crushed to powder in the mill. The crushing is done by stamps, or the dropping of heavy weights upon the quartz. Five stamps are usually arrayed side by side, weighing from five to seven hundred pounds each. They are raised a distance of from eight to ten inches, and dropped from sixty to eighty-five times a minute. The powdered rock then goes through a wire sieve, whence it is taken to a furnace, mixed with salt, which assists in freeing the silver and gold from its surroundings or combinations and then subjected to the action of a stream of flame from five to eight hours, during which time it is constantly stirred. As this flame carries off some silver bodily, it is made to pass through a long chamber, and exposed to cooler air before reaching the chimney, so that the silver can be saved. After being thus roasted, the pulverized quartz is ready for amalgamation. At the Midas Mill, which was considered to be the best mill at Reese River, the amalgamation is done by the Freiburg barrels, into which loose and irregular pieces of iron are placed for the purpose of mixing the quicksilver with the pulp, (as the pulverized quartz is called,) and which are then revolved over and over. In other mills, the pulp is put into tubs and stirred in water for nearly an hour, and then the quicksilver is applied, and the mass is stirred by means of iron flanges for three hours. About seventy-five pounds of quicksilver are allowed for one thousand pounds of pulp, the quicksilver amalgamating with or taking up the little unseen particles of silver now separated from their original associations. After this, the water is drawn off, and a process like the distillation of cider brandy is resorted to for the purpose of saving the quicksilver, and the amalgam, composed of silver and quicksilver, is squeezed, to get out the quicksilver, after which it is put into the retort, and upon being subjected to heat more quicksilver passes off in fumes, and is saved, and the crude bullion which is left is ready to be taken to the assay office. This is substantially the process used at Reese River, where dry crushing is necessary, on account of the presence of the baser metals. In Virginia and its vicinity where the ore is of a different character and far less rich, it is crushed wet, and not roasted, and the expense is much less. The common gold ores of Colorado and California are also treated in the latter way. Crushing by stamps and amalgamating with quicksilver are the two fundamental and universal features of all processes for reducing gold and silver ores, except that of smelting.
Contributed 2025 Jan 09 by Norma Hass, extracted from 1869 Our New West by Samuel Bowles, pages 279-283, 285-287.
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