the silver, our pocket-money melted steadily away and none returned to
take its place. We lived in a little cabin and cooked for ourselves; and
altogether it was a hard life, though a hopeful one–for we never ceased
to expect fortune and a customer to burst upon us some day.
At last, when flour reached a dollar a pound, and money could not be
borrowed on the best security at less than eight per cent a month (I
being without the security, too), I abandoned mining and went to milling.
That is to say, I went to work as a common laborer in a quartz mill, at
ten dollars a week and board.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
I had already learned how hard and long and dismal a task it is to burrow
down into the bowels of the earth and get out the coveted ore; and now I
learned that the burrowing was only half the work; and that to get the
silver out of the ore was the dreary and laborious other half of it.
We had to turn out at six in the morning and keep at it till dark.
This mill was a six-stamp affair, driven by steam. Six tall, upright
rods of iron, as large as a man’s ankle, and heavily shod with a mass of
iron and steel at their lower ends, were framed together like a gate, and
these rose and fell, one after the other, in a ponderous dance, in an
iron box called a “battery.” Each of these rods or stamps weighed six
hundred pounds. One of us stood by the battery all day long, breaking up
masses of silver-bearing rock with a sledge and shoveling it into the
battery. The ceaseless dance of the stamps pulverized the rock to
powder, and a stream of water that trickled into the battery turned it to
a creamy paste. The minutest particles were driven through a fine wire
screen which fitted close around the battery, and were washed into great
tubs warmed by super-heated steam–amalgamating pans, they are called.
The mass of pulp in the pans was kept constantly stirred up by revolving
“mullers.” A quantity of quicksilver was kept always in the battery, and
this seized some of the liberated gold and silver particles and held on
to them; quicksilver was shaken in a fine shower into the pans, also,
about every half hour, through a buckskin sack. Quantities of coarse
salt and sulphate of copper were added, from time to time to assist the
amalgamation by destroying base metals which coated the gold and silver
and would not let it unite with the quicksilver.
All these tiresome things we had to attend to constantly. Streams of
dirty water flowed always from the pans and were carried off in broad
wooden troughs to the ravine. One would not suppose that atoms of gold
and silver would float on top of six inches of water, but they did; and
in order to catch them, coarse blankets were laid in the troughs, and
little obstructing “riffles” charged with quicksilver were placed here
and there across the troughs also. These riffles had to be cleaned and
the blankets washed out every evening, to get their precious
accumulations–and after all this eternity of trouble one third of the
silver and gold in a ton of rock would find its way to the end of the
troughs in the ravine at last and have to be worked over again some day.
There is nothing so aggravating as silver milling. There never was any
idle time in that mill. There was always something to do. It is a pity
that Adam could not have gone straight out of Eden into a quartz mill, in
order to understand the full force of his doom to “earn his bread by the
sweat of his brow.” Every now and then, during the day, we had to scoop
some pulp out of the pans, and tediously “wash” it in a horn spoon–wash
it little by little over the edge till at last nothing was left but some
little dull globules of quicksilver in the bottom. If they were soft and
yielding, the pan needed some salt or some sulphate of copper or some