MINING
AND THE MINERS
The Green Valley Hiking Club's club hikes so often come across abandoned mines
and mining sites. Just what activities took place at such locations and
what were the miners like? The Mining Camps Speak, by Beth and Bill Sagstetter (GV Joyner Library), offers us useful and
fascinating vignettes of life in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries in the
western half of the
HARD-ROCK MINING
So where does hard rock or underground mining come in? Remember, the
prospector takes his gold pan and, having "mined out" his placer
claim, advances up the stream to where the gold ultimately might have come
from. He pans all the while, and when he no longer finds gold in his pan, he
has passed the spot where the gold originated. Then he backtracks and
identifies the likely spot of the gold's origin. Or he simply moves up
the stream's banks, looking for a likely gold-bearing outcropping, typically of
quartz. When he finds this place, he files a claim on it. He tries
to sell his claim to a mining company. Technically at this point,
hard-rock mining begins.
Once mining went underground, it was no longer a one-man operation. Developing
a mine became an extremely expensive proposition. Roads had to be built
to the site and buildings constructed. Boilers had to be hauled in.
Shafts needed to be dug and hoists installed. Maybe a mill was needed and
a power source to be arranged for. A small town had to be built, and
usually in a remote place (as witness Total Wreck Mine or Kentucky Camp).
This called for big money, for capitalists and investors from the East or
Hard-rock miners were a different breed from most prospectors. In hard-
rock mining, the gold and silver are encased in rock, as opposed to placering, where the gold has been weathered away from the
surrounding rock. A hard-rock miner was a man at the top of his profession.
He was highly paid, and although he worked for a mining company, he probably
had a claim or two of his own. He was an expert with explosives. He
could recognize the difference between valuable ore and barren rock at a glance
in flickering candlelight. With a three hundred pound Burleigh Drill, he
was as skilled as a sculptor.
He wore a felt hat called a hard boil, a hat boiled repeatedly in a resin so
that it would become as hard as a modern construction helmet. A loose
shirt, clothes would be spattered with candle drippings.
He carried his ingeniously designed lunch pail into the mine. The lower
section was filled with coffee or tea; the middle compartment held his dessert
and pasty, a concoction of meat/potatoes/vegetables inside a pastry shell; the
top of the pail was a lid, with a tin cup inside. Upon arriving at the
shaft, he's hang up his pail and place a lighted
candle underneath, which heated the coffee and steamed the pasty. Ingenious.
Mostly Europeans worked the mines. Native-born Americans made up only 20%
of all the miners.
Mining was dangerous. The leading cause of death in mining camps was
silicosis, caused by inhaling the dust kicked up by drills. Later a
stream of water was directed at the drill bits to lessen the exposure to
dust. Actually, the most dangerous part of a miner's day was coming and
going. He was lowered by hoist on a bucket down to the main mine
shaft...and raised after his shift was over. He had to be alert to the
bucket's hitting the sides of the shaft while he was standing on the bucket's
rim.
Mule-drawn trams on very narrow-gauge tracks moved the ore from horizontal
shafts to the main vertical shaft. Mules were lowered down the shaft,
blindfolded and bound by rope, so they wouldn't fall off the bucket. They
stayed in the mine for life. They went blind but were cared for in stable
areas, with oats and straw lowered down to them and manure raised out from the
shaft.
Miners would drill a series of holes with hand-held drills powered by
four-pound hammers. The holes would be about three feel deep. The
holes would then be filled with sticks of dynamite, with fuses of varying
length corresponding to the detonating sequence the miners wanted the
explosions to create. It could take an entire ten-hour shift to drill the
holes. This was dangerous work because an undetonated
stick of dynamite from a previous blasting sequence might be awaiting an
unsuspecting drill. BOOM!
To help supplement their salaries, miners in mines with rich and visible gold
ore would sneak out small nuggets in their lunch buckets or clothes. This
"highgrading," as it was called, was done
mostly in very large mines run by big corporations and absentee
investors. Given the danger and extremely physical labor of hard-rock
mining, highgrading was condoned in the miner's
community. The nuggets were used as payment for a variety of services and
goods.
(Compiled by Frank Surpless, 03/05)
Additional Material: GVHC Library File 2