CHAPTER XVIII.

OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE.

            ALL this time, while describing pioneer life, early settlement, the bonanzas, the Sutro Tunnel, and many other episodes of the long story of the Comstock, one has necessarily made passing allusions to the buildings and machinery on the surface of the ground, and to the still more interesting details of the inside workings of the great mines on the lode. So much remains to be told, however, respecting the appearance of a mine of the first rank, " on deck " and " between decks," that this chapter and that which follows are devoted to mines and mine equipment as they appear at times of especial activity and high organization.

            When a visitor goes to the Comstock he sees the ruins of many old mine buildings no longer in use, because much larger and more complete structures over the later shafts have taken their place. Of the more important large shafts there were twenty-four in 1880, several of them huge combination shafts used by more than one mine. The surface of the lode is so irregular that the altitudes of the tops of the shafts vary to an extent that would be surprising anywhere except in such a wild mountain region; the highest shaft, Bullion, begins 6,307 feet above the sea, and the lowest, the old Overman, begins 5,731 feet above the sea, showing a difference of 536 feet on the lode enough to make quite a hill on a Western prairie. The surface

209

210 THE STORY OF THE .MINE.

workings of the Comstock are on the side of a mountain furrowed by immense ravines, where men have, with marvellous persistence and energy, hewn out or built up, on terraces supported by masonry, sufficient room for mine and mill buildings.

            Any one of the great mines when in active operation will serve as a type of the general plan of outside works, the result of thirty years of experience under Comstock conditions. Nothing better can be found in the way of concrete illustration than the works grouped about California and Consolidated Virginia with the old shafts, the new combination shafts, the mills, yards, railroad tracks, trestle works, machinery, and all that so well represents the modern industry of mining. What one sees at the main works is a very large mass of high buildings, partly on the level, partly terraced down the slope, and still further complicated by wings, annexes, and various additions all thoroughly well made and painted with fire-proof paint. Surrounding the whole and between the wings and additions are piles of iron, lumber, cord wood, separate buildings, and vast collections of supplies of every imaginable sort.

            The main mass of buildings resembles nothing so much as the union of several large foundries and manufactories. A row of tall smokestacks steadied by steel cables mark the location of the engines, the blacksmith shops, and the machine shops. As one goes around the yards and the vast structures full of life and activity, the passing impression varies; here are flat steel cables woven or twisted, copper wire, steel bars, and hardware in a thousand forms; yonder are supplies enough, one would think, to stock a street full of wholesale houses. There is a powder house; there are offices for clerks and superintendents and a build-

OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 211

ing where bullion is melted and assaying is done; there are also rooms for the surveyors, draughtsmen, and civil engineers. But there is no mine in sight anywhere.

            Some idea of the variety of articles that come under the general head of supplies and are gathered together in the storehouses here may be obtained from a few notes of purchases made by a single mine (California) in 1877, when over $315,000 was spent for miscellaneous supplies and over $547,000 for fuel and for the timbers and iron used in the new shaft then being sunk. The " regular supplies " stored up and used above ground or sent down into the mines as required included the following large items: Timber, over 10,000,000 feet, costing about $224,000; ice, nearly 2,000,000 pounds, costing about $22,000; powder to the value of $17,000; candles worth $16,000; steel and iron, $5,000.

            If we take the total expense account of the same mine for that year (1877), we obtain, perhaps, a more striking impression of the scale of operations. Supplies, as we have seen, were used to the value of about $315,000; salaries and wages came to about $788,000; cost of reduction was $2,220,000; of hoisting, $186,000; and of assaying, $53,000. Office expenses, teaming, surveying, taxes, litigation, and miscellaneous items, added to the above, bring the total to consider- ably more than $4,000,000. In such a mine the value of the outside works is nearly impossible to determine, for it is constantly changing. If there is no mill attached, half a million dollars would be a low estimate; complete reduction works add as much more to the total.

            Everywhere, in the first view of a mine, lumber, firewood, and machinery are the most striking features.

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The depths of the mine in the last thirty years have swallowed up fully 800,000,000 feet of timber --  enough, if sawed into boards and scantlings, to construct forty thousand two-story houses of six rooms each. These would provide homes for two hundred thousand people. If the consumption of lumber had always been at the rate of such bonanza years as 1875 and 1876, the Comstock lode would now contain nearly three times as much lumber as this buried in its shafts and drifts, or sufficient for the homes of six hundred thousand people. Hundreds of square miles of forest have been cut to supply this inexorable demand, and every foot of timber used has been hauled to Gold Hill or Virginia City and piled in the lumber yards at the works.

            The fuel used during the past thirty years has aggregated something like three million cords. It consists for the most part of yellow pine, pitch pine, tamarack, and fir, and vast tiers of it lie piled up at all seasons. In 1880 the Sierra Nevada furnaces used about sixteen thousand cords of wood, and four other mines used more than ten thousand cords apiece, Such a mine keeps six months' supply of fuel on hand, and even a smaller mine always has five hundred cords piled in the yard.

            The machinery is of so many different types and is constantly undergoing so many changes, repairs, and improvements, that the foundries and machine shops at the mouth of a mine often seem as if they had been transplanted bodily to the Comstock from some large seaport. The immense power of the pumping engines has been noticed, but the total horse power represented by all the engines used on the Comstock affords a still better measure of the work done. The mines in 1880 had engines of a combined capacity of 21,000

OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 213

horse power. Single mines have had 2,000, and even 3,000 horse power in use at times.

            Outside of each of the vast structures is a pile of waste rock, the dump of the hidden mine. This is perhaps the most peculiar feature of the place, and if the mine that supplies it is of the first rank, the size of the pile is mountainous. A part of the waste rock sometimes goes to make acres of level ground on which to place the mine buildings and the quartz mill, but there is so much left to be poured down into the caņons that the sum total is really one of the most impressive things about Virginia City. Cars run out upon a track extending from the building far over the middle of the dump, and are emptied automatically. They flash back and forth all day, all night, every day in the week, and the waste rock and debris slide slowly to the bottom of the great dusty pyramid, on which no green leaf ever grows. Such a pile, much smaller, and of saw- dust instead of broken rock, the lumber mills make along the Mendocino coast; but always these latter smoke and blacken with an ever-smouldering fire that burns unquenched for decades, and always the wild flowers of the forest grow in the very edges of the fragrant hills of sawdust. In strange contrast, the waste rock mountains of the Comstock are without life, colour, sound, or change, except the rattle of bits of porphyry and the sharp sunlight gleaming on whitening clays and splinters of stone piled on barren hollows above the sage brush.

            The central building over the mouth of the large shaft sunk in partnership by the California and Consolidated Virginia mines, is high, steep-roofed and large, heavily framed, floored solidly and well, open to the roof forty and fifty feet above, and in every respect suited to the requirements. Men dozens of

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them quiet, busy men dressed in woollen shirts, small felt hats or caps, and blue overalls, are directing and operating affairs. Those whose duties do not take them down into the mines are in ordinary citizen's clothes. From the middle of the floor, through a row of four square openings, white columns of steam often rush upward in huge volumes rolling to the roof; it is the breath of the mines below, and in cold weather the warm lower levels send up these whirling clouds. The four openings are the tops of the four compartments of the shaft, which is not only lined on every side with square timbers, but is still further divided by perpendicular partitions. The timbering leaves these lesser parallel shafts about five feet square, and one is occupied by the pipes of the pumping machinery, while the other three are hoisting compartments.

            This is the top of the mine; through these small shafts the business of the mine is carried on. The cages that move up and down may be compared to hotel elevators, only in this case the hotel is from fifteen hundred to three thousand feet high and pushed down into the ground so that everything except the roof is out of sight. The elevators begin at the roof and go down to the basement, past floor after floor, station after station, passageway after passageway, until the place is reached where another cellar is being hewed out.

            Some sixty feet from the steaming shaft top is a large, square platform raised several feet above the floor. Here, on frames of massive timbers built upon solid rock and filled in with cement, are the hoisting engines; here the engineers sit under a placard some- thing like this: "No person allowed on the platform, or to speak to the engineers." There is reason enough for the warning, for the lives of many men are in the

OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 215

hands of the engineer and his assistants. These mine engineers are strong, modest, manly much such men as are in similar places of responsibility in the engine rooms of a Cunarder.

            Before the face of each engineer is a large " indicator" like a clock, or sometimes in the form of a cylinder, which shows exactly where the cage is; beside it is the bell by which he communicates with the officers and workmen on the different levels of the mine. He stops and starts the cage, " slows up," goes ahead at full speed, receives word about the contents of the cage, and many other important matters. Safety cages are now used, similar in construction to the elevators in large buildings but much heavier, and one source of accident is thus removed. The mouth of each compartment that opens through the floor of the main building is closely covered with an iron grating which each cage lifts as it comes up, and the place is sometimes still further protected by a railing, so that few accidents occur at the top of a mine except through careless engineers.

            The power of the hoisting engine is necessarily great. At the Yellow Jacket the two hoisting engines are each of 1,000 horse power. The main engine at the California and Consolidated Virginia shaft, every- where known as the "C. & C.," is of 2,000 horse power; it lifts a cage with two cars of rock and handles a passenger cage at the same time. What would be called an average cable at one of these great mines is made of steel wire, woven flat, seven inches wide and five eighths of an inch thick; the pulleys are forty or fifty feet above the shaft mouth on a cross-beam supported by a very large and massive frame which is built around the mouth of the shaft and is called the " gallows-frame."

            There are two kinds of cable reels. In some cases

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the cable is coiled directly upon a short reel; in other cases a drum is used. The latter is known as the tapering hoisting reel, which is a drum of very heavy wood turning with a wrought-iron shaft sixteen inches in diameter. On this base beam after beam has been bolted until the result is a structure fifteen feet long, thirteen feet in diameter at one end and twenty-two feet at the other. On the outside of the truncated cone thus obtained iron plates are bolted, and a deep spiral groove is made from end to end in the iron to guide and steady the cable as it winds and unwinds. The wrought-iron shaft turns in a framework that reaches quite through the floor of the building, and is sunk deep in solid rock and braced against every strain.

            A steel cable such as is used on the Comstock weighs from twenty-five thousand to forty thousand pounds. In the case of those that taper regularly toward the lower end, where less strength is needed, the reduced size is not obtained by leaving out some wires, but by gradually tapering each wire in its manufacture. The flat cables are much preferred for heavier work, and were first made by Mr. A. S. Hallidie, of San Francisco, the inventor of the cable system of street cars so much in use in that city.

            The engineers of the Comstock greatly increased the efficiency of their steam engines, so as to save fuel. The valve gear on compound engines was greatly changed. The hoisting engines were made to act directly upon the cables by keying the reel to the main shaft, increasing the possible speed with which the cables could be hoisted to three thousand feet per minute, a rate ten times greater than the utmost speed attainable before 1865.

            Danger seems inseparable from such machinery. If an engineer loses his presence of mind for a second

[Illustration]

The Mouth of a Shaft.

OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 217

while guiding the swift-flying cage, the men may be hurled to destruction. At the Union shaft, in 1879, the engineer, a careful and temperate man, was hoisting a cage with seventeen men from the bottom of the shaft; when they were near the top he started to shut off steam, but turned the lever the wrong way and the cage shot swiftly into sight. Losing his head entirely, the poor engineer threw the valve still farther over, and the cage, leaping upward, gleaming and terrible, struck the timbers of the gallows frame and snapped the seven-inch cable, which " parted like twine," making a report like the sound of a cannon. The cable flew backward and swung on one side, mowing down timbers and machinery as far as it could reach. It was like that most tremendous accident known on shipboard, the breaking loose of a gun amidships. The great building shook to the granite foundations, and men cried out that one of the boilers had exploded. When the cage struck, every man except two who clung to the shattered frame, and one who seized the bell rope, were hurled against the roof and fell dead, dying, or crippled on the floor.

            One must not expect to see a close-walled box or steel cage for an elevator. The miners have only a heavy iron cage, entirely open on two 'sides and nearly so on the others. Some cages are single; some have two floors and are called double-deckers. The old- style three- and four-deckers have now gone out of use. Loaded iron cars come out of the depths and are at once hooked to a cable that pulls them from the cage along a track on the floor of the building, or they are rolled out by men in waiting. If the contents are worthless, the cars are quickly switched to the dumps and so diappear; if they consist of ore for the mill, they go to one of the most important and complicated of all the

218 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

huge structures that cluster around the mouth of a Comstock mine.

            The Consolidated Virginia mill as built in bonanza days has sixty stamps of eight hundred pounds each, forty pans, four agitators, and twenty settlers, and is capable of reducing two hundred and fifty tons of ore daily. The California mill has eighty stamps of nine hundred and eighty-four pounds each, forty-six pans, four agitators, and twenty settlers, and can work three hundred and eighty tons daily. The sixty-stamp Consolidated Virginia mill is a good type of the more modern improved work of the Comstock. Let us follow the course of an ore car from the mouth of the shaft and see what happens to it.

            This mill is built near the rest of the main structure on a lower level. A car track nearly three hundred feet long leads straight from the mouth of the shaft in the main building to the roof of the quartz mill. It is supported forty-five feet in the air on trestle-work, and is boarded over its whole length with rows of windows on each side, so that it " resembles nothing else so much as a ropewalk." The ore cars are made up into little trains and hauled to the top of the mill by mules. One of the famous mules in bonanza days was known far and wide as "Mary Ann Simpson." Tradition had it that she knew more about mill work than any man employed in the mine, and she had certainly hauled millions of dollars from shaft mouth to mill. In some mines the ore is carried by an endless belt in buckets on a cable, or the cars are drawn by a cable run by a shaft from an engine.

            When dumped, the ore falls into chutes in the roof of the mill, and what the Californian hydraulic miners first named " grizzlies " are set in the bottom of each chute. A grizzly is a screen of parallel iron bars three

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inches apart, in most cases, set sloping, and loose at one end, so that while the finer rock goes through, all larger fragments roll into the jaws of a rock breaker, whence, after having been sufficiently crushed, the material goes through another chute into the main ore bins to which the smaller rocks went at once. In the hydraulic mines, where sets of grizzlies are sometimes used to keep boulders out of the flumes, the mingled roar of the foaming waters, the harsh crashing of rolling rocks, and the clang of quivering bars of massive iron can be heard a long distance. It is one of the noisiest things about such a mine, but its name does not seem very appropriately taken from the monarch of the Sierran wilderness, whose tread, though lumbering, is noiseless, and whose loudest utterance is a menacing growl.

            Returning to our typical mill on the Comstock, the ore bin where the crushed rock falls is one hundred and ten feet long and the contents are fed by chutes to the eight batteries of ten stamps each. The mill building stands upon ground that was terraced in the most careful manner, so that the different parts of the structure stands upon different levels, as is required for the most perfect economy of labour and time. After the ore is once delivered at the top of the building, gravity is made to do as much work as possible.

            Beginning with the power required to run a mill of this type, it is primarily a 600-horse-power compound condensing engine. There are two cylinders, one of twenty-four by forty-eight inches and the other forty- eight by forty-eight inches; steam which goes into the initial or smaller cylinder, cut off at the half stroke, goes into the expansion cylinder, where it fills eight times the bulk it first had. Instead of going into the air, it then exhausts into a condenser which is so

220 THE STORY OF THE MINE.

arranged as to counterbalance the atmospheric pressure at the altitude of Virginia City. In ways like this the ponderous machinery of the Comstock is all adapted by a host of details to suit exactly the work and the locality. The main shaft of the engine is fourteen inches in diameter, weighing fifteen thousand pounds. The fly wheel, eighteen feet across, weighs thirty-three thousand pounds. A belt from the fly wheel, which is also a band wheel, drives the stamps in the batteries. A long shaft eleven inches in diameter goes into the amalgamating room and drives the machinery of the pans and settlers. The engine itself weighs fifty tons and rests on solid masonry. There are eight boilers, each sixteen feet long and fifty-four inches in diameter, and four huge smokestacks, each ninety feet high, extending forty feet above the roof.

            The progress of the ore from the ore bin, under the stamps, through the amalgamating room, to the retort house, and finally to the melting room, where the refined metal is cast into bars of bullion, would require many chapters full of technical details which properly belong to metallurgical treatises. It may be noted in passing that there is a great deal of gold in all the Comstock ore, but the quantity varies in different mines and at different levels. In the whole lode the average amount of gold is about forty-two per cent, but the Gold Hill group contains forty-seven per cent of gold in its total yield to date, and in some single mines the gold has been nearly sixty per cent.

            The forty-six mining companies of the Comstock in 1866 had forty-four engines, of a total horse power of 1,500, used for pumping and hoisting, and sixty- two mills run by steam and water power, with 1,271 stamps crushing 57,112 tons of ore each month. Fifteen years later (in 1881) the total horse power of all

OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 221

the engines on the lode was nearly 21,000, and it has not materially increased since that time. When all the energies of the men of the Comstock are again directed to going deeper there will have to be another great advance in the machinery used, and the inventive skill of the world will be taxed to its utmost. If new and greater bonanzas are found, the mills themselves will be reconstructed upon a larger scale.

            We leave the deafening clang and clatter of the mills and turn back to the main building. We have seen the progress of the ore from the top of the shaft to the retorts and the assay office. It is time to descend into the mine itself, where the iron ore cars are being filled and pushed along underground rails to the station. It is time to study life in the chain of subterranean cities of the Comstock.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE CITY UNDERGROUND.

            AT last we are ready to study at its best the great subterranean city, the chain of works for whose maintenance and extension, mills, machinery, and towns on the surface were created. We are ready to go down the main shaft, stop at a "station," explore a drift, see the miners at work, and hear stories of peril and adventure.

            The visitor retires to a dressing room, takes off his or her ordinary clothing, puts on one of the suits kept there for the purpose flannel pantaloons, woollen shirt, heavy shoes, and felt hat is placed in charge of a foreman, and they enter the cage. The foreman waves his hand; in an instant we are dropping noiselessly into the darkness, lit only by the flickering rays of a lantern which shows timbers seemingly leaping upward.

            Pretty soon a station appears, but we pass without pausing. There seems to be a large irregular room opening back from the side of the shaft. Men are busy there, moving about in the well-lighted space, and there is machinery at work. If we went slower we should see a drift extending from the station and dividing into many other passages, and miners and foreman would be noticed passing to and fro engaged in various occupations. Every hundred feet a station

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THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 223

flashes past, and the immensity of the work begins to grow upon the traveller.

            Sometimes the man in charge of a station hails us as we pass, and the foreman makes a reply that is Choctaw to the uninitiated, for we are dropping rapidly away from the sound. As we reach a depth of a thousand feet or so the cable sometimes begins to " spring " with a peculiarly disagreeable bobbing motion, which gives a novice a new sensation, as if hung in an abyss by a rubber strap. In the midst of this we come to a full stop at the fifteen-hundred-foot station and step off on the floor.

            A station is the office for the work done on that mining level, as well as the point where men stop and where freight is shipped or received. It is walled, roofed, and floored with huge timbers and planks, and is a large, well-lighted place crowded with mining supplies, barrels of ice water, candles, fuse, powder, tools, etc. If it were not for a car track which crosses the middle of the floor, coming from the level beyond and connecting by switches with all the hoisting compartments of the shaft, the place would sometimes seem a combination of office and country store. The car track that extends through the main drift of the mine connects by turntables with the side drifts and cross- cuts. Laden cars arrive regularly from the " stopes " or places where ore is being taken out, and are sent to the surface by the station tender. Empty cars as they arrive are returned to some place where they are needed by the car men, and so the work goes on steadily, excepting when shifts are changed.

            The drifts, or "galleries" as some call them, are from four to six feet wide and seven to eight feet high. The miners prefer to cut them outside of the vein as much as possible, as there is less danger of caves. The

224 THE STORY OF THE MINE.

floor of a drift is horizontal, or slightly raised, to facilitate the delivery of ore. The main north and south drift is the Broadway of the level, and sometimes even contains a double car track. The cross-cuts start from the main drift at right angles with the vein, so as to cut into the ore body if any is found. Like the levels, they are about a hundred feet apart. They are extended entirely across the lode to the other wall, and are connected with each other by cross-drifts. Every new cross-cut attracts the attention of all who are interested in the mine. If one cross-cut is in pay ore there is much greater excitement when the next one, a hundred feet farther on, is to be opened. In this way, with drifts, cross-cuts, and cross-drifts, the skeleton of the underground plan begins to be apparent. Imagine a general plan something like this on each level, and we only have to describe the winzes to complete the framework of the passageways. A winze is a small shaft sunk wherever it is needed, from one level to another, for ventilation, to explore new ground, or often, when sloping, to serve as a chute for ore and timbers. An " upraise " is the beginning of a winze started on a level and carried upward toward the next higher level. If it is finished its name is changed to winze. The only connection between one level and another besides the main shaft is by means of these winzes. Vertical winzes are in reality shafts; sloping winzes are inclines; drifts, cross-cuts, and cross-drifts are really tunnels. The main shaft which connects all these underground workings is not always vertical, neither does it always remain the same for its entire length; it may be an "incline," as the Crown Point shaft, which is vertical to the eleven-hundred-foot level and then follows the lode, which dips thirty-five degrees at that

THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 225

point. The car used for hoisting through an incline is a " giraffe," absurdly called so "because the hind wheels are very large and the front ones low, so as to keep the car level." One would suppose that the name kangaroo would be more appropriate. It carries eight tons of ore at a trip. Sometimes another or "back-action" car is fastened behind. A ride on a giraffe is very exciting. The track is well lighted and the cars climb it with the speed of a lightning express. The giraffes, like the elevator cages, have safety grips. At the bottom of the shaft or incline is the " sump," a pit or well sunk there to collect the water from the mine. Here are the suction ends of the pumps.

            To have a main shaft presupposes that there are some air shafts for ventilation; but there are few on the Comstock, ventilation being secured as far as possible by connection with the main shafts of other mines. The miners agree that the direction of a draught in a mine remains permanent for years, but if a fire in a mine changes the draught, it never changes back. A " down-cast " has thus been changed in an hour to an " up-cast." The general tendency of air currents in the Comstock is in the same direction as the slope of the ore chimneys that is, southward. Each new connection makes changes in the air currents in all the mines.

            There is machinery in the mines, and often a great deal of it. Steam makes too much heat, but compressed air, hydraulic power, and electricity are now used with entire success. Small engines run the " blowers " to force fresh air through pipes to every part of the mine, but particularly to the heads of the news cuts, drifts, and upraises; others hoist and lower rock and other materials in the various winzes, and still others drive the drills. All this makes a network of

226 THE STORY OF THE MINE.

pipes, mostly for compressed air, extending throughout the mine.

            The admirable system which prevails is nowhere more manifest than in the way men are handled. They form in line in the hoisting works and march into the cages. They leave the mines in the same way. Three shifts of eight hours each make the day of twenty- four hours. " Morning shift " is from 7 A. M. to 3 P. M.; "afternoon shift " from 3 to 11 P.M., and "night shift " till 7 again. Each level of the mine has therefore its three shift bosses. The clerk who acts as time- keeper has an office in the hoisting works and registers every man's ingoing and outcoming with the regularity of a machine. The shift bosses report men missing or sick, also accidents, or anything else of importance. They tally loads of ore and waste rock, filling up a printed blank. The superintendent thus knows how much work each shift has accomplished. Each level has a foreman. The mine has also a general underground foreman, and an assistant to take his place at night. As regards the workmen, there is complete classification. The timber men attend to the supports of the various workings; the miners, drill men, and drifters hew and cut passages and extract the ore; the pump men and engineers see to their respective duties. Watchmen make regular rounds, messengers carry orders, take the men water or tools, and gather up the dulled picks and crowbars to send them to the forges.

            Lamps, candles, and electric lights gleam along the rocky aisles of the mines, except in long unused portions. Since one mine is connected with another on the various levels, the boundary lines being accurately marked on the walls of the main drifts, the longer streets of the underground city extend for three and four miles, and in active times men are met at almost

THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 227

every corner and turn, singly or in groups. It is a busy, populous city, and its inhabitants are a superb race of men, white-skinned twilight dwellers, naked except for shoes, overalls, and small felt caps. They go about quietly with hardly a word to each other. It is a land of silence as well as of candlelight. One begins to understand why miners have always made such unconquerable soldiers at times of national need; these men are soldiers already in their power to yield prompt obedience and in their capacity to move together in solid phalanxes.

            On the Comstock the arch enemy is heat. " View their work! " says Mr. Lord in his history of the lode. " They enter narrow galleries where the air is scarce respirable. By the dim light of their lanterns a dingy rock surface braced by rotting props is visible. The stenches of decaying vegetable matter, hot, foul water, and human excretions intensify the effects of the heat." The men can not wear woollen garments, they perspire so freely. In the most heated parts of the mine they work ten or fifteen minutes, then run to thrust their heads under cooler water from the pipes, and to breathe deeply the fresh air forced out of the blowing tubes. They soon become so exhausted that the shift boss orders them back to lighter work in less torrid drifts. Miles of passageways have been cut in air so unendurable that candles burned blue and went out, and men falling down were dragged back by their comrades.

            About 1868 it began to be noticed that the points of greatest heat in the lode moved considerably from year to year, as if the hot-water streams sometimes filled one part of the lode and sometimes another. Crown Point, on the fourteen-hundred-foot level, struck a stream so hot that eggs were readily cooked in it, but a year later the heat at this place was much lessened.

228 THE STORY OF THE MINE.

Bullion on the seventeen-hundred-foot level registered 140 Fahr. About this time an enormous vein of hot water was tapped at various points along the lode. It has been estimated that the water pumped out of the Comstock at this period and the air in circulation through the mines were together removing annually an amount of caloric that was the full equivalent of that produced by fifty-six thousand tons of the best anthracite coal, burned in the most economical manner. Notwithstanding this constant extraction of heat from the lode, the temperature continued to increase, though with many fluctuations, as greater depths were attained in the various mines.

            Specialists have had a pretty quarrel over the cause of the heat in the lode. Prof. Church says: " Chemical combinations between the water and the lode rocks ;" technically, kaolinization of the lode feldspar. Others say that the water in the lode rises from " where the eruptive rocks retain much of their primal heat." The highest recorded water temperature here is 175 Fahr., and large areas of rock remain at from 130 to 150. When the miners were working on the lowest levels of the deepest shafts, three thousand feet and more from the surface, there was every sign of entering a new hot belt probably far greater than any heat previously known in the entire history of mining. By the compressed-air pipes the five or six men at a heading receive fully seven hundred cubic inches of air per minute. It reaches the place at a temperature of about 90, seldom less. On some levels each miner drinks three or four gallons of ice water in his eight- hour shift. The hotter parts of Consolidated Virginia have required ninety-five pounds of ice daily to every miner at work. " Even with this help, " said the Territorial Enterprise, "four picked men in some stopes

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have found themselves unable to do the work of one man in a cool drift." An incline in Savage became so tropical as it advanced that the men who were arranging the pump rod at a new station staggered out half dead with cholera-like cramps caused by the blinding heat and foul air. Men lost their wits, raved, sang, talked like lunatics, and had to be taken to a less heated part of the level, where they were rubbed and kneaded from head to foot, especially on the stomach. Sometimes it was necessary to carry them to the surface and obtain prompt medical attendance. Under these searching strains, which tried the best constitutions until the weakest place gave way, men often perished in the drifts. Besides those who yielded to heart failure, apoplexy, and suffocation, some were tortured to death by falling into pools of boiling water.

            Besides this intense heat of the lower levels, the hot water met with in running drifts and crosscuts is sometimes so poisonous with the minerals it contains in solution that when a vein is tapped it blinds every miner in that part of the workings. Their faces swell and their eyes remain closed until they have been some time in the open air and under medical treatment. Then, too, the old shafts in the upper levels, long ago abandoned and marked " dangerous " on the mine maps, have been left to darkness and decay. Acres of underground passages and ore chambers here are ghastly, crumbling ruins, trembling under the step of every explorer. Timbers are twisted and crushed to half their original length or pressed together by the weight of the mountains overhead until they seem like flattened, broken, entangled straws in the " lake " of a cider press. Occasionally some one creeps along the remaining crevices into the shapeless and fast-closing chambers of ancient bonanzas. The foul and

230 THE STORY OF THE MINE.

musty odours of a charnel house fill the hot, dripping, desolate darkness; moist and slimy fungi of gigantic size and strange shapes grow out of the walls and timbers; fire damp fills many of the drifts, and dangerous explosions occur; phosphorescent lights glow at times in these tangled tropical forests overthrown and crushed together, and in winter nights abandoned shafts are sometimes illuminated with dazzling blue flames that might serve for the witch scene of an opera.

            The ordinary accidents which are everywhere in- separable from mining life occur on the Comstock in every possible form, only on a larger scale than usual. The character of the vein matter would be termed " extra hazardous " by every mining man. Three hundred fatal accidents and six hundred " severe injuries " were reported in the files of the Virginia City newspapers between 1863 and 1880. It is safe to estimate that from the time the mines were opened in 1859 to the summer of 1893 thirty-four years there have been six hundred fatal and twelve hundred severe accidents on the Comstock. The years for which the statistics are most complete show inexplicable variation. Accidents seem to go by groups and seasons, and there are many superstitions respecting the subject among miners themselves.

            Although not the greatest source of mining disaster, according to statistics, a fire is by far the most dreaded of all accidents. In some mines there is but a single shaft up which to escape, and smoke and explosive gases add to the dangers. There may be eight or nine hundred men compelled to take their turns to ascend the shaft in the cages; the gas explosions put out most of the lights, and men rushing to escape fall headlong into winzes and chutes. Other accidents only endanger a few men nearest the scene, but when

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the timbers take fire every person in the mine is in imminent danger. The slightest smell of anything burning is instantly noticed and examined into. A man could cause an excitement throughout half a dozen levels of a mine by lighting a newspaper in a candle, for the smoke would soon penetrate the drifts, and anxious miners would begin to tumble out of every nook and cranny.

            The amount of lumber packed into a mine is so great and the draught in case of fire is so violent that hurricanes of flames and smoke leap through the narrow channels of rock and beat in resistless waves to the remotest opening. It can hardly be possible to overestimate the inflammability of a well-timbered Comstock mine. Where bonanzas once existed are oval chambers, one or two thousand feet high, packed full of cribs of timbers, with hundreds of floors of two- and three-inch planks on which the miners stood to work away at the roof as they rose on frame after frame from the bottom to the top of the bonanza. There are stairs, timber-lined chutes, winzes, drifts, and cross- cuts, and everywhere, besides the heavy timbers, there are miles of "lagging" behind the frames. Things could not be better arranged for a conflagration.

            Some glimpses of the famous fire in Yellow Jacket will serve to illustrate the subject. Here the fire began about seven o'clock one April morning in 1869 on the eight-hundred-foot level, two hundred feet from the main shaft. The morning shift was in the mine when the alarm was given, and Gold Hill and Virginia City were aroused. At the shafts of Kentuck and Crown Point, the adjacent mines, as well as in the Yellow Jacket shaft, blinding volumes of smoke prevented descent. As when a ship is in the breakers grinding to pieces against sharp rocks, those on board are some-

232 THE STORY OF THE MINE.

times as completely beyond mortal help as if they were upon another planet, so in this case the firemen and miners found it impossible to descend, not only on account of the black, thick smoke, but because of the highly mineralized and deadly gases which made men faint and dizzy yards from the mouths of the shafts.

            A safety lantern was put on a cage and sent down with a message of cheer written in large letters on a piece of pasteboard: " We shall get you out soon. It is death to attempt to come up from where you are. Write a word to us." The cage descended slowly, stopping long at level after level to the lowest point at which any of the men were; it came back without any reply. A draught suddenly drew the smoke out of the Kentuck shaft, and men were able to descend in the cages; they found the bodies of two miners; the gathering of Death's harvest had begun. Crown Point could not be entered, but the smoke and gas drew away from Yellow Jacket after an hour or two, and men began to bring up the dead in that shaft, carrying them through a circle of rope extended about the hoisting works and laying them on the ground.

Firemen took hose, and carried it down the shaft to the eight-hundred-foot level; miners and timber men went with them, putting out flames, propping up falling walls and sides of drifts half filled in places with debris from the roofs. Such a battle in the recesses of a mine equals, and indeed surpasses, in elements of danger and heroism the fiercest fire battle that men ever waged on the surface of the earth. They played streams of water all day upon red-hot rock and into boiling lakes, and the water ran at scalding heat from the giant pumps. Sudden caves drove poisonous gases upon them; they were paralyzed by fumes of sulphur, antimony, and other minerals, and were sent up the

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still smoking shaft, whose heavy timbers fortunately had not been destroyed.

            After thirty hours of continuous labour the firemen and miners recovered twenty-three bodies. The fire broke out again and again, with new jets of deadly gas; it became evident that no life remained in the ruins, and at last, after several days and nights of unavailing struggle in the three mines, the mouths of the shafts were hermetically sealed and steam was forced into them with all the force of the giant engines. Two days later the shafts were opened and more bodies found, but the fire broke out, and the mines were again sealed. This alternation continued several times, for the whole mining community was determined to recover every body; but the firemen were brought up insensible, even seventy-five days after the first outbreak of the fire. The miners at last walled up the smouldering fire on the eight-hundred-foot levels of Kentuck and Crown Point, where it continued to burn for a year or more. It is a well-authenticated fact that three years afterward there was still red-hot rock in some of these drifts.

            The scenes that occurred in the mine when the fire broke out were graphically told in the Territorial Enterprise and other newspapers, whose reporters interviewed every man who escaped in the first cage load before smoke and gas had filled the shaft. The story reads like a leaf from the destruction of Pompeii darkness, smoke, ashes, rains of fire, fatal vapours asphyxiating the panic-stricken people of the submontanic city. The Crown Point miners crowded in the cage, where they hung to every bar in such wild confusion that the station keeper thought many of them would be torn to pieces, and so held the cage until it had only time to escape, remaining behind himself

234 THE STORY OF THE MINE.

and losing his life. One miner, hastening toward the shaft in the total darkness, all lights having been put out by gas explosions, dropped on his knees and began to crawl forward till he was at the edge of the shaft. Several other miners ran up from behind, and he heard them fall headlong into the deeps.

            Outside, the scenes that occurred as bodies were brought out of the volcano mouth, and, most of all, when the order to seal the shafts was given, were such as abide in one's memory for a lifetime. Wives, children, fathers, mothers, friends of the doomed men were all there, adding their separate passions to the awful grief and despair. Some wept, some wrung their hands and cried aloud, some appeared as if suddenly insane or stupefied and overwhelmed by the calamity. Now and then a woman fainted and was carried home by her friends, and ever the crowd grew as the more remote cottages of the miners poured forth wild women hurrying from washtubs and housework to where the black smoke rolled forth, a sign to the cities of the lode that precious human lives were being lost in that vast daedalian labyrinth a thousand feet below. As each body was carried out, a wailing cry rang through the crowd like the winter wind in Sierra pines: " Who is it? " " Who is it this time? " Then the wives of the missing miners came forward to look, and some one shrieked recognition, and those that carried the dead sobbed as they turned back for another.

            Later there were other fires. Explosions shook the solid earth and hurled sheets of flame two thousand feet along the drifts from mine to mine. Scorched bodies were found beside the fire track, but miners in the cross-cuts escaped. Again, some months after- ward, the Belcher air shaft caught fire. The men were got out of the mine, but gas explosions that were heard

[Illustration]

The Bottom of a Shaft.

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a mile off and spurts of flame five hundred feet high warned the superintendent that the drifts must be closed or the whole mine would soon be a mass of flames. He called for eighteen unmarried volunteers for a desperate undertaking, and had great difficulty in choosing among those that came forward. They were hastily bulkheading the main drift near the burning shaft when a large cave in the latter changed the direction of the draught, and instantly a breaker of white flame rolled forward through the drift. Nine of the eighteen men "were hoisted out scarred and crisp, their clothes burned from their bodies." A second gang of volunteers took the place of the first and completed the bulkhead.

            A remarkable struggle for life occurred in the Succor mine, a little off the Comstock, on the Silver City grade. Some miners who wished to " thaw out " their frozen giant powder put a dozen cartridges on the engine boilers and went away. Pretty soon the cartridges began to burn, throwing out jets of flame that rose to the woodwork, and so the hoisting works blazed up in a moment. The mine was a small one, and little work was being done at the time; two men were down in the shaft, five hundred feet below, and the hoisting tub was there also. The car man and engineer shouted to the men and shook the cable, but failed to make them understand that they were in great peril. Then the fire drove everybody out of the building. It was soon in flames and fell in, and the timbers of the shaft itself began to ignite. Of course every one knew that there was no hope after that for the men below, who could not escape suffocation. But two days later, when the fire was put out and a gang of miners went down, they found the bodies of the two men " at the pump station," a recess in the side of the shaft. They had

236 THE STORY OF THE MINE.

actually climbed two hundred and sixty-five feet by clinging like snails to the corner timbers and slight crevices. Foot by foot their marvellous journey was traced, and it still remains an unequalled feat in the annals of mining. They were in perfect safety in the sheltered alcove until the poisonous gas from the burning pine rose to that point and destroyed them. A polite coroner's jury a few days later said: " We must strongly deprecate the custom prevalent in many mines of warming giant powder on the boilers about the works."

            The spirit in which the miners meet peril and death is almost uniformly the cool, careless fatalism of many a war veteran. Some of their grim jests still ring like the sayings of old Norse sea kings. A premature blast in one of the mines once drove a foot-long splinter through the hand of a timber man, through the lagging he was working on, and into the soft rock. " We shan't need a spragg at this end, Bill! " was his cool remark. A "spragg," be it understood, is a square stick of wood six or eight inches long. One end is put against the posts of the timbering; the other end, slightly sharpened, is against the heavy planks, called lagging. The pressure of the walls upon the planks gradually forces them out, and the spraggs go steadily through into the rock behind. When the planks reach the post the men in charge take picks, relieve the pressure, and put in new spraggs. This system keeps the main timbers from being broken.

            A still more famous case of nerve was furnished by a brawny young Cornishman who fell into a main shaft. Twenty feet down he came to the pump station out of which the old-style pump "bob-nose" projected a little, and by agility, strength, and good fortune he was enabled to seize it with both hands, and so

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hung over the shaft, swinging from the slippery iron. He made no outcry, knowing that he had been seen to fall and that men would look down the shaft. When a bucket was lowered and he was brought up he cast a careless glance over his shoulder as he walked off and said: " If ee ha'nt caught hold of the bob ee'd ha* been scattered all abroad by now! "

            We have thus studied the toils and adventures of the citizens of the real Comstock, the men of shafts, drifts, winzes, and ore chambers. This strange hidden realm begins to take shape in one's mind. It is truly a city, but it is not like the cities of the surface, nor can it be even measurably described by the terms and phrases that apply to such cities. If the California and Consolidated Virginia mines could be taken out of the great lode and set on a plain, they would cover a parallelogram thirteen hundred and ten feet one way and about three thousand feet the other. The height to which they would rise would be over three thousand feet. Through the mass around and within it one would see so many galleries and pathways that to re- move the whole body of material piecemeal would seem easier than to construct a tithe of them. Everywhere there are angles, curves, and irregularities, as veins of ore have been followed. Everywhere the mass of soft, mineralized matter mingled with hardest rock is bored, patched together, upheld by braces, and kept from instant collapse. These mines, moreover, are only two out of many. The whole lode, if plucked forth by the roots, would present similar characteristics, and, more than this, it would lean like the Pisan tower, and the sides would run in and out like a toppling, wave-worn cliff full of coves and promontories.

            But the Comstock seems to me a more impressive fact just as it stands, walled in by mountains and rooted

238 THE STORY OF THE MINE.

so deep that men may toil there through centuries to come without reaching the bottom of its "fissure vein." After meditating upon the paths, lanes, alleys, roads, crossroads, and highways of the great group of mines, rising by stairs on stairs, from level to level, one is ready to grasp the completed conception of the labyrinthian wilderness, where, in the midst of abandoned acres of caves, pitfalls, and jungles of fungi- overgrown timbers, lie masses of ore and yet-undiscovered bonanzas.