Collection: Books and Periodicals > Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins

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Title: Volume 049-1 - January 1995 Collection Type: Books and Periodicals Collection Name: Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins # of Pages: 8 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

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Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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pretended to be an assayer and chemist induced the company to build huge furnaces out of fire-brick, at a dollar and a half each. What for? To melt the quartz, and find the gold in one solid layer, at the bottom of the molten mass, when it had am, cooled! This was actually tried. The furnaces were kept in full blast a week, and then they looked for a surprising sediment of wealth at the bottom of their artificial volcano. Result, of course, zero, plus a heap of slag. The same chemist, they say, used to receive specimens of quartz, every day, to be tested. He threw them into a fox-hole back of his office in the night, furnished his analysis in due shape the next morning, and took heavy fees.” The mill is now furnished with new machinery; another company has bought it of the original proprietors, who lost everything; and it pays moderate profits in crushing rock that yields at the outside thirty dollars in gold to a ton. A man might have his “pocket full of rocks” of this description and not be a very “heavy” man of State street [Boston]. It rather reduces the poetry of gold bearing quartz in our imagination to think of the rock as yielding, under very expensive and cunning machinery, not over a cent and a half a pound. When it pays two cents a pound it is accounted quite rich. Scores of mills have proved failures, and very disastrous to the pockets of the projectors, because the quartz veins would not yield a cent a pound. Yet some mills pay enormous profits, and are likely to for years to come. There are a few, like the Eureka mine in Amador county, which turn out a clear gain of thirteen thousand dollars. Of the celebrated Frémont estate, I shall have something to say in another letter. A vein near Sonora is proved to be worth at least four millions. But the most wonderful of all the quartz leads is that on the Allison Ranch, a few miles from Nevada [City]. It is the richest gold mine in California, and probably in the world. Six persons own it— most of them, I believe, Irish laborers originally. It was opened by them in 1855. They owned no mill, but sent the rock, as they took it out, to a mill in the neighborhood, and the first sixty tons yielded at the rate of $350 per ton, paying over twenty thousand dollars. In 1856 they erected a small mill of their own, capable of crushing twenty tons of ore a day, and the six partners now grind out clear cash, which they hardly know what to do with, at the rate of nearly a hundred thousand dollars a month.’ Miners work half stooping in the dark, wet, narrow shaft, hundreds of feet under ground, picking the soft, rich stone to be sent up by windlass; but no person, not skilled as a mineralogist, would believe that the rock was of any value if he should see a long road macadamised with it. For not a speck of free flaky gold is visible in any specimen stones where the ledge pays three hundred dollars a ton. In fact a stranger is much disappointed, who goes into one /™ of these cash-factories, that he doesn’t see the production of dust or nuggets fair and clean in some portion of the establishment. When I first heard the roar of the stampers of the quartz-mill in Nevada, and saw men shoveling the rock, in pieces like eggs, under the crushing-irons that pounded them speedily to powder, I supposed that I could be taken at once to the point in the mill where the dust was steadily falling or settling, so that, each hour, the yellow profit could be seen. I imagined that it was something like the Yankee’s machine which took in the live pig at one end, and turned out sausages and scrubbing-brushes at the other. But one may search a whole day through a mill that is crushing fifty tons of very rich ore, and scarcely detect anywhere the color of gold. When the stampers crush the rock the powder is mixed with water, and the milky fluid is dashed against the sievelike screen, through which it passes into a box outside that connects with long sluice ways leading at last out of the mill. Traps are set for the gold that is contained in the white fluid as soon as it passes from the stampers through the first screen. These traps are quicksilver and blankets. In some mills quicksilver is placed plentifully under the huge pestles themselves, or in the first box through which the dissolved rock passes, and most of the gold is caught by it, through chemical affinity, there. Then the blankets, spread in the sloping sluice-ways, catch, as the stream flows slowly over them, the sulphurets which would not unite with the quicksilver. These narrow blankets are carefully rolled up every few minutes, and washed out in a large tub, the dark settlings of which still showing no color of gold, are passed through an amalgamating machine, to force the gold into partnership with the quicksilver. Beyond the blankets, little riffles are made in the sluice, and quicksilver is laid in them to catch what the blankets and boxes had let slip; and then the creamy stream runs out of the mill, and is considered useless. After two or three days, perhaps, sometimes every day, the quicksilver is collected from its various biding places in the mill, still looking white, but stiffened by the gold it has arrested, and the amalgam is submitted to heat in a retort. The volatile mercury flies off in steam and is collected again for further police duty, and the gold is left in the crucible in one mass, yellow and clean, to pass quickly into the blood of civilization. Different methods are followed in different mills for catching the gold by the spry and subtle metal; but nowhere is the gold obtained pure from the rock. And in no mill, probably, is anything like all the gold saved which the rock contains. Some scientific miners maintain that the best machinery now in use is so defective that not more than a quarter of the gold which the rock contains in almost infinitesimal particles, is arrested. If this is so, you will see what fame and rewards await the man whose genius shall conceive the process by which such waste of wealth may be obviated. He will add two or three Californias to the world’s treasury. If it be true that so much treasure runs out of the mills, it throws new meaning into the adage that “any fool can make money, but only a wise man can keep it.” Our talk of gold-seeking would not be complete, of