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Show DESCENDING THE HUMBOLDT MINE. Entering a rough wooden building you may see a steam engine turning an immense drum, around which is coiled a wire rope. On a chair sits, with each hand on a lever, the bright, watchful engineer, his eyes fixed on the drum now nearly covered with its coil. In another minute, click! the machinery has stopped, and out of an opening in front, like Harlequin in a Christmas pantomime, has come a grimy figure who stands there smiling at you, with a lamp fixed on the front of his cap and his feet on the rim of a great iron bucket. He steps off, the bucket is emptied of the load, not of rich ore, but of very dirty water, which it has brought up, and there is an air of expectancy among the workmen, and an inquiring smile on the face of Mr. Thornton, the superintendent. Something is clearly expected of you, for it is established that you are not what is called by miners a "specimen fiend?," or unmitigated sample collecting nuisance, and it is assumed that when you came hither to investigate you "meant business." You take the hint, and follow Mr. Thornton to a room, where, amid a good deal of joking, you put on some clothes - and such clothes! If you have one spark of personal vanity, "all hope abandon ye who enter here," for even your kind guide has to turn away to hide a smile when he sees you in overalls which will not meet in front, and are precariously tied with a ragged string, an ancient flannel shirt, the sleeves of which hang in tatters around your wristbands, and a cap which might have come over in the Mayflower, and has a smoky lamp hooked into its fast decomposing visor. As you approach the mouth of the shaft, the engineer genially remarks that there "ain't much danger," and when the bucket has come up and been partially emptied, the by-standers repeatedly advise you to be careful about getting in. As you climb perilously over the side, you think of the Frenchman who, starting in the fox-hunt, cried out: Take noteece, mes amis, zat I leafe everzing to my vife!" And when you are crouched down so that Mr. Thornton can stand on the rim above, you do not think at all, but know, that you are what Mr. Mantalini called " a dem'd moist, unpleasant body." Mr. Thornton makes a grim remark about it being as well to have some matches in case the lamps go out, gives the word, and down you go. Understand that there is just about room for the bucket in the shaft, that the latter is slightly inclined, and that you catch and jar and shake in a nerve-trying way; and understand further, that a person [unreadable line] and possible disabilities before he takes a contract to go into a deep shaft. At a certain depth - it may be 500 or 1,000 feet (in some Nevada mines it is 2,500) - you stop at side drifts or cross-outings in which men are at work, and here you see, walled in by rock, the fissure vein. Some are "stoping," or cutting pieces away with the pick, others holding the steel wedges, and others striking them tremendous blows with sledge-hammers. They are, by-the-way, in the habit of accompanying those blows with guttural sounds, the hearing of which induced a special correspondent of the gentler sex - ignoring the fact that they receive three dollars per diem, own chronometer watches, and have fine bank accounts, and silver spoons on their tables - to write a soul-moving description of the poor down trodden miner, imprisoned far from the light of the blessed day, uttering terrible groans as he toiled his life away for the enrichment of the bloated and pampered capitalist. Other men, again, are drilling, loading, and tamping for the "shots," which are to tear the rock in pieces; and you will probably remember a pressing engagement to "meet a man" at some distance from the mine, and induce Mr. Thornton to ring for that moist car, and take you up before they light the match. - A.A. Hayes, Jr. in Harper's Magazine. |