| Show written for this paper HOW SILVER IS MINED copyrighted 1896 by bt frank G carpenter PARK CITY utah september 8 1896 HAVE COME f t to park city to tell you how silver is gotten out of the earth this is one of the w worlds 0 r 1 ds great treasure vaults of the white metal V it is the site ot of the ontario mine which is the biggest silver mine in the united states and which is said to be the biggest working mine iu in the world today the ontario has already produced more than worth of silver and it has paid its owners more than ia in dividends forthe for the past two years it has been putting in very expensive improvements and owing to this and to the of silver the dividends have dropped but I 1 am ain told that it will pay more than ten per cent this ye arand its silver deposits are still of incalculable value connected with the ontario is the great daly mine whose dividends have amounted to between two and three million dollars and near it is the daly west mine now just about ready for working and other things which have large deposits of silver you reach park city by a branch of the union pacific it is situated in the wasatch mountains just about a mile anda and a half above the sea and within thirty two miles of salt lake city the town has about inhabitants it lies along both sides of a gulch and its main street is filled with dust in the summer and mud in the winter A I 1 around X k are silver mines and the town lives upon silver in its pal days its pay roll roil hits has amounted to millions a year and the ontario mine alone pays out now more than annually in wages the ontario property is situated just back of the city when the mine was discovered its surroundings were those of bleak bare aare and desolate hills bills now immense frame buildings with steam pipes and smoke stacks are seen scattered over the moun talus and big four horse wagons travel from daylight until dark up and down the valley with loads of silver silver ore in going up to the mine you pass here and were there enormous bins or square buildings into which the ore dragged from the bowels of the earth is emptied preparatory Lar atory to leadin loading g it on the wagon these buildings h have ave many mouths or holes boles at the bottom so arranged that by the lifting of a board they can be opened and the ore will fall down into the wagons on the road below you pass boarding houses devoted to the feeding of the army ot of men in the mines and go on until you reach the big barn like shaft houses bouses they seem to be rudely udel y built and you would never imagine that they represent a product of 30 they contain however little more than the hoisting machinery the real workshops of any mine are underground but let me give you in simple words some idea of this enormous silver mine when discovered it was you know merely a mountain of rock through one part of of which ran a little streak which the prospectors thought carried ore values they broke some of the rock in in pieces it looked not noe much different from any piece of broken granite which you might pick up on the roadside but to their experienced eyes it contained silver they laid out their claimant cla claim imand and dug a shaft or well they found the prospects grow richer as they went downward and at last the hole was sold to senator hearst lloyd tevis J B haggin and other millionaires who put in expensive machinery to get the or om out this wao waa almost twenty years ago and it has in that time produced the enormous amount of silver above stated these men took the well or hole made by the prospectors and they have sunk it more than x r feet down through that mountain of rock they have made of it what is known as the shaft which is little more than a hole walled with boards five feet wide and fourteen feet long running for more than a quarter of a mile straight down into the earth this shaft was sunk just beside the vein of silver rock and at intervals of one hundred feet on the way down ward they have run off tunnels into the vein and have taken out the ore each OF of these tunnels is from four to six feet wide and irom six to nine feet high it is walled and roofed with timbers logs as big around as your waist are braced by the walls against the roof to keep the dirt and rock from coming down upon you as you go through them from these tunnels the miners have worked upward along the vein digging out great caves and rooms in the mountain all of which have to be walled and roofed with logs and so braced that there may be no danger of their caving in A good idea of a silver mine dighe be gotten from a big new york apartment house take the ontario for instance the mine has fifteen stories each one hundred feet in height and the shaft contains an elevator which an immense steam engine raises and lowers carrying the ore and the men from story to story at each story the tunnels run off through the vein and connect with the rooms or as they are called by the miners the tunnels are the passage ways or halls of the flats and the are rooms dug upward and outward in taking out the ore each tunnel has a little railroad running through it and there are fifty miles of such tunnels in the ontario and the daly the cars of the railroad are of iron they are ard always loaded load edby iby gravity in order that the miners may not have the trouble of lifting the ore from the tunnel of each of these stories to the tunnel below it is cut a great pipe or chut chat at such an angle the ore being shoveled into it will roll down and fall into the car placed at its mouth at the other end and feet below but the manager is is ready for our visit to the mine we stand at the entrance of the shaft and watch the elevator coming up it is raised by means of a cable made of wire ropes each as thick as your thumb which runs over a pulley forty feet above the floor and thence straight down into the shaft the cable looks strong and we ask the engineer how much the rope will hold without breaking we are told that it can easily support eighty tons I 1 look at the manager and the two miners who are to go with us none of them weigh more than pounds and as my weight is about loo I 1 feel comparatively sale safe now the elevator is at the top two cars each holding 1500 pounds ot rock are wheeled oft off and we are motioned to take their places As we e do so the manager gives a signal to the engineer and we start down into the bowels of the earth we descend as fast as though we were in the elevator of a chicago hotel and wi we drop at once into the darkness we are warned to keep close within the cage as a hand or a head might be taken off by a pro ejecting timber we hold on for dear life to the iron iron rail over our heads and I 1 try to shrink myself inward as far as possible as we go down down down now we pass one of the levels and we catch a glimpse of a candle in the opening now our ears are dinned dinnee by the shooting of a blast and the sound so shakes the air that our candles are blown out we light them again when we tall all to the next level and the faces of the miners about us look weird and ghost linein like in their flickering glare it makes one shudder and you feel at times as though you were on the edge of the grave at least I 1 felt so when the elevator was stopped at the sixth level and there feet below the earth alminer step ped on with a box of dynamite candles it was no bigger than a soap box it could not have been more than two feet square but it contained enough dyna mite to have blown up the capitol building at washington and to have torn the state wan and navy department into atoms there was no top to the box and as the miner placed it close to my feet I 1 thought of the terrible possibilities ties suppose a rock should drop from the top down upon that dyna dynamite mitel suppose a spark from a candle or a bit of wick should fall into it A sudden jar might throw one of us upon it I 1 could leel feel my hair rising and my face whiten I 1 as asked mk ed as to the danger and was told that it was comparatively small but that the box contained 40 40 per cent of nitro glycerine I 1 was much relieved when it was taken away and so we went on down to the bottom where we were to visit one of the greatest eanest feats of mining engineering gown known to the world this is the famous ontario tunnel which has just been completed at a cost of in order to draw the water off of the mine the ontario Dt alio is a wet mine and a river of water flows through its tunnel it is in fact a great subterranean passage so wide you could drive a buggy through it ft and so high that we walked in it with out stooping the three mile tunnel has a floor running through its middle upon apon which there is a railroad by which the he ore and men are dragged from one pat part of the mine to another by mules As we walk over the road we bear the crushing of water and look down be tween the boards there is a torrent owing flowing under us it comes from the mine at the rate of ten thousand gallons a minute and as we listen we hear bear the water falling wing falling as it comes from the e levels above there was not an qunce of silver in the rock which was dou away in order to make this tunnel and 1 it gives you some idea of the cost of mining when you learn that this hall million illion dollars was spent for dead work and aad solely to get water away from the ether parts of the mine until this tun nelias built all of the water had to be taken out by means of pumps one of the die pumps used costing the enormous aum M of it had a capacity oi al gallons a minute but it is no now lying ing idle and useless its work being done by the tunnel it ft is the water that necessitates the walling waiting of the tunnels and the slopes wm with logs the wet earth and rock is always pressing in and without timbers the mine would not last for an hour the force is so great that it sometimes grinds these great pine logs some of which are as large around as your waist to powder some of the highest priced men employed in the mines are those who take care of the timbers who walk through the mine daily looking ilor ifor weak spots the best of timber is required and that used in the ontario mine comes from the forests ot of oregon and so we ego go along from tunnel to tunnel now we climb into one of the and watch the men at work we have candles in our bands and we crawl along almost bending double the water dripping down upon us at last we enter tera a cave here a half dozen miners are working some are taking the ore out with picks their wire candlesticks are stuck into the rocks beside them as we they dig away at the pile ot of stone which hhas has bien been blasted out by dynamite some are loading ore they push it into the chutes with long han ban aled shovels and we hear it roll down and the iron bottom of the car beneath in other places men are drilling in in order to blast they cut out holes by means of diamond drills compressed air furnishing the force which turns them there they have the work done and a half dozen holes are ready for the explosives note how carelessly the miner seems to handle that dyna mite he picks up one of those dyna mite candles cuts it in half with his knife and slices it down at one end he then puts a fuse as big around as a lead pencil and about three leet feet long into the powder he next pushes the candle into the hole in the rock and fills what is lett left of the hole with mud and dirt pounding it close in about the fuse handling his tools tool with great rest care A strike too hard might seni send on off the candle and blow him into eternity other holes are prepared in a similar manner and the charge is is now ready for lighting the miner hands me the candle and tells me to start the explosion I 1 hang back a moment but finally consent and touch the candle to the end of the fuses the powder at once begins to fizz and the miners as well as ourselves run tor for dear life we get just around the corner and into a chamber or when there is an immense report it is dull heavy and cannon like it blows out our candles and following it we hear the falling and crushing of ore we go back to the scene of the explosion the dynamite has torn the rock out of the earth and a great mass of silver bearing ore has been loosened from the sides or of the mountain As we stop the miners show us the vein it runs from six inches to forty feet in width the average being fifteen jeet feet and the ore streaks ranging from two and a half to three feet in width but let us follow the ore to the mill it is no now little more than a lot of rocks it is put into the steel cars raised to the surface and carried in wagons to immense frame buildings further down the mountain first it is run through a crusher which chews the rocks between its teeth until they become no larger than pebbles and fits them fur the dryer the ore as it cowes from the mine is wet and thle the drying is done by the means oi of an immense iron cylinder about feet long through which a stream of fire runs the cylinder is inclined at a short angle the ore is put in at the top and as it slowly revolves the pebbles of silver ore are rolled over and over butil they come to the lower end perfectly dried by the flames the ore as it comes fn m the dryer looks much like gravel it must be made much finer this is done by means of stamps each of which weighs pounds and which drops on the gravel at the rate of ninety two times per minute this pounding reduces the gravel to dustano du stand it soon becomes a flour it is now mixed with salt by means ot machinery and then carried by an elevator made like that which carries the flour in a mill to the top ot of a furnace and dropped into the flames this furnace is is so arrari arranged ged that the ore dust mixed with salt falls down in millions million oi dust like particles the furnace is thirty nine feet deep it is filled with flames and it is kept at such a heat that the ore is roasted but not melted by the time it falls to the bottom in falling the salt brings about a chemical action by which the ore has been changed from a sulphide to a chlo ride ot of silver the only form in which it can be acted upon by the mercury which is to suck the silver out of the rock after falling talling to the bottom the ore is drawn from the furnace and piled up on the floor outside and left there for about twenty hours during which this chemical action is is perfected when I 1 entered this furnace room I 1 saw perhaps a dozen of these great piles of ore they did not seen seem to be hot and they looked for all the world like piles of sand they appeared indeed so inviting that boy like I 1 was tempted to jump into them the manager however pulled me back and handing me a long handled shovel told me to stir the sand I 1 did so and saw that it was red hot ore putting your finger figger into it would be like sticking it into molten lead the yellow crust was of the thickness of paper while all beneath was of the temperature of the shadrach Shadra cb meschach and abednego furnace after the silver bearing sand has thus lain tor for twenty hours it is ready for its marriage to the quicksilver the union ot the two metals makes me think of the prince who broke through the hedge and kissed into life the princess who had been sleeping for a hundred years it is the quicksilver prince in fact who kisses the sleeping silver ore maiden into life and carries her away irom from her palace of rock in which she has been locked for ages after the sand has cooled it is carried into what is known as the pan room and is thrust into great pans of iron each of which holds about pounds water is introduced and the pans seem filled with a thick brown mush now into each of them through a little pipe is poured pounds of quicksilver and stirring machinery is set to work which moves about through the ore mixing the quicksilver with it the sand was warm and the quicksilver by the warmth becomes |
