Roughing It by Mark Twain (read with me .txt) 📖

Comstock silver lode-a vein of ore from fifty to eighty feet thick between its solid walls of rock-a vein as wide as some of New York's streets. I will remind the reader that in Pennsylvania a coal vein only eight feet wide is considered ample.

Virginia was a busy city of streets and houses above ground. Under it was another busy city, down in the bowels of the earth, where a great population of men thronged in and out among an intricate maze of tunnels and drifts, flitting hither and thither under a winking sparkle of lights, and over their heads towered a vast web of interlocking timbers that held the walls of the gutted Comstock apart. These timbers were as large as a man's body, and the framework stretched upward so far that no eye could pierce to its top through the closing gloom. It was like peering up through the clean-picked ribs and bones of some colossal skeleton. Imagine such a framework two miles long, sixty feet wide, and higher than any church spire in America. Imagine this stately lattice-work stretching down Broadway, from the St. Nicholas to Wall street, and a Fourth of July procession, reduced to pigmies, parading on top of it and flaunting their flags, high above the pinnacle of Trinity steeple. One can imagine that, but he cannot well imagine what that forest of timbers cost, from the time they were felled in the pineries beyond Washoe Lake, hauled up and around Mount Davidson at atrocious rates of freightage, then squared, let down into the deep maw of the mine and built up there. Twenty ample fortunes would not timber one of the greatest of those silver mines. The Spanish proverb says it requires a gold mine to "run" a silver one, and it is true. A beggar with a silver mine is a pitiable pauper indeed if he cannot sell.

I spoke of the underground Virginia as a city. The Gould and Curry is only one single mine under there, among a great many others; yet the Gould and Curry's streets of dismal drifts and tunnels were five miles in extent, altogether, and its population five hundred miners. Taken as a whole, the underground city had some thirty miles of streets and a population of five or six thousand. In this present day some of those populations are at work from twelve to sixteen hundred feet under Virginia and Gold Hill, and the signal-bells that tell them what the superintendent above ground desires them to do are struck by telegraph as we strike a fire alarm. Sometimes men fall down a shaft, there, a thousand feet deep. In such cases, the usual plan is to hold an inquest.

If you wish to visit one of those mines, you may walk through a tunnel about half a mile long if you prefer it, or you may take the quicker plan of shooting like a dart down a shaft, on a small platform. It is like tumbling down through an empty steeple, feet first. When you reach the bottom, you take a candle and tramp through drifts and tunnels where throngs of men are digging and blasting; you watch them send up tubs full of great lumps of stone-silver ore; you select choice specimens from the mass, as souvenirs; you admire the world of skeleton timbering; you reflect frequently that you are buried under a mountain, a thousand feet below daylight; being in the bottom of the mine you climb from "gallery" to "gallery," up endless ladders that stand straight up and down; when your legs fail you at last, you lie down in a small box-car in a cramped "incline" like a half-up-ended sewer and are dragged up to daylight feeling as if you are crawling through a coffin that has no end to it. Arrived at the top, you find a busy crowd of men receiving the ascending cars and tubs and dumping the ore from an elevation into long rows of bins capable of holding half a dozen tons each; under the bins are rows of wagons loading from chutes and trap-doors in the bins, and down the long street is a procession of these wagons wending toward the silver mills with their rich freight. It is all "done," now, and there you are. You need never go down again, for you have seen it all. If you have forgotten the process of reducing the ore in the mill and making the silver bars, you can go back and find it again in my Esmeralda chapters if so disposed.

Of course these mines cave in, in places, occasionally, and then it is worth one's while to take the risk of descending into them and observing the crushing power exerted by the pressing weight of a settling mountain. I published such an experience in the Enterprise, once, and from it I will take an extract:

AN HOUR IN THE CAVED MINES.-We journeyed down into the Ophir mine,
yesterday, to see the earthquake. We could not go down the deep
incline, because it still has a propensity to cave in places.
Therefore we traveled through the long tunnel which enters the hill
above the Ophir office, and then by means of a series of long
ladders, climbed away down from the first to the fourth gallery.
Traversing a drift, we came to the Spanish line, passed five sets of
timbers still uninjured, and found the earthquake. Here was as
complete a chaos as ever was seen-vast masses of earth and
splintered and broken timbers piled confusedly together, with
scarcely an aperture left large enough for a cat to creep through.
Rubbish was still falling at intervals from above, and one timber
which had braced others earlier in the day, was now crushed down out
of its former position, showing that the caving and settling of the
tremendous mass was still going on. We were in that portion of the
Ophir known as the "north mines." Returning to the surface, we
entered a tunnel leading into the Central, for the purpose of
getting into the main Ophir. Descending a long incline in this
tunnel, we traversed a drift or so, and then went down a deep shaft
from whence we proceeded into the fifth gallery of the Ophir. From
a side-drift we crawled through a small hole and got into the midst
of the earthquake again-earth and broken timbers mingled together
without regard to grace or symmetry. A large portion of the second,
third and fourth galleries had caved in and gone to destruction-the
two latter at seven o'clock on the previous evening.

At the turn-table, near the northern extremity of the fifth gallery,
two big piles of rubbish had forced their way through from the fifth
gallery, and from the looks of the timbers, more was about to come.
These beams are solid-eighteen inches square; first, a great beam
is laid on the floor, then upright ones, five feet high, stand on
it, supporting another horizontal beam, and so on, square above
square, like the framework of a window. The superincumbent weight
was sufficient to mash the ends of those great upright beams fairly
into the solid wood of the horizontal ones three inches, compressing
and bending the upright beam till it curved like a bow. Before the
Spanish caved in, some of their twelve-inch horizontal timbers were
compressed in this way until they were only five inches thick!
Imagine the power it must take to squeeze a solid log together in
that way. Here, also, was a range of timbers, for a distance of
twenty feet, tilted six inches out of the perpendicular by the
weight resting upon them from the caved galleries above. You could
hear things cracking and giving way, and it was not pleasant to know
that the world overhead was slowly and silently sinking down upon
you. The men down in the mine do not mind it, however.

Returning along the fifth gallery, we struck the safe part of the
Ophir incline, and went down it to the sixth; but we found ten
inches of water there, and had to come back. In repairing the
damage done to the incline, the pump had to be stopped for two
hours, and in the meantime the water gained about a foot. However,
the pump was at work again, and the flood-water was decreasing.
We climbed up to the fifth gallery again and sought a deep shaft,
whereby we might descend to another part of the sixth, out of reach
of the water, but suffered disappointment, as the men had gone to
dinner, and there was no one to man the windlass. So, having seen
the earthquake, we climbed out at the Union incline and tunnel, and
adjourned, all dripping with candle grease and perspiration, to
lunch at the Ophir office.

During the great flush year of 1863, Nevada [claims to have]
produced $25,000,000 in bullion-almost, if not quite, a round
million to each thousand inhabitants, which is very well,
considering that she was without agriculture and manufactures.
Silver mining was her sole productive industry. [Since the above was
in type, I learn from an official source that the above figure is
too high, and that the yield for 1863 did not exceed $20,000,000.]
However, the day for large figures is approaching; the Sutro Tunnel