Scavenging..

[mnaz]

As the valley widens I crest a rise, and my dirt road is a radiant ribbon to a vanishing point. Another dimensionless corridor. I’m on my way to an old mining camp tucked high in the mountain range beyond next, some seventy miles off, because I need to see for myself that wild anomaly of history and geology. The valley runs to no end, etched with numberless, nameless reentrant grooves into bare mountains on either side. I’m as close as I’ll ever be, yet I’ll never get there; they always stretch far ahead. Possibility runs to no end as well, the open canvas of rock and sky.

How could I speak geology? Could I adjust my time signature enough to begin to comprehend rock’s incomprehensible meter? Lifting and flattening of immortal, immovable mountains? Life spans of eternal? Rock time becomes an ultimate desert, with no beginning or end, laying waste to everything in its field, but thank heavens for those rogues known as “geologists,” who turned their gaze from the heavens and started tapping on the ageless rock beneath our feet—mapping faults and fossils, reading strata as cosmic journal entries, tracking unthinkable creeping, colliding plates adrift on engines of creation, speaking in tongues of useless epochs, senseless blocks of time, fit only to ridicule our sacred existence, render it sub-microscopic on the arc. Bastard science. Heretics!

Nevada is called the Silver State, named for a prodigious silver mining frenzy in the late nineteenth century, but how did it come to pass? Some background: Crustal upheaval wrought Nevada’s kingdom of pure rock and sky, starting in the late Miocene some eight million years ago, a mere flash in rock time, after a series of foreign terrains had moved in from the western ocean and collided violently with the continent for 300 million years. Basin and range began its silent realm on rising, expanding strata, analogous to a balloon’s surface as it inflates, upon which a series of mega blocks inexorably faulted and rotated, and the distance between them is likely equal to the depth of their cool, brittle reach to the upper edge of earth’s mantle, the rock engine, the point at which rock is hot enough to become plastic. In general, materials flow instead of fracture if hotter than half their melting point from absolute zero (-460 deg. F).

As Nevada’s crustal blocks pulled apart and groundwater boiled up in the rifts, silver was deposited. An easy prospect? Not exactly. The tilting mountains fractured their ore deposits, greatly complicating the search. But how to explain the countless boom and bust cycles and legends? Rainfall. Simple, eternal runoff. It broke into vein deposits, collected silver sulfides and converted them to heavier silver chloride, which stayed in place where it formed, an ironic chemical equation. Geologists called them “supergene enrichments,” and miners called them “surface bonanzas”—both groups caught up in the hype, it seems. These bonanzas, these freak anomalies pursued hotly by the same, were “discovered” all over the basin and range beginning some 140-plus years ago, though many Paiute Indians, the fabled “Silver Jims” sought by prospectors, knew of these rich deposits for centuries prior. Did we find them all? Perhaps. No large silver deposits have been found since 1915. Maybe someone did make it to the end of my endless valley, peek and poke around each of its feathery, peaceful hiding places.

Instant towns sprang up beside each new supergene find, with false-front saloons, sod houses, tent ghettos and names like Gouge Eye and Hardscrabble. Everyone is familiar with the lawless violence of these intense, ephemeral communities and the human detritus blowing intermittently through canyons once untouchable, but few are familiar with silver mining’s science. The oldtimers used to stamp the ore to powder, stir it into hot salt water and mercury and distill the attracted mercury from the silver. They built sagebrush fires to heat the brine, and when the mercury found silver it made a squeak, and miners knew they had something. But in the mid- 1890s a more thorough extraction process of cyanide dissolution reached the States from England. By that time the silver frenzy was nearly over, and mounds of tailings rejected by earlier camps littered Nevada’s uncountable remote, rousted canyons quietly reclaiming their rightful sense of lost.

How much did the oldtimers miss? How much good ore did they dump on mountainsides beneath their crude operations? Many of those raucous, bloody camps took a million dollars from the ground in six years or so. In nineteenth century dollars. What riches might be found in those lost tailings if they could be reworked with cyanide? Might they still be worth a million in today’s dollars? The question never seems to go away. Of course I’m hardly the first one to ask. The biggest mines, like the Comstock, have been reworked and cyanided to extinction, and even some of the lesser mines have been reworked, particularly during the Depression. But so many nineteenth century mines sprang up in the basin and range that it seems possible, or even likely, that some were forgotten.

I could investigate. Certainly. I could research it, make a huge list of mines, labor through countless journals and articles, pore over hundred-year-old Bureau of mines reports, narrow it down to the best producers, study faded old maps and squint carefully at endless satellite photos in hopes of finding tailings—underestimated heaps as gray smudges. I could do a mountain of research to find that one perfect mountain and a forgotten heap of valuable leftovers carelessly tossed by some hardscrabble mob. Certainly I could.

I could grind up a precarious, precipitous trail into a time warp, haul tanks of cyanide, a spectro-photometer, a whole portable laboratory and assemblage of tools and supplies. And at the top of the trail I could rest a while, get out and walk, breathe rare air of a raw mountain mystery, explore the shafts, timbers, ore buckets and scattered square nails— yes, square nails, since they date from the wildest, crudest heights of silver madness. I could walk the ruins, mere outlines of cabins and saloons, and I could sit down on a granite ledge, consider the old cottonwoods looking grotesque and weary in their dry creek bed and imagine one of them splitting with a ghastly shriek in the still pitch darkness of a moon-less night. I could sit at the top of my treacherous trail and consider the scarred face of silent awe, my dumped mounds of scrounge pay dirt, and wonder if I could go through with it all.

Inspired by and based loosely on John McPhee's "scavenger mining" chapter in "Basin and Range," and a few thousand miles through the great empty.

[mb]

splendid!

-mb

[mnaz]

Thanks, mb. I knew next to nothing about Nevada when I first explored its back roads eight years ago, but even then, when I encountered my first old mine, I remember thinking, "I wonder if they missed any of the good stuff." I thought I was fairly brilliant to think of that question so quickly, but obviously, many others asked the same question long before I was born. Starting about 25 or so years ago, there was an increase in "scavenger" extraction activity due in part to increased access to mining and satellite information, and (portable) technological advances in the extraction science and process. I'm not sure if such activity persisted or not. Perhaps nothing of any value is left any more, "just lying there somewhere waiting to be collected." Who knows?