Silver scavenging (revised)

[mnaz]

On your way to an old mining camp the valley widens and your dirt road is a vanishing ribbon. The camp is tucked in the mountain range beyond next, seventy miles off; you had to see it for yourself, that wild aberration of history and rock. The valley runs to no end, etched with numberless, nameless reentrant grooves into bright, bare mountains on either side, as close as you'll ever be, and you never seem to get there. How does one speak a language of rock? Adjust the time signature to begin to comprehend its incomprehensible meter? Rock time has no beginning or end, and it lays waste to everything in its field, ultimate desert. You wonder why a few strange folks first wandered out to tap on rocks, to map and study them—that is, beyond the ancient enterprise of mining.

It was counterintuitive, against the foundations of wisdom. Imagine the first cowhand on a red soil sea, a monotony of peace and dust, and the herd trudging into mystic overflow. Until it drops away. His canyon is instantly “all there,” no slow unfolding; he’s a speck on a shore of mineral eons. Something happened here! He could hike below the rim, glimpse unthinkable epochs we flit over, a visionary inner eye. Or maybe he shouts at the sky. Vertical travel is tricky; why go down instead of up? Things in the sky exalt and signify, while earth is mere dirt.

Religion spans millennia; geology just a few hundred years, assailed upon its debut. Goons came if you questioned earth’s age. “Six thousand years,” declared the Pope. De Maillet wrote of billions and the Church simply edited decimals to the left. Lamarck and Darwin were furious at such suppression. And fossils? Extinctions? Heresy! Planted by the devil to confuse. Tiny crinoids in timeless muck became archfiends, and insolent rock tappers chiseled away at the truth; their spans unacceptably dwarfed us. Bastard science.

Fast forward. No righteous decree here, nor pure science, only thin air, crisp as arid truth and just as deceptive, and a lucent ribbon to the horizon, headed toward a mountainside anomaly that is unique to this stretch of rock silence. Nevada is called the silver state, after a prodigious but fairly short- lived nineteenth century silver mining frenzy. How did it come to pass? Some rock background: upheaval wrought Nevada’s realm of rock and sky, starting eight million years ago, a mere flash on the rock clock, after a series of foreign terrains came from the western ocean and collided with the continent for 300 million years.

So the basin and range began its silent kingdom on rising, expanding strata, similar to a balloon’s inflating surface, upon which a series of mega blocks inexorably faulted and rotated, with the distance between likely equal to the depth of their cool, brittle reach to the upper edge of mantle, the rock engine, the point where rock is hot enough to become plastic, at half its melting point from absolute zero (-460 deg. F). Funny how this point of plasticity holds true for all materials in general.

As the crustal blocks pulled apart and groundwater boiled up in the rifts, silver was deposited. Easy prospect? Not really. Tilting mountains fractured their ore deposits, complicating the search. But how to explain the countless boom and bust cycles of a relatively brief silver frenzy? Rainfall. It broke into fractured veins, converted silver sulfides to heavier silver chloride, which stayed in place where it formed. Geologists called them “supergene enrichments,” and miners called them “surface bonanzas,” both groups caught in the hype.

These freak anomalies were “discovered” all over the basin and range beginning 140-plus years ago, though many Paiute Indians, the fabled “Silver Jims” sought by prospectors, knew of these deposits for centuries prior. Did we get them all? Maybe. No major silver deposits have been found since 1915. Maybe someone made it to the end of your endless valley, peeked and poked around every last one of its feathery, peaceful hiding places, an impossible notion.

Instant towns sprang up near each new supergene find, with false-front saloons, sod houses, tent ghettos and names like Hardscrabble. Everyone knows about the lawless violence of these intense, ephemeral places, the human detritus blowing through canyons once untouchable, but few know the science of silver mining. The oldtimers used to stamp the ore to powder, stir it into a salt water and mercury brine heated over a sagebrush fire, and distill the attracted mercury from silver. When the mercury found silver it made a squeak, and miners knew they had something. By 1895 a more thorough extraction process of cyanide dissolution reached the wild west from England, but by that time the silver frenzy was nearly over, and mounds of tailings rejected by earlier camps littered Nevada’s uncountable remote basins and canyons, quietly reclaiming their rightful sense of lost.

So how much did the oldtimers miss? How much good ore did they dump beneath their crude operations? Many of those raucous, violent camps took a million dollars from the ground in six years. In nineteenth century dollars. What riches lie within those lost tailings if they could be reworked with cyanide? Might they still be worth a million twenty-first century dollars? The question never goes away. Of course you’re not the first one to ask either. The biggest mines, like the Comstock, have been reworked, cyanided to extinction, and even some lesser mines were reworked during the Depression. But so many nineteenth century mines dotted the basin and range that it seems possible, even likely, that some were forgotten.

You could investigate. Certainly you could. You could make a huge list of mines, labor through countless journals and articles, pore over hundred-year-old Bureau of Mines reports, painstakingly narrow it down to the best producers, study faded old maps and squint at endless satellite photos hoping to find tailings, those gray smudges, underestimated heaps. You could do a mountain of research to find that one perfect mountain, a magic forgotten heap of valuable leftovers tossed by some careless hardscrabble mob.

You could grind up a precarious 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 end of the trail you could rest a while, get out and 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.

You could walk the ruins, mere outlines of cabins and saloons reclaimed by rubble and scrub, and sit down on a granite ledge, consider the old cottonwoods looking grotesque and weary in their dry creek and imagine a limb breaking from the trunk with an awful shriek in the dead of a pitch dark night with no moon, heartwood rotted away. You could sit at the top of a treacherous trail, consider the scarred face of silent awe, your mound of scrounge pay dirt, and wonder if you could go through with it all.

[stilltrucking]

i been looking at it for two days nazz. Could not find the quiet to let it wash over me. Fascinating read. All of it but this bit

You could walk the ruins, mere outlines of cabins and saloons reclaimed by rubble and scrub, and sit down on a granite ledge, consider the old cottonwoods looking grotesque and weary in their dry creek and imagine a limb breaking from the trunk with an awful shriek in the dead of a pitch dark night with no moon, heartwood rotted away. You could sit at the top of a treacherous trail, consider the scarred face of silent awe, your mound of scrounge pay dirt, and wonder if you could go through with it all.

You brought it all home to me in that last paragraph. You chilled me

[mnaz]

Thanks Jack. Apparently, starting in the '80s, some folks actually tried to go out into the wilderness and rework old mines. I like how the science blends with "rustic history" in this one. Was inspired (and informed) by John McPhee's writing. (If I ever publish these latest writes from the last 10-11 months, I'll have to make sure I give credit is where it is due... McPhee never said if his silver-scavenging protagonist was successful or not. Left that up to the reader's imagination.

[mnaz]

btw, need to trim the 2nd-3rd paragraphs. can't stick the church vs. geology thing into this one. need to find another place for that expression...