lost silver riches (revised)

[mnaz]

The valley widens on the way to an old site, tucked in the mountain range beyond next, seventy miles off, and your dirt road is a vanishing ribbon. You had to see this place, the anomaly of history and minerals unique to this silent stretch. The valley runs to no end, etched in numberless reentrant grooves into the bright, bare hills on either side, as close as you'll ever be, yet you can't seem to get there. How does one speak a language of rock? It has no beginning or end, and lays waste to any life span in its field. High desert. You pick up these things in time spent on the fringe. What drove the old sites? What made legends? Clues turn up in the ruins, or in the wide open vistas that promised wide open prospects, or even the back shelves of Nevada public libraries when a little study is in order. Variations on raw curiosity.

Nevada is called the silver state, after a prodigious but fairly short-lived nineteenth century silver mining frenzy. How did it come to pass? Set the geo-scene: upheaval wrought Nevada’s realm of rock and sky starting eight million years ago, a mere blip on the rock clock, after a series of foreign terrains came from the western ocean and collided with the continent for 300 million years. Basin and range began its silent kingdom on rising, expanding strata, like a balloon’s inflating surface, upon which a series of mega blocks inexorably faulted and rotated, with distance between them 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, not only rock.

As crustal blocks pulled apart and groundwater boiled up, silver was deposited. An easy prospect? Not really. Tilting mountains fractured their deposits, complicated the search. But how to explain the silver frenzy? The countless boom and bust cycles over such a relatively brief period? Simple erosion. Rainwater broke into fractured veins, converted silver sulfides to heavier, more concentrated silver chloride, which stayed in place where it formed. Geologists called them “supergene enrichments,” and miners called them “surface bonanzas,” caught in the hype either way.

These anomalies were “discovered” all over the basin and range about 150 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? Perhaps. 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 hiding place, those feathery dreams from a distance.

Instant towns sprang up near each new supergene find, with false-front saloons, sod houses, tent ghettos and names like Hardscrabble. We know the lawless violence of these intense, ephemeral places, the waste blowing through once untouchable solitude, but few know the science of silver mining. 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. By 1895 a more thorough extraction process, cyanide dissolution, reached the wild west from Britain, but by then silver madness was nearly over, and mounds of tailings left by older camps littered remote basins and canyons, reclaiming their rightful sense of lost.

How much did the oldtimers miss? How much decent ore did they dump beneath their crude operations? Many of those hell-bent camps took a million dollars from the ground in six years. In nineteenth century dollars. What riches still lie in those lost tailings, lost mines? The question never goes away. And you're not the first to ask. The biggest, most famous mines, like the Comstock at Virginia City, have been reworked, cyanided to overkill, and a few lesser mines were reworked during the Depression. But so many nineteenth century mines dotted the basin and range that it's likely some were forgotten. Cycles of prospecting are never complete.

You could investigate. Certainly. You could make a list, pore over ancient Bureau of Mines reports, labor through countless journals and articles, painstakingly narrow it down to the best producers, then study faded old maps and squint at satellite photos in hopes of finding a forgotten site, lost riches. Certainly. You could do a mountain of research to find a forgotten mountain, and valuable scraps tossed by some careless hardscrabble mob. You could grind up a rough 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, breathe in rare air of a raw mountain mystery, explore the shafts and timbers, ore buckets and scattered square nails that date from the 1870s, at the wildest heights of silver.

You could walk the ruins, faint outlines of cabins and saloons reclaimed by rubble, erosion and scrub, and sit down on a ledge, consider the old cottonwood looking weary and grotesque beside its dry creek bed, and imagine a limb breaking from its trunk with an awful shriek in the dead of a pitch dark night, its heartwood gone. You could sit at the top of a lost trail, consider the scarred face of silent awe, your mound of lost pay dirt, and wonder if you could go through with it all.

[dadio]

Well captured. Enjoyed.