Forgotten Silver Mines

Prose, including snippets (mini-memoirs).
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mnaz
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Forgotten Silver Mines

Post by mnaz » February 10th, 2018, 7:07 pm

(Revision of an older post. The "jumping mountains" are the fault-block ranges of "The Southwest" (of North America). I posted something awhile ago about them as well.)

What is it with all those old diggings shown in my atlas, scattered on bare slopes? For awhile I never saw any activity around them, and mining seemed nothing but a dead relic of the Old West. Until one fine bright day while traversing the heart of Nevada's spatial otherworld, entranced within it as I kicked dust, I came upon my first corporate mine-- a whole ridge being cut down and devastated, a monstrosity of mutilation. And from that day forward it was clear: mining is never dead. Who knows how far it can go if dollars align just right?

In little desert towns when I hear talk of a big new mine planned for the next mountainside I grumble a little in my gut. If the Big Dig comes on at full force it could change the face of rock. It could remove the rock, and turn its hills into gigantic, bleeding pits, and destroy too many of the old trails out to the old diggings, and I'd really hate to lose them.

I get a better sense of magnitude and relative span out here and I realize, a century or so ago isn't such a long time. May the old diggings rest in their silence and dry wind, but they will always entice mineral minds. And not just the big shooters. I met a guy in one of those desert towns who said even the remotest, most obscure old silver sites are still very much in play, since the old timers were sloppy and may have left some wealth lying around . . . somewhere out past the last lost horizon, where mining is never dead.

Imagine if only you knew a secret place of fortune in the desert, at the end of a long, rough trail, where at sixteen miles out you'd still have another sixty and two ridges to go. Could you make it happen? Could you endure the rigors of mucking tailings? Could you live way out on a desolate mountain, alone to face its storms and ghosts?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
But how is it possible? How and why did so many hardscrabble miners and assorted frontier bastards and tycoons come to scour the basin and range and overrun certain ledges, only to vanish almost as quickly as they came?

You have to go way back in deep time to the jumping mountains for an answer. It all started with them, the signature of this realm, ridge over basin like great dusky waves over lit-up sage troughs, where a sun-dazed stray on a slope can pause to watch the next wave, sixteen miles out, ready to break and roll in for the next epoch like an afternoon in rock time.

It all started with the jumping mountains, the mighty masses tilting on their faultlines for millions of years as the Nevada crust rose and stretched. Rock tappers claim that silver was deposited when groundwater boiled up in cracks and faults, but then it fractured and scattered as rock masses kept tilting. But then rainwater of all things broke into the scattered silver and changed its sulfides into heavier chlorides, which then collected in larger . . . Bonanzas. And a feverish but short-lived silver madness exploded in the 1860s.

Ephemeral, lawless towns sprang up at each new find, with tent ghettos and ramshackle saloons where sometimes prostitutes had to shoot their customers, and it was puzzling to the local Paiutes who had known these silver places long before greed and obsession overwhelmed quietude at each new town until the silver ran out and the silent sage seas began to reclaim their rightful solitude . . . at least for awhile.

But maybe the oldtimers abandoned their pay dirt too soon. Back then they mixed ore powder into a saltwater-mercury brine over a fire, then distilled the mercury out when it found silver with a squeaking sound, but this method was crude and wasteful. A better one, cyanide dissolution, reached the wild west in 1890, but by then the silver boom was done, and no one really knew how many riches might still be lying around. The big mines were cyanided long ago, but the boom was so huge, with so many mines spread so far to all corners of oblivion, that lost wealth seemed a near certainty.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
But lost riches out in far reaches of glow and dust are nothing to romanticize. Scavengers may have already found it all, and yet just finding such places out in thousands of remote square miles of desert would seem impossible. And even if secret wealth is somehow found, the heavy toil of working dirt and living in a rugged, open place hundreds of miles from anything would usually defeat a tenderfoot suddenly deprived of city walls.

But possibility dwells in the endless, silent ranges, so intrigue and strands of obsession remain. And people have done it before. They've read through stacks of old Bureau of Mines reports and old journal articles, narrowed possible sites down and studied old maps and satellite photos seeking clues to lost treasure tossed aside by some careless old west mob. And apparently a few of these people, by hard work and luck, have managed to find what they sought on some remote slope with a forever view, though I wonder what happened next.

I imagine how it might play out . . . outfitted with a truckload of supplies, tools and cyanide tanks, you crawl eighty miles up a rough and treacherous trail into a time warp, and when you get to the top you shut off the truck and go rest on a ledge to absorb a raw mountain scene, a sinister old tangled cottonwood barely clinging to life beside a dry creek bed high above the radiance from which you ascended. And then you criss cross the camp, poking about timbers, shafts and faint traces of cabin footings, looking for square nails-- the kind used in the boom years.

And then a long string of trials comes: the back-breaking labor and lack of results; the fierce winds, dust, lightning and hail stones; and then in the dead of a pitch-black night one of the spooky old cottonwood's weary limbs, with a hair-raising shriek, splits off from the trunk, its heartwood dead. And then one frosty morning you sit for awhile to consider your secret mound of pay dirt out on a scarred face of silent awe, and wonder if you can go through with your plan.
Last edited by mnaz on March 10th, 2018, 3:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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sasha
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Re: Forgotten Silver Mines ("Mining is Never Dead")

Post by sasha » February 11th, 2018, 4:14 pm

enjoy these travelogues of yours - and your characteristic use of the 2nd person to put the reader right into the millieu - thanks for this!
.
"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

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mnaz
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Re: Forgotten Silver Mines ("Mining is Never Dead")

Post by mnaz » February 11th, 2018, 4:38 pm

Thanks sasha. A fascinating (to me) idea/phenomenon I came across on the road-- oddly enough, first on the printed pages of a book I had with me (McPhee's Basin and Range), then confirmed with one of the locals..

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stilltrucking
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Re: Forgotten Silver Mines ("Mining is Never Dead")

Post by stilltrucking » February 11th, 2018, 9:04 pm

I am so grateful I got to see those forever views, even if it was through the windshield of a truck.

an afternoon in rock time


8)

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mnaz
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Re: Forgotten Silver Mines ("Mining is Never Dead")

Post by mnaz » February 11th, 2018, 11:32 pm

Thanks ST. I think this old mine scavenging thing was more "in play" up to maybe 20-25 + years ago for smaller mines/operators. Not sure if it still goes on. I know that reprocessing tailings at larger abandoned mines has been given serious consideration lately-- which I'm glad to hear. Pollution from these bigger mines really effs up ecosystems.

The idea-- on a small scale-- just fascinated me for some reason...

And yes, I'll never forget the first time I stumbled onto the mammoth open pit complex at Cortez, NV ... Truly staggering...

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