Mining pickaxe

“ The most remarkable advance, which in recent, or perhaps in any, times has been made in the practice of mining consists in the substitution of machine for hand labour in rock boring. The importance of this change is obvious, and very great. Not only is the miner relieved thereby of the labour of boring, but the speed with which the shot-holes may be bored is increased a hundredfold. This gain of speed offers many practical advantages. The ability to sink a shaft or to drive a heading rapidly may ensure the success of an undertaking, and save indirectly the expenditure of large sums of money ”

“ The want of capitalists in the mine country, and of practical skill in the boring, blasting, sinking shafts and galleries, oppose obstacles to the [Pg 160] successful progress of mining. There is but one regular hearth-furnace for smelting in the whole district; and that is on the modern plan of English furnaces. There are not over four or five regular shafts in about forty mines; there is not an engine, either by horse, steam, or water power, for removing water from the mines, several of which have been abandoned on this account, with rich prospects of ore in view. ”

“ If you intend to dig, have one or two pickaxes and crowbars made under your own supervision; exported tools are too often made of very inferior iron, and it is money well spent to pay something over the market price for a pickaxe that won’t turn its nose up at you the instant you drive it into the hill-side.
After one of the San Francisco fires an intelligent blacksmith bought up a quantity of “burnt-out” gun-barrels ”

“ The trituration is effected by revolving the stone in a large cylinder together with a number of steel balls of various sizes, the attrition of which with the rock quickly grinds it to powder of any required degree of fineness.
More mines have been ruined by bad mill management probably than by bad mining, though every experienced man must have seen in his time many most flagrant instances of bungling in the latter respect. ”

“ In shafts and levels for permanent use iron is an economical substitute. Wherever possible, new methods of mining are being introduced. Thus in the Lake Superior iron regions, the mine development is planned along lines almost unheard of ten years ago. In the first place the gravel which overlies the ore is stripped off, even if it is fifty feet thick. This is done with steam shovels, which load the gravel upon cars. These are then pulled away by one locomotive while a second places new “empties” in position to be filled. One shovel will load from 150 to 175 cars a day ”

“ Passing through the entrance, the mine gradually widens underground to a depth of 1062 feet. The chief mass of ore is 600 feet broad on its upper surface, greatly narrowing as it descends to a depth of 1200 feet. Round it are other similar deposits. As the copper pyrites are deposited generally on the circumference of the outer shell of these masses, which are of a very irregular outline, the mining operations are carried on in a perfect labyrinth of winding passages and galleries, situated at various depths, and supported either by pillars or walls. ”

“ If he takes any thing in that line, let it be the best mining pick and spade he can{181} find, with a stout sheath-knife, and a horn for crevassing. The “cradle” is found any where in the settlements or in the mines. If it is intended to engage in the quartz-crushing operations, the most simple machinery is the best. The very complicated and expensive machinery which has, in several instances, been taken to the mines, has been useless. The least breakage will delay the whole work for months, till it is replaced from the States.
By all means avoid companies which are got up at home for mining. ”

“ Steam shovels, weighing from sixty to seventy-five tons each, do the work. Like a great hand one of these shovels dips down into the soft mass of ore, buries its great dipper until it holds from four to eight tons, and then, groaning and rumbling, slowly lifts its burden aloft, swings it over a car, and the actual work of mining is done. A thousand times a day it will repeat this operation, lifting from three thousand to eight thousand tons of ore. ”

“ Rock and earth on the one hand, and metal and ore on the other, are filled into buckets separately and drawn up to the open air or to the nearest tunnel. If the shaft is not deep, the buckets are drawn up by a machine turned by men; if it is deep, they are drawn by machines turned by horses.
It often happens that a rush of water or sometimes stagnant air hinders the mining; for this reason miners pay the greatest attention to these matters, just as much as to digging, or they should do so. ”

“ Upon the bed-rock is a deposit, from three to four feet in depth, of gravel and boulders, in which the gold is hidden. This is called by the miners "pay-dirt," and to remove it to the surface and wash it is the end of mining. It is an expensive and laborious process indeed. The water has first to be controlled; and in mines of not too great depth this is done by a drain ditch along the bed-rock, commenced many claims below. In this all the claim-holders are interested, and all contribute their quota of the labor and expense of digging it. ”

“ By far the greater part of the successful mining is still done by antiquated methods which have the advantage that they require little capital for an outfit. A miner's tools consist of a short-handled hoe with which to stir up diamond-bearing gravel in a sluice; a crowbar to pry up stone to lay bare deeper layers or to break down banks of clay or gravel; an iron hook on a pole with which to take diamond bearing gravel from beneath large stones or from cracks otherwise inaccessible ”

“ A complete outfit for boring with the diamond drill includes a steam engine and boiler, diamond crown, lining tubes, rods, and various minor accessories.
Hydraulic mining is the cheapest known method of recovering gold. In four years the North Bloomfield Mining Company of California worked 325,000,000 cubic yards, which yielded only 2.9 cents of gold per cubic yard, and realized some profit. Very poor gravel will pay when the conditions are good. ”

“ Since the first discovery of lead in this Territory, the number of mines has been much increased, and hardly a season passes without some new discovery. Every discovery of importance soon becomes the centre of mining attraction. As the ore is found in the diluvial soil, it is generally exhausted on reaching the solid rock; and after penetrating a considerable area of the surface with any, or but partial success, the locality is abandoned, and a new one sought. As the mines are worked without capital, and the ore is dispersed over a wide area, the number of localities is almost indefinite. ”

“ That ton would have to be ’packed,’ as they say here, eighty miles over the roughest of trails to Cody, and there loaded on cars and sent clear to Omaha, our nearest smelter. And I guess you know more than I do about the costly process of crushing ore and extracting gold from it in a smelter. It’s not like mining for ’pay dirt,’ as the men here call 137 placer mining, where you gather up sand and wash it out yourself and find the particles of gold in the bottom of your pan. This quartz digging is the most expensive kind of mining there is. ”

“ Many gold mines have been abandoned as unprofitable that could have been mined at a profit had their owners been wealthy and enterprising enough to do a great deal of expensive prospecting by diamond drill, cross cuts, drifts and rises. In one instance that came to the writer's knowledge a clever mining engineer cleared nearly $200,000 profit by leasing for a term of years a gold mine that was supposed to be exhausted. A drill hole sunk less than 50 feet below the old workings revealed a pocket of ore in the vein, and paying quartz was found for many hundred feet below. ”

“ Twenty yards from this was a cone of black earth twice the height of a man. This was their pile of pay dirt. For five days now, they had been working on the second 35 mine of the seven. The pay dirt they had struck was not as rich as they hoped to find, but it would repay the labor of sluicing. It was growing richer each hour. They hoped in time to uncover the mother-lode. This would pay for panning and yield a rich reward.
It was placer mining. Beside the mine entrance stood a steam thawer, a coal-heated boiler such as is used for driving a sawmill or grist-mill engine. ”

“ Probably in no other mines in the world does massive machinery play so great a part in mining operations and hand labor so little. Work in the Mesabi Range began in 1892, and the output grew rapidly until 1901, when it amounted to 9,303,541 long tons. The Southern iron region shares with the Northern Appalachian region in the advantage of having coal and limestone, two essentials in the reduction of the ore and found in close proximity to the ore itself. The South has the additional advantage of cheap labor, but it is under the disadvantage of having a limited local market. ”

“ Access to the buried deposits is gained by vertical shafts. Actual mining is now done to a large extent by continuous miners, machines which bore or rip the potash ore from the face and load it into shuttle cars in one continuous operation. The shuttle cars then transport the ore to conveyor belts which move it to the shafts for hoisting. Working conditions and safety are excellent and have led to high productivity from these mines. ”

“ The process of mining coal is a combination of boring and digging. Shafts are sunk, levels are driven, and drains are carried off, by the help of picks or pickaxes, wedges and hammers, the rocks being also sometimes loosened by blasting with gunpowder. In searching for coal, a shaft is sunk through the uppermost soft stratum, and the rock is then bored, by striking it continually with an iron borer terminating in an edge of steel, which is in the mean time turned partly round; and, at proper intervals, a scoop is let down to draw up the loose fragments. ”

“ The industry has also profited by the improved methods adopted to facilitate the transfer of the ore in transit and especially by the use of machinery and the mining operations themselves. Furthermore, in the principal mining range—Mesabi—the ore is sometimes found so near the surface that with the removal of a few feet of earth it is mined by the open-pit method, the ore being scooped by huge steam shovels directly from the pit to the car. ”

“ Even the scoria, or slag from the furnaces, has been found to be good for something, and now it is made into a coarse sort of brick that for certain rough uses is of value. By the way, the shaft of a copper mine, the Red Jacket, has shown itself of use in a manner that no one expected, namely, it helps to prove that the earth turns around. This shaft is the deepest mining shaft in the world, and when you get into the cage, you go down a full mile toward the center of the earth. If you drop any article into the shaft, it always strikes the east side before reaching the bottom. ”

“ Not so with silver and gold mines. They are most unreliable in both quality and quantity. Costly buildings and machinery are often erected to economize the mining of the ore, only to find no mine to operate by the time the buildings are completed and the machinery is working. ”

“ As soon as the mine is blown, the infantry will consolidate their positions on the rims of the craters. Many craters are used to good advantage in the disposal of spoil from near-by mine-shafts. Considerable difficulty is found in obtaining new places in which to dump the spoil, especially on active mining sectors.
Many devices are employed to deceive the enemy when firing. Dummy picks are often suspended in the face of the gallery and operated regularly to imitate picking, etc. ”

“ The pumps had got control of the water, a temporary ventilating circuit had been established in an effort to keep the mine air pure—for the main system had been destroyed by the fall, and the mining gangs were at work, digging away the obstruction and loading with feverish haste.
This was a very different matter from hewing coal, which is always laid out in regular seams and naturally divided by splitting planes. The rock from the strata above had fallen into the galleries at all angles, and was mixed up with the crushed and partly splintered timbers of the roof [Pg 78] and sides. ”

“ These pillars and the back of ore above are then mined in retreating back towards the haulage road. The subdrift system is somewhat cheaper than the top-slice system, the output per man being greater. The bottom-slice caving system of mining begins at the bottom of a hundred-foot block of ground, a floor being excavated under the whole area, leaving pillars of sufficient size to support the ground above. These pillars are then filled with blast holes which are fired simultaneously, permitting the whole block of ground to the level above to drop. ”

“ It not being possible to point out where the ancient river beds lie, smothered as they are by hundreds of feet of overlying drift, lava, and other later deposits, the only feasible plan is a series of boring with the diamond drill.
When gold has been discovered the finder must act with the greatest prudence, for even gold may be bought too dear. The surest test is a mill run, that is passing 10 to 50 tons through all the operations of crushing, milling, roasting, amalgamating, etc., and so ascertaining what returns are likely to be obtainable when the deposit is worked on a commercial scale. ”

“ Dave picked up the pliers and rubbed the rust from them.
“They’re Orientals all right,” he mused. “Pliers got their stamp on ’em. But say! These boys sure had some ideas about mining placer gold. A man could take their machine to Alaska and make a fortune. Let’s have a look.”
“Sure! Sure!” came from a half score of throats. 95
They hurried down the narrow tunnel to find themselves in the mine. Here, as in the cave, they found cubes of pay dirt piled high on every side. At the end of it all was a low square machine with a buzz-saw-like wheel extending from it. ”