Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/776

752 a pin point of ore was seen. For hundreds of feet the miners drifted beside this slender clew. Fair became ill, and the workmen lost it, but on his return he picked up the ore thread. They were now a hundred feet in Consolidated Virginia ground, and the price of the stock began to break, when suddenly the stringer widened to a vein of sixty-dollar ore. In October, on the 1,167 foot level, the top of the "Big Bonanza" was uncovered; the drift went 148 feet through solid ore 54 feet wide. The great kidney-shaped mass extended downward below the 1,500-foot level, and widened to 150 feet and even to 300 feet. The ore grew



richer and richer as the men advanced. Nothing like it had ever been known in the history of mining.

Here, in the heart of the Comstock, hundreds of naked miners were soon hewing down the ore. On all sides of a pyramidal mass of timber which grew larger every minute were twinkling stars of lamps. Everything in the bonanza was sent to the mill as fast as it was quarried out, and some of it was so rich that waste rock was added to aid amalgamation. An average block of ore three feet square contained from two hundred to five hundred dollars in silver and gold. The richest spot was near the California line, where clusters of malleable silver in coiled wires occurred beside shining stephanite, pale-green and steel-gray chlorides, and lustrous black silver glance, besides masses of the most exquisite crystals of every color known to the mineralogist.

In six years Consolidated Virginia milled 682,355 tons of ore, producing $60,732,882; California, in four years, milled 480,043 tons, producing $43,727,837. The total yield of the Big Bonanza had been nearly $105,000,000, and more than $73,000,000 had been