Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/779

Rh The progress of the work was dramatic. The face of the rock "showed a temperature of 114°." Two or three hours was all that the strongest men could work. Endurance was strained to its utmost capacity. Man after man dropped down on the rocky floor and was carried to the surface babbling and incoherent. This strenuous toil continued till July 8, 1878, when Sutro himself, half naked like one of his miners, labored at the front, and finally crawled through a jagged hole into the Savage drift, "overcome with excitement," as one of the newspaper accounts



said. What had been contemptuously called "Sutro's coyote hole" thus became an accomplished fact.

Through such passionate conflicts as those described the heroes of the Comstock continued making workshops, mills, machinery; building two marvelously picturesque towns along the lode, and hiding underneath the greater creation—the real City of the Comstock. Here, in deeps below deeps, are three-mile streets, mysterious labyrinths, water torrents, burning-heats, perils numberless, legends that might serve to fill a volume. Time was when twelve thousand miners toiled in these vast galleries, swinging picks, hammering drills, raising timbers to place, climbing to the stopesslopes [sic], breaking down the ore, pushing lines of loaded cars to stations on the hoisting shafts. They were superb athletes, with muscles evenly developed by their labor. A few of them remain, scraping out the ore left in older workings and maintaining to the fullest degree the fine old-time pride of their craft. For sixteen years, however, the mines have been