Gold Hill Daily News

THE COMSTOCK MINES.
San Francisco's Backbone—The Source of Her Prosperity—A Volcano of Silver—Mysteries of Bullion Production and Extraction. An Engineering Wonder.
The San Francisco Alta of October 22d. contains a well written and interesting article, evidently from the pen of John S. Hittell, a member of its editorial staff. descriptive of his recent visit to this section. The following extracts will be read with interest:
Notwithstanding the unprofitable character of most of the workings, there is great activity along the Comstock for a distance of more than two miles, and a district a mile and a half long and a half a mile wide may challenge any other equal area on the globe for a comparison of labor, enterprise and production. There has been much declamation about the evil of speculation in the shares of mining incorporations by the people of California, but the man must be blind who does not see that the Comstock Lode is the backbone of San Francisco's prosperity. Many of our finest buildings are built, metaphorically speaking, from lowest foundation to the highest chimney top. with silver bricks, and the business men know from what mine the materials were obtained in two dozen prominent cases.
The decrease in the yield of the gold placers began in 1853, and was accompanied by a decline in the business and in the real estate values of the metropolis of the State, and there was no substantial and secure revival till the discovery of the wonderful treasures buried in the eastern flanks of Mount Davidson. While the Comstock became a volcano of silver to the commerce of the world, its whole current had to pass through and enrich San Francisco, which had the enterprise, intelligence, and good fortune to get complete control of the hidden wealth. but not without paying largely and boldly in advance for the property that capitalists elsewhere would probably have been afraid to touch, even if they had had the opportunity, unless they had possessed more experience than the San Franciscans had when they started in. Never were bold industrial adventurers rewarded with more magnificent success, as a class, than those Americans who left the Atlantic slope for the gold mines of the Sacramento Valley in 1849, and the Californians who went to Washoe about ten years later. The Comstock lode, thus secured, became a nursery of millionaires for San Francisco, and promises to keep that position for a long time to come.
The yield of the Comstock trade is about $1,000,000 a month, and as nearly half the value is gold, the weight for each working day may be two tons and a half. worth nearly $150,000. To obtain that. about 2,500 tons of ore must be hauled to the surface—much of it from a depth of more than a quarter of a mile—crushed to fine powder, mixed in a state of thin mud with quicksilver, and driven by strong machinery through pans and settlers until the precious metals are extracted so far as possible, though more than $1,000,000 is lost every month by the incompleteness of the chemical and mechanical processes.
The timbers used to put under ground. and prevent the caving in of the mines, cost $17,000 a day; the fire wood, mostly consumed by the steam engines, $6,000; the candles burned in the mines, $10,000; the quicksilver lost, $2,000; and the ice needed to cool the water for drinking in the hot lower levels, $1,000 a day. The Consolidated Virginia alone uses ice daily worth $180.
The great Comstock community, including Virginia, Gold Hill and vicinity, is well supplied with pure mountain water from the main Sierra Nevada range, the water being conducted at one point through an iron pipe that dips down a quarter of a mile on one mountain side, and then rises nearly as high on another. This inverted syphon has no equal elsewhere, and is one of the engineering wonders of the world.