Sept. 1, 1S6S.] 



HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



193 



SILVER MINING IN EASTERN NEVADA. 



the last soiree of the 

 President of the Geo- 

 logical Society, I was 

 much struck by au 

 exhibition of choice 

 silver, lead, and cop- 

 per ores which had 

 been brought from 

 Nevada by Colonel Buel, late 

 Commissioner from Eastern 

 Nevada to the Paris Exhi- 

 bition. 



I was induced to pay his 

 agent a visit, and obtained 

 much interesting information. 

 He had on view about two tons 

 of silver and some hundred- 

 weights of copper ore, to the 

 value of £1,000 sterling. The 

 freight of this to England cost £250 sterling. Some 

 of his specimens were magnificent and of large size. 

 Nevada is situated on the western side of the 

 Rocky Mountains, between the Mormon settlement 

 of the Great Salt Lake and California; and was 

 until recently regarded as an unpromising country, 

 but one which those on the land route between the 

 U.S. and California were obliged to traverse. 



The story of the development of Eastern Nevada, 

 all within the last six years, reads like a fairy 

 tale. 



Early in the month of May, 1S62, W. H, Talcott, 

 an attache on the station at Jacob Springs, on the 

 transcontinental stage route, while hauling wood 

 from tbe hillside, discovered a vein of metal bearing 

 quartz, which proved to contain silver. " The 

 ledge " was registered as a mining claim, and 

 named "The Poney," as the discoverer had been 

 formerly a postilion in the poney express. A. few 

 clays after and the Reese River Mining district 

 was formed. A code of laws was adopted, and 

 William Talcott, the discoverer, elected recorder. 

 The Reese River valley is five miles in width, and 

 contains many thousand acres of good agricultural 

 No. 45. 



land. The mountain in which the silver was 

 found received the name of Toiyabe, an Indian 

 name, meaning a range of hills ; these are com- 

 posed of granite and gneiss, generally with quart- 

 zite, limestone, serpentine, and porphyry, containing 

 veins of quartz bearing gold, silver, copper, lead, 

 and antimony. The discovery of silver led to a 

 great influx of population. The site for a large town 

 was surveyed, now called Austin, in north latitude 

 39° 29" and 30'", and 117° west longitude from 

 Greenwich. Eive years after Austin was an incor- 

 porated city, with its mayor, aldermen, police, city 

 hall, daily newspaper, banks, churches, schools, 

 lecture-rooms, comfortable private dwellings with 

 gas and water laid on in every house, which the 

 electric telegraph connects with all parts of the 

 world. And yet in all but the most recent maps 

 this country is marked unexplored. 



Professor Silliman, of Yale College, after a careful 

 examination of the region, considered that the 

 abundant stores of wealth buried in the surrounding 

 hills, the almost infinite number of veins of silver, 

 salt, sulphur, iron, and copper, give promise of ex- 

 traordinary prosperity to the country, which only 

 requires labour and capital to become in a few 

 years one of the wealthiest in the world. The 

 journey from San Francisco to Austin is 473 miles ; 

 it occupies four days, and costs fifty dollars. Prom 

 the east, the traveller leaves the Missouri river by 

 the Pacific Railway, goes through the Bridger Pass 

 of the Rocky Mountains, thence to Salt Lake, to 

 Austin, distant ten days' journey — a route which 

 great bodies of emigrants annually pursue. In a 

 couple of years' time the whole journey will be 

 performed in a few days by rail. 



The specimens I have from Nevada consist of a 

 quartz, intermixed with a large quantity of home 

 silver, the home silber of the Germans. It is a 

 chloride of silver, and rich specimens are from the 

 Transylvania mine, Belmont Company, and assay to 

 £559 a ton. This wonderfully rich ore is widely 

 distributed and abundant. The ruby silver ore, 

 which I also have, is a compound of sulphuret of 



