1897 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



299 



knows any thing about it positively. While 

 they are pouring out the melted metal you will 

 notice a man with a little ladlt^ about the size 

 of a teacup. He keeps dipping this in for a 

 sample, as it were. These samples are given to 

 the assayer, so that the company has at least 

 some knowledge of the value of the metal they 

 are mining and shipping every day. The works 

 run day and night, week days and Sundays as 

 well. There is no stopping.* 



After we were tired of exploring this wonder- 

 ful industrial plant away off in the wilderness 

 of Arizona, we rested from our labors (climbing 

 up and down), and waited until next morning. 



At this point I was reluctantly obliged to bid 

 adieu to my good friends Elvey and Carey, who 

 had been "with me so long. They said that, 

 with the bad cold I had, I must not undertake 

 to go home by the route we came; and it is 

 well I did not, for they encountered some storms 

 on the way that would have been at least a 

 little trying to a " tenderfoot." My good friend 

 Jordan got off from duty during the afternoon, 

 and we had a rare time in exploring by daylight. 



I said the ores were taken from the mine and 

 dumped into the furnace. This is true of only 

 a part of them. The greater part are run out of 

 the drifts on cars along the track that runs 

 around the mountain-side on a dead level. All 

 along this track are heaps of roasting ore. 

 The ore (sulphuret of copper) is piled up with 

 alternate layers of wood. When the wood is 

 igni ted the ore contains sulphur enough to keep 

 it burning. In fact, sometimes the sulphur 

 runs out and runs around loose. 1 suppose 

 there is not demand enough for it at the Jerome 

 mines so that it would pay for refining and 

 sending to market. This roasting process is in 

 order to get rid of the sulphur and other waste 

 products if I am correct. The fumes of the 

 burning sulphur are so strong that no plant, 

 tree, shrub, or bush can live near or around the 

 town of Jerome. Mrs. .lordan told me that 

 some of the women brought house-plants, and 

 kept them alive for a certain length of time; 

 but when the wind changed so as to blow the 

 sulphur fumes the right way, every thing in the 

 way of vegetable life gave it up. The first in- 

 quiry a stranger makes is whether or not these 

 sulphur fumes are unwholesome. Well, the 

 people claim they are not. How nice it is that 

 folks should be so loyal to tlieir own town and 

 climate! My companion told me that people 

 suffering from catarrh or throat troubles were 

 found to be greatly benefited. I remembered 

 then that our good friend E. T. Abbott, of St. 

 Joseph, Mo., when talking at farmers' insti- 

 tutes, recommended sulphur fumes for curing 

 poultry of the roup. I heard him remark that, 

 if you had a very bad cold, nothing would give 

 you relief quicker than to inhale the fumes of 

 the sulphurous acid while you are treating the 

 poultry. I remembered, too, I took particular 

 pains to see what effect it had on my cold, and 

 I was obliged to confess that it gave at least 

 temporary relief. I am inclined to think the 

 fumes of burning sulphur are not necessarily 

 deleterious. 



Well, one of the most wonderful things about 

 the Jerome gold-mine is a spring of water that 

 runs out in considerable quantity from the 

 lower drift. The water runs out beside the 



*The machinery and fixtures of this mine are 

 said to have cost about a million of dollars; and the 

 company claims that there is ore enoug'h now in 

 sight to keep them at work for the next fifty years. 

 An English syndicate that talked about buying 

 them out was told that no proposition could be con- 

 sidered short of about sixty millions of dollars. I 

 shall have more to tell you about this copper-mine 

 in our next issue. 



track. It is carried into a wooden flume some- 

 thing like the irrigating-flumes; and this wood- 

 en flume runs along the mouniain side pretty 

 nearly level for a mile or moie. The flume is 

 perhaps ten or twelve feet wide, and the water 

 in the bottom is several inches deep. Now, on 

 the bottom of this flume they have laid all 

 sorts of pieces of refuse old iron. The water 

 from this spring from the mine is considerably 

 impregnated with sulphate of copper, or blue 

 vitriol, as it is generally called. Perhaps many 

 of our friends have observed that, when they 

 dip a bright piece of iron or steel— say a knife- 

 blade— into a solution of sulphate of copper, 

 the blade soon becomes coated or plated with 

 copper. When you are spraying fruit-trees 

 with the copper sulphate, you may have notic- 

 ed this. The explanation is that the sulphuric 

 acid has a stronger liking for the iron than for 

 the copper; so it lets go of the copper, as it 

 were, and grasps hold of the iron, which is an 

 easy solvent. The copper must go somewhere, 

 so i t is left on the surface of the iron. Cast-iron 

 articles are often copper-coated by this means. 

 Well, at this Jerome mine the copper is held in 

 solution in such quantities that the iron causes 

 it to drop the copper, not only all over the iron 

 articles, but even on the bottom of the wooden 

 flume. Every little while this loose mass of 

 copper dust or mud is shoveled up. When they 

 get a carload or more it is melted down, and it 

 gives ingots of almost pure copper. Strangely 

 enough— at least it was strange to me— this 

 precipitated copper aJso contains a percentage 

 of gold; and my friends told me that a sharp 

 Yankee down by the Verde River had com- 

 menced speculating on his own hook by precip- 

 itating an additional quantity of copper from 

 Copper Creek after the Jerome mine had got 

 through with it and let it go to waste. Before 

 the mine was ever discovered, people knew this 

 spring and called it Bitter Spring because no 

 man or animal could drink the water. Now 

 this spring yields a mint of money when you 

 get it out, by chunks of old iron, in the way I 

 have described. Of course, there is a great deal 

 I did not understand at all about the Jerome 

 mine; and even Mr. Jordan himself could not 

 enlighten me on all points. For instance, when 

 I was in the jewelry business (years ago) I 

 learned chemistry enough so that I could ex- 

 tract all the gold, by means of acids, from old 

 jewelry of any sort. This was done by dissolv- 

 ing out the cheaper and baser metals by acids, 

 and recovering the gold by quicksilver. Now, 

 then, if 100 II'S. of copper contains one ounce of 

 gold, how do the folks at the mint.or other metal- 

 lurgists, get this one ounce of gold and save the 

 copper also? Surely they do not dissolve this 

 quantity of copper in acids, then precipitate it 

 and restore it to its metallic state. If I under- 

 stand chemistry, this would cost ever so much 

 more than the copper is worth. Can any of our 

 readers enlighten us on this point? 



A word about gold-mining. Almost every 

 man in Arizona (and perhaps a good many 

 women and children besides) has been more 

 or less affected at different periods in his 

 life by the gold-mining mania. People are 

 prospecting everywhere, sending samples to the 

 assay, rs, taking out claims, and selling their 

 chances on said claims. One night by the 

 camp-fire an old miner told me that it was his 

 opinion there were not more than a dozen gold- 

 mines in the whole of Arizona that were really 

 paying expenses. He said, furthermore, that 

 not one of a thousand of the prospecting miners 

 succeeds in making even day's wages, counting 

 all the time they spend at the business. At one 

 point in our travels Mr. Elvey pointed out a 

 mountain-side where he said he had on a for- 



