The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1896-09-13
THE MINING OF SILVER
THE ONTARIO MINE HAS PAID IT'S
OWNERS MORE THAN 5000, 900.
Fifty Miles of Underground Tunnels
Dangers of Dynamite, and other
CuriOsities Below Ground,
copyrighted. 1885, by Frank G. Carpenter,

PARkE CITY, Utah, Sept. 10.-I have
come to Parke City to tell you how silver
is got out of the eartn. This is of
the worlds great treasure vaults of the
white metal. 1t is the site of the Ontario
mine, which is the biggest silver mine in the
United States, and which is said to be the
biggest working mine in the world to-day.
The Ontario has already produceds more
than $40, $1,000 worth of silver, and it has
paid its owners more than SIS, 900 in
dividends. For the past two years it has
been putting in very expensive improve
ments, and, owing to this and to the de-
monetzation of silver the dividends have
dropped, but l told that it will pay
more than 10 per cent. this year, and its
silver deposits are still of incalculable
value. Connected with the Ontario is the
great DAILY mine, whose dividends have
amounted to between two and three mil
lion dollars, and near it is the Daly-West
mine, now just about ready for working,
and other mines which have large deposits
Of silver.
You reach Parke City by branch of the
Union Pacific. 1t is situated in the Wa
satch mountains, just about mile and
half above the sea, and within thirty-two
miles of Salt Lake City. The town has
aboue 1000 inhabitants. 1t lies along both
sides of a gulch, and it's main street is
filled with dust in the summer and mud
in the winter. All around it are silver
mines. and the town lives upon silver. In
its palmiest days its pay roll has amounted
to millions o year, and the Ontario mine
alone pays out now more than 100000 an
nually in wages. The Ontario property is
situated just back of the city. When the
mine was discovered it's surroundings We're
those of bleak, bare and desolate hills.
Now immense frame buildings, with steam
pipes and smoke stacks, are seen scattered
over the mountains, and big four-horse
wagons travel from daylight until dark up
and down the valley with loads of silver
ORE In going up to the mine you pass
here and there enormous bins or square
buildings, into which the ore, dragged from
the bowels of the earth, is emptied, pre-
paratory to loading it the wagon.
These buildings have many mouths or
holes at the bottom, so arranged that, by
the lifting of a board, they be opened
and the will fall down into the wagons
the road below. You pass boarding
houses devoted to the feeding of the army
of men in the mines, and go until you
reach the big, barn-hke shaft houses. They
seem to be rudely built, and you would
never imagine that they represent a
product of $50, 900. They contain, how
ever. little more than the hosting
chinery. The real work shops of any mine
are underground.
HOW A GREAT MINE LOOKS.
But let me give you in simple words
some idea of this enormous silver 1nine.
When discovered it was, you know, merely
mountain of rock, through one part of
which ran a little streak which the pros
pectors thought carried ore values. They
broke some of the rock in pieces. 1t looked
not much different from any piece of
broken granite which you might pick up on
the roadside but to their experienced eyes
it contained silver. They laid out their claim
and dug a shaft or We'll. They found the
prospects grow richer they went down
ward and at last the hole was sold to Sem
ator Hearst, Lloyd Tevis, J. b. Haggin and
other millionaires, who put in expensive
machinery to get the out. This was al
most twenty years ago, and it has in that
time produced the enormous amount of
silver above stated. These men took the
well, or hole, made by the prospectors and
they have sunk it more than 1850 feet
down through that mountain of rock. They
have made of it what is known as the
shaft, which is little more than a hole
walled with boards five feet wide and four
teen feet long, running for more than a
quarter of mile straight down into the
earth This shaft was sunk just beside the
vein Of silver rock, and at intervals of one
hundred feet on the way downward they
have run off tunnels into the vein and have
taken out the ore. Each of these tunnels is
from four to six feet wide and from six to
nine feet high 1t is walled and rooted with
timbers. Logs as big around as your waist
are braced by the walls against the roof
TO ha irt nd
down upon you as you go through them
From these tunnels the miners have worked
upward along the vein, digging out great |
caves and rooms in the mountain all of |
which have to be walled and rooted with |
logs and SO braced that there may be no |
danger of their caving in. A good idea of |
a silver mine might be got from a big |
New York apartment house Take the On |
tario, for instance. The mine has fifteen |
stories, each one hundred feet in height. |
and the shaft contains an elevator which an |
immense steam engine raises and lowers |
carrying the ore and the men from story |
to story. At each story the tunnels run |
off through the vein and connect with the |
rooms Slopes, as they are called by the |
miners. The tunnels are the passa geways |
or halls of the flats and the Slopes IRA |
rooms, dug upward and outward in taking |
out the ore. Edcn tunnel mas a little rail- |
road running through it, and there are fifty |
miles of such tunnels in the Ontario and the |
Daily. The cars of the railroad are of iron.
They are always loaded by gravity. In or !
der that the miners may not have the trou- |
BILE of lifting the ore. from the tunnel of
each of these stories to the tunnel below it
is cut great pipe or chute at such an
angle that the ore being shoveled into it will
roll down and fail into the car placed al
its mouth at the other end one hundred
feet below.
GOING DOWN INTO THE ONTARIO
But the MANAGER is ready for our visit
to The mine. We stand at the entrance of |
the shaft and watch the elevator coming |
up 1t is raised by means of a cable made |
az wire ropes each as thick as your thumb
Which runs over pully forty feet above |
the floor, and thence straight down into |
the shaft. The cable looks strong. and |
we ask the engineer how much the rope |
will hold without breaking. We are told |
that it easily support eighty TONS |
look at the manager and the two miners |
who are to so with None of them |
weigh more than 200 pounds. and as nv /
weight is about 10O l feel comparatively |
safe. Now the elevator is at the top. Two |
cars, each holding 1900 pounds of rock, are /
wheeled off and we motioned to take