Lyon County times. [volume] (Silver City, Nev.) 1874-1907, 1906-12-29
AND M|NERAL0GY OF
YER|NGT0N COPPER DEPOSITS

song of countless orioles and meadow
larks that futter and float as they sing,
through the blue, fragrant air-musical
also, drowsily musical in the good old
summer time, with the droning hum of
busy bees getting in their work of be-
nignant assimilation on the alfalfa
blossoms and the bloom of wi1lowy
growths that line the rivers banks-an
amazing scene of rural lovliness to come
upon in the midst of the wind-haunted
deserts and the scoriac desolations of
Nevada one straight, broad highway
running up the valley, pillared with
wide-spreading, majestic alarnos (other-
wise called cottonwoods) that fan the
drowsy airs of summer with their plumy
branches where the song birds nest and
brood and rear their generations of
feathered papooses-a truly surprising
scene to come upon in Nevada-the only
camp in the desert state (though there
are many such in California; where an
honest Christian miner toiling sweat
fully at his work can hit the drill with
one hand and pick peaches from the
bough with the other-if his arms are
long enough.
That impressive, shady highway is
macadamized with azurite and malachite
(the blue and green carbonates of cop
peri of low grade but brilliant color,
quarried from the edge of the mountain
to the westward, where the great mines
lie They will be digging it all up some
day to sell to the reduction works.
1t is the Yerington country, under
.f,.I Il
Valley, that have been describing, not
the town. That's a hoss of another
color. 1t is Just an ordinary squalid
little Nevada jay town that started out
40 years ago with an ardent ambition to
be bright and beautiful, but after a
while got discouraged and quit trying;
and it has stood there all these years
like hide-bound heifer sullenly hump
ing herself against blizzard, hopeless
and effortless, in the midst of all that
dreamful, tuneful, fragrant, rural lowell
ness. The town is mainly double row
of cheap shacks with here and there a
substantial stone building along that
broad highway columned with snoble
trees and paved with such stuff as else
where is wrought into the cheaper
grades of jewelry-but a prosperous
place withal and alive with business
these DAYS, having an extensive ranch
and mine trade, bank and a news
paper, aud sure of population of Is, 900
to 20, 900 within the next few years, now
that its vast deposits of copper are to be
energetically developed.
All this preliminary description may
seem to the unreflecting wide of the
geology and mineralogy of the Yering
ton copper deposit, but not SO at all. 1t
has direct and influential bearing on
the cost of producing the copper.
And that is the very crux of the prob
lem always.
To say that all the meat, bread, butter,
honey, sugar, milk, fruit, vegetables,
horse power and horse fodder needed by
mining camp of 10000 people-as
seems sure to be assembled at Yerington
within few years-can be produced in
abundance within three miles of the
mines, is to show that one of the great
est items of cost human labor will
never be excessively high.
To show that it possesses large and
constant river of pure mountain water,
capable of supplying unlimited water for
treatment processes, and unlimited cleo
trical power, is to indicate that two other
important items of cost can never be ex-
cessively high.
The value of a copper mine depends
upon the cost of laying down the fin
ished product, the refined copper in
the city of New York The eminent ex-
pert, j. Park Claiming, estimated that
the copper mines of Ely can put their
product in New York at about half a
cent pound less than the great Calumet
and Helca of Michigan. And knowing
both Ely and Yerington probably better
than any other man in the country, l
am confident that Yerington, operated
on the same gigantic scale, can place its