Pre-U. S. A.
Sirs: Almaden mine at which you glance in this week's issue [TIME, April 22, p. 80] & which you announce as soon to run again is running full tilt now & has been for some months.
Well, maybe not full tilt, but a score or more "hard-rock" miners are gouging, chipping, blasting at those cinnabar-streaked granite tunnel walls, bringing out sacks of ore every day, to be "cooked" in the retorts there on the steep shank of the mountain. A week or so ago "Hap" brought out one rock that was might' nigh pure cinnabar. It weighed 130 Ib. He brought it through seven miles of tunnel from the very gizzard of the ancient mine.
Bobby [my son] & I, on a two-year walking tour of the Americas, went through that mine two weeks ago, by the grace of a friendly, tipsy miner. . . .
"The Indians used to come here for their war paint," he told us. "Then the Spaniards mined it. With slave labor, too. There's signs of it. Must be 300 years old if it's a day.
You'll see timbers in here put in long before this was the U. S. A.!" We walked, waded, crawled & scrambled & slid through the endless tunnels—"there's 500 miles of tunnel in this mountain," the boys said—down 200 feet of sharply sloping rock piles, peered down fearful shafts, heard about the mine's famous ghosts and were mighty glad to get out of there, I tell you.
We saw them "cooking" the rocks, drops of mercury rolling out the long pipes. One man's take for one day cooked him a flask of "quick" & he worked no more that week, I bet.
For they're all out-of-work miners working Almaden on their own time, faithfully sending, each man, a percentage of all he makes to the estate. Each pays a percentage to the silent man who owns the retorts, gives another percentage (50) to the cooker who retorts all the ore, keeps each man's cook separate, looks after it for him. . . . How gay they all are! . . . "We quit when we're tired or when we've made enough for that week," he said. There was an air of comradery, merriment, & rough heartiness that almost made a hard-rock miner of my young son. . . .
When big industry gets hold of it, there'll be more ore taken out faster, I have no doubt.
And on top of the fabulous old mine, the flowers will still be growing in sheets of gold & blue & pink—petal to petal, as John Muir once said.
JUNE BURN Bakersfield, Calif.
P.S. The 130-lb. "nugget" of cinnabar & the four sacks which yielded a flask of "quick" were extremely unusual. Most of the men do well to make laborer's wages. Many do better occasionally. Sometimes they find such rich ore that to drill the highly volatile stuff is dangerous: the fumes. But again some miner will pick away for days in the all but airless devil's pocket & have hardly 50 pounds of rich ore to show for it.
Anesthesia