Today, a dispatch from Prospect Mountain, Nevada, 1872. We’ll meet Tone, a miner from China who is digging for his future.
Dear listener,
Have you ever searched for something for so long that the search itself becomes the goal—that the routine you do everyday is suddenly your life’s work? If so, you know how it feels to be a silver miner in the Nevada mountains.
The hunt for silver or gold could sometimes take years in tough, desolate spots. A big find could draw hundreds of miners to a too cold, too hot, too remote mountain top within days. Sometimes a find lasted months, sometimes it lasted years, but it almost always ended without warning, as the mountains simply stopped giving up their treasure and everyone packed up except for a few clinging onto sunken fortunes.
In Eureka, everyone is waiting for the biggest find yet. Many are convinced that if it is going to happen anywhere, it will be on Prospect Mountain. After all, this is the region where it all started, some eight years earlier, when five miners trekked about 80 miles from the nearest town and started digging. They hit a mix of silver and lead, which was enough to attract the attention of investors from New York.1
Before the mines took off, wrote one business owner, “there were not 100 white inhabitants in the county.” Within three years, there are now about 4,000 people living and drinking and doing business in Eureka, the town closest to Prospect Mountain.2
You can feel the impact of all those people, all those shovels and wagons, all those unrealized dreams on the mountain itself. It teems with tunnels from top to bottom, some just a few feet deep, others burrowing hundreds of feet into the fabric of the earth. Eventually the miners hit rock that is older than dinosaurs, older than fish, older than plants that live on land. The closest living neighbors to that rock still on this earth are jellyfish, sea sponges, and algae.3
Hidden amid all this geology are bands of ore, and that’s what the miners are after. Ore is basically a catch-all name for rocks with potential. When melted down or broken up, they can reveal valuable stuff that people will buy—in Eureka, their ores are usually full of lead, silver, and gold.4
Mining, as it turns out, is something nearly everyone does, everywhere in the world. And so miners turn up on Prospect Mountain from all sorts of different places. The man who operates the first smelter in town—basically a giant furnace that melts the valuable stuff out of the rock—is half Welsh, half Mexican. Everyone talks about the skill of the miners from Cornwall, in England, while the German engineers bring their rational science and education. There are miners from all over the US, some with mining experience but many looking for a fresh start after a long war.5 And there’s even the sad story of a miner all the way from Costa Rica who takes his own life in the Eureka jail.6
And then there is Tone, one of a small band of Chinese miners who work Prospect Mountain.
Though they rarely get any credit from the white miners, the Chinese know their way around these mountains. Many of them had started out working in the gold rush of California twenty years earlier, and they special order a lot of their equipment from China. This makes them work smarter, lighter, and cheaper than many of their white counterparts, carrying their gear on poles on their shoulders and making sure nothing goes to waste.7
Tone himself has been up on Prospect Mountain for a few years now. We don’t know how much he earns or if he’s ever had a big strike, but we know that most Chinese miners make about half as much as white miners when they work for mining companies.8 This makes for a tricky situation—the Chinese have to work longer to earn more but are also willing to work for wages that white miners wouldn’t take. This leaves the white miners to badmouth them as cheap labor out to steal jobs. Chinese like Tone usually can’t join a union, and they often have only other Chinese men to live and work alongside.9
And even there, among his fellow Chinese miners, Tone might feel isolated. If he’s lucky, he works alongside miners from his province or region in China, so they can understand each other’s dialect and talk, gossip, and joke about their new home. But China has almost 20 provinces, and even within those, dialects and customs and clothing and style can swing wildly. There’s a good chance that Tone can’t understand the men he digs with, or that they talk to each other with hand signals and the few phrases they have in common.10
Up on the mountain, success makes people equal. Where you come from, how you speak, and what you believe all fall away when you hit an ore strike. Then, you have leverage—to negotiate, to drive a harder bargain, to take over your neighbor’s operation. On Prospect Mountain, it’s capital that always wins.
But Tone has been around long enough to know that success is hard earned here. You can die so many different ways on the mountain—crushed, caved in, blown up, or swept away by a flood, a landslide, or a snowstorm. Or maybe worst of all, you can lose all your money before your time is up, and have to slink out of town or sell all your belongings in a sheriff’s auction.
Success is possible, though. On the west side of the mountain, there are a few miners who have been in this game a long time, and one of them is the tough backcountry miner Maurice Hartnett of Ireland.
If Tone is looking for a role model, he could do worse than Hartnett. The locals remember Hartnett from the earliest days on the mountain, when he and his mining pals dug out the Manhattan mine. Then, they slept at the mine every night, guns at their side, in case someone tried to seize their claim.11
Things have settled a little since then, and Hartnett is now a popular hired hand for mining operations that need someone who knows how and where to dig in these mountains. But he’s also working and buying up his own mining claims on the side. And that multiplies his chances for hitting a profitable vein of ore.12
These are lessons that Tone is learning, too, and trying to follow. In the meantime, day after day, both men dig into the earth, praying for a find. Soon, one of the men’s luck will change.
If you’d like to learn more about the experiences of Chinese miners in Nevada, check out the excellent In Pursuit of Gold by Sue Fawn Chung.
Works Cited:
1. Lambert Molinelli, Eureka and its Resources (San Francisco: H. Keller & Co, 1879), pg. 12
2. Ibid.
3. Thomas B. Nolan, “The Eureka Mining District,” Geological Survey Professional Paper #406, 1962
4. Lambert Molinelli, Eureka and its Resources
5. Wilbur Shepperson, “Immigrant Themes in Nevada Newspapers,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Summer 1969
6. Eureka Daily Sentinel, November 15, 1872
7. Sue Fawn Chung, In Pursuit of Gold: Chinese American Miners and Merchants in the American West (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014)
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 7, 1885
12. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 10, 1878