Lead Smelting and Refining, With Some Notes on Lead Mining
Science
Lead Smelting and Refining, With Some Notes on Lead Mining
Lead -- Metallurgy; Lead mines and mining
In the rock quarries of St. Louis, immediately under the lower coal
measures, fine specimens of millerite of world-wide reputation occur
as filiform linings of vugs in this sub-Carboniferous limestone. These
vugs occur in a solid, unaltered rock which gives no clue to the
existence of the vug or cavity until it is accidentally broken. The
vugs are lined with crystals of pink dolomite, calcite and millerite,
with occasionally barite, selenite, galena and blende. They occur
in a well-defined horizon about 5 ft. thick, and the vugs in the
limestone above and below this millerite bed contain only calcite,
or less frequently dolomite. Yet this sub-Carboniferous formation in
southwestern Missouri, about Joplin, carries the innumerable pockets
and sheets of lead and zinc that have made that district the most
important zinc producer in the world. While faulting and limited
folding occur in eastern and central Missouri to fully as great an
extent as in St. François county or the Joplin district, thus far no
mineral concentration into workable orebodies has been found in this
formation, except in the Joplin area.
The next important series of limestones that make up most of the
central portion of Missouri are of Silurian age, and in them lead and
zinc are liberally scattered over large areas. In the residual surface
clays left by dissolution of the limestone, the farmers frequently make
low wages by gophering after the liberated lead, and the aggregate
of these numerous though insignificant gopher-holes makes quite a
respectable total. But they are only worked when there is nothing else
to do on the farm, as with rare exceptions they do not yield living
wages, and the financial results of mining the rock are even less
satisfactory. Yet a few small orebodies have been found that were
undoubtedly formed by local leaching and re-precipitation of this
diffused lead and zinc. Such orebodies occur in openings or caves,
with well crystallized forms of galena and blende, and invariably
associated with crystallized “tiff” or barite. I am not aware of any
of these pockets or secondary enrichments having produced as much as
2000 tons of lead or zinc, and very few have produced as much as 500
tons, although one of these pockets was recently exploited with heroic
quantities of printer’s ink as the largest lead mine in the world. Yet
there are large areas in which it is almost impossible to put down a
drill-hole without finding “shines” or trifling amounts of lead or
zinc. That these central Missouri lead deposits are due to lateral
secretion there seems little doubt, and it is possible that larger
pockets may yet be found where more favorable conditions occur.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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