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
When the lateral secretion theory is applied to the disseminated
deposits of southeastern Missouri, we are confronted by enormous bodies
of ore, absence of barite, non-crystallized condition of the galena
except in local, small, evidently secondary deposits, and well-defined
courses for the main and cross-runs of ore. The Bonne Terre orebody,
which has been worked longest and most energetically, has attained a
length of nearly 9000 ft., with a production of about 350,000 tons
or $30,000,000 of lead, and is far from being exhausted. Orebodies
recently opened are quite as promising. The country rock is not as
broken nor as open as in central Missouri, and is therefore much less
favorable for the lateral circulation of mineral waters, yet the
orebodies vastly exceed those of the central region.
Further, the Bonne Terre formation is heavily intercalated with thick
sheets of shale that would hinder overlying waters from reaching the
base of the ore-horizon, where most of the ore occurs, so that the
leachable area would be confined to a very limited vertical range,
or to but little greater thickness than the 100 ft. or so in which
most of the orebodies occur. While I have always felt that such large
bodies, showing relatively rapid precipitation of the lead, could not
be satisfactorily explained except as having a deep-seated origin,
the fact that the disseminated ore is practically non-argentiferous,
or at least carries only one to three ounces per ton, has been a
formidable obstacle. For the lead in the small fissure-veins that
occasionally occur in the adjacent granite has always been reported
as argentiferous. Thus the Einstein silver mine, near Fredericktown,
worked a fissure-vein from 1 to 6 ft. wide in the granite. It had a
typical complex vein-filling and structure, and carried galena that
assayed from 40 to 200 oz. per ton. While the quantity of ore obtained
did not justify the expensive plant erected to operate it, the galena
was rich in silver, whereas in the disseminated ores at the Mine la
Motte mine, ten miles distant, only the customary 1.5 oz. per ton
occurs. Occasionally fine-grained specimens of galena that I have found
in the disseminated belt would unquestionably be rated as argentiferous
by a Western miner, but the assay showed that the structure in this
case was due to other causes, as only about two ounces were found.
An apparent exception was reported at the Peach Orchard diggings,
in Washington county, in the higher or Potosi member of the third
magnesian limestone, where Arthur Thacher found sulphide and carbonate
ore carrying 8 to 10 oz. of silver per ton; and a short-lived hamlet,
known as Silver City, sprang up to work them. I found, however, that
these deposits are associated with little vertical fissure-veins or
seams that unquestionably come up from the underlying porphyry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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