The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912Hegermann-Lindencrone, L. de (Lillie de)
History
The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912
Hegermann-Lindencrone, L. de (Lillie de)
Courts and courtiers; Europe -- Social life and customs
A dressing-room was put at our disposal, and the clothes we were to
wear were neatly placed in piles. There were miners' jackets, miner's
leather trousers, and felt hats. We chose the suits best fitting our
different anatomies, and dressed. My choice fell on a boy's rather
clean suit. We felt very rakish in the dressing-room, but very sheepish
when we joined the gentlemen outside. In going down the shaft we had to
stand on the platform of the cage, which had neither railing nor
support of any kind. We went down thirteen hundred feet and stepped out
into the alleys of the shining ore. After walking for what seemed
miles, they showed us a hole and a shaft. We looked down a hundred feet
deeper, where the men who were working were almost naked. The
thermometer was fabulously high. There was a tank of cold water where
the men who worked could plunge every two minutes out of the five. The
air beginning to be rather oppressive, we requested to be taken up to
our mother Earth. How glad we were to breathe the fresh air. A bath was
awaiting us, and when we became ladies again we were taken all over the
works, and saw the process of making silver bricks out of the walls we
had been walking between, the beating of the metal, the sifting and
weighing, and finally the silver bricks. They have 2,000 men working
day and night. They are 1,400 feet below the surface now, and hope to
go lower. The "pocket" is 175 feet long, but the poor stockholders'
pockets are empty, for all that. (I am a stockholder and ought to
know.)
Each lady was presented with a bag of silver ore-rocks they seemed to
me. My bag had "500 dollars" written on it, in fun, I am sure. I left
it at the hotel, as it was too heavy to carry.
We left Virginia City that evening for Carson City and slept there,
glad to shake off the silver dust from our weary feet. The next day at
7 A.M. two carriages, one with four horses and the other with two, were
before the door, and we drove up the mountain, took the little
narrow-gage railroad which is there to carry the logs down to the lake.
Sitting on the front logs, we rode down the mountain. The big beams of
timber are brought to the mines in order to prop up the places where
the ore has been taken out. These logs do a lot of traveling. They are
cut on the other side of Lake Tahoe, dragged over the lake by a tug,
sawed the right length by a sawing-mill, then carried up the mountain
by this railroad and floated down by means of a wood trough, three feet
wide, for twenty-two miles to another railroad, thence to Virginia
City.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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