Navigating a Silver Mine by Zina Abbott

The past two summers my travels have taken me to--and into--two historical mines. The Broken Boot Gold Mine is just outside Deadwood, South Dakota. The Lebanon Tunnel mine is in Silver Plume, Colorado, and can be part of your Georgetown Railroad train tour.

Since many of my Old West romances feature mining towns and miners, I found these tours very interesting and educational. A big part of my education included realizing that many of the words I used to describe mines are flat-out wrong.

This post is not going to be everything you ever wanted to know about mining terms. However, it will include a few terms to describe navigating within a mine, as well as a few structures you may find inside mines. The images I've used were taken by me, inside mines with poor lighting, during fast-paced tours involving 20-30 people. Please keep that in mind when judging photo quality.

First of all, most mines are not tunnels, although many of us think of them as that. Tunnels enter one side of a hill, cliff, or mountain and have at least one exit elsewhere. Also, you do not enter a mining shaft unless you are on top of the ground and entering the mine by going down, down, down or down at an angle. The two mines I toured had horizontal entrances. So I entered by what is called an ADIT.

Here is some basic terminology:

Adit – a horizontal opening from the surface into a mine, usually into a mine drift.

Original adit to the Broken Boot Mine

Shaft – a vertical opening from the surface into a mine, tunnel or drift. 

Drift – Similar to a tunnel in appearance, a drift goes only partway through a solid surface, but has no outlet.

Drift in Lebanon Mine

Raise – A vertical or inclined passageway driven between levels of a mine. They are used as manways, ventilation passages, for support lines such as pipes and electrical lines, for hauling ore from a lower level to another for removal from the mine, and as ore dumps for transporting ore to lower levels.

Winch with lines down a raise to bring up ore from lower level of mine.

Back – ceiling of a tunnel or drift.

 

Miner on top has hand on drift back and chalk marker on a rib of drift.

Rib – wall of a tunnel or drift.

Working face – a wall of rock in which miners will set charges to break it into small pieces, the working surface.

Miners in a drift preparing drill holes on working face of mine.

Stope – a large, underground room from which ore is removed. They are formed when miners drill numerous holes in the working face, then fill them with explosives which they then detonate. Said blasts breaks up the working face into pieces small enough to be loaded into mining cars and taken out of the mine. Often the area between two levels of the mine and sometimes accessed through a raise.

Crib/Crib Sets – in hard rock mining, cribs are the heavy wood supports that protect and support the drift.

Cap – top timber of the crib set.

Post – side pieces of a crib set that provide vertical support for the cap.

Posts - no caps or stringers in this section of the mine.

Stringer – connecting pieces that join the crib sets.

 

Stringers

Square-set Timbers – massive notched beams designed to form an interlocking series of cubes.

Square-sets – cubes formed by square-set timbers

Back-filling –partially filling open stopes that are no longer actively mined with waste rock taken from other areas of the mine. This was done for safety as well as disposal of waste rock.

Test Pocket - Removing rock from the working face far enough to see if there is any sign of ore. 

Test pocket

Slag - waste rock.

Slag

Silver Ore - tends to be black in appearance in its raw state.

 

Examples of silver embedded in rock.

I have written seven books for the multi-author series, Sweethearts of Jubilee Springs. Jubilee Springs is a silver mining town set in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. My most recent book in the series, Two Sisters and the Christmas Groom, is currently available. Please CLICK HERE.

My eighth Sweethearts of Jubilee Springs book, and my next book to be released, Nathan's Nurse, is the first book in which I wrote a scene that took place inside the Prosperity Mine. I went out of my way to be sure the descriptions I used were understandable to those readers who, like I was, are not overly familiar with mining terms. I even asked some authors in my Gold Rush Writers group to give suggestions, which I followed. Still, I hope you found these mining terms above helpful. You may want to refer to them again when this book is published. 

Nathan's Nurse is currently on pre-order and is schedule for release on December 27, 2019. You may access the book description and purchase link by CLICKING HERE.

Sources:

Broken Boot Gold Mine in Deadwood, South Dakota

Lebanon Tunnel Mine in Silver Plume, Colorado

Native American Tribes & the Transcontinental Railroad by Zina Abbott

The construction of the Transcontinental Railroad created serious consequences for the native tribes of the Great Plains. As roadbeds and tracks cut across the land, it forever altered the landscape. Along with the increased arrival of white Americans, it caused the disappearance of once-reliable wild game.

Railroads began to undercut native independence before a single mile of track had been laid. Especially with the discovery of gold in California, the federal government felt a powerful need to bridge the distances between the bulk of the nation’s people east of the Missouri River and the rising populations on the Pacific Coast. During the 1850s, the army surveyed and improved more than twenty thousand miles of roads in the West, but the greatest hopes were pinned on a transcontinental railroad. Four possible routes were surveyed, each with its eastern advocates who hoped to benefit from the traffic. However, before a route could be considered, the government had to have clear, unopposed access to the land where the rails would run. That meant settling up with American Indian tribes and eliminating any of their claims to the country in question.

The result was a quarter century of vigorous efforts by railroad interests and their political allies to move Indians out of the way, part of the broader effort to confine and isolate them on reservations.

Although most of the Native Americans had signed away their rights to much of their land in treaties with the federal government, they still regarded it as their traditional hunting grounds. After acquiring horses, Indians had become heavily dependent on the plains bison for everything. The railroad was probably the single biggest contributor to the loss of the bison on which they had come to depend upon for everything from meat for food to skins and fur for clothing and shelter.

The railroad brought white homesteaders who farmed the grasslands that had been the home of bison for centuries. Not having the same understanding of land rights as the whites, the Indians regarded their coming and ownership claims on the land as an invasion. As the resources they depended upon for survival diminished, they fought back against the great beast—the railroad—who brought the intruders.

Native Americans sabotaged the railroad and attacked white settlements supported by the line. Working several days journey ahead of the end of the track, the union Pacific's Advance work parties were in considerable danger of Indian attacks. Near Plum Creek, Nebraska on the night of August 6, 1867, Cheyenne Warriors derailed a hand cart carrying a repair gang, and then a freight train. Eight men were killed. The only survivors were the train conductor, who escaped and ran for help, and an English-born track worker named William Thompson. Thompson feign death as a Cheyenne scalped him. In the confusion, he later managed to slip away and even carried his scalp with him. Many years later while living in England, Thompson mailed the scalp as a donation to the Omaha Public Library.

Warriors occasionally harassed surveyors. In addition to destroying railroad tracks and machinery, they stole the railroad livestock used to feed the rail workers. Some of the tribes attacked the railroad crews or their hunting parties directly, which necessitated guards being posted for the safety of the men, but overall, their direct attacks were relatively few.

In contrast, there was one tribe that welcomed the coming of the railroad. The Pawnees, with their traditional lands in Nebraska, had the greatest Indian presence on the line. They were friendly to the American government. Their traditional enemies were the Sioux. Their warriors often served as scouts for the military. The railroad offered the Pawnee people free passage on its work trains, which was gladly accepted. In exchange, they staged mock raids and battles for visiting dignitaries at Union Pacific’s lavish 100th Meridian Excursion party. Under army Major Frank North, a uniformed battalion of 800 Pawnee men patrolled the railroad to protect crews and livestock from Lakota and Cheyenne raiders. Their presence served as an effective deterrent to attacks by other tribes.

In the end, in spite of their struggle to drive away the railroad, tribes of the Plains were unsuccessful in preventing the loss of their territory and hunting resources. The Transcontinental Railroad ushered in a new way of life for many Americans, but the cost was the destruction of the traditional way of life of most Native Americans.

Just today, I introduced my cover reveal and pre-order link to my new Christmas novel, Two Sisters and the Christmas Groom. More about that book next month after it releases.

I have been pleased with the overwhelmingly positive reviews for my novel, Escape from Gold Mountain, which was released last month. It is now available on Kindle Unlimited. 

Please CLICK HERE for the book description on Amazon. The print version is also available on Barnes & Noble, which you can reach if you CLICK HERE.

Sources:

https://dp.la/exhibitions/transcontinental-railroad/human-impact/native-americans

“Linked by the Golden Spike: Building the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads”; History  of Railroads (Moorshead Magazines, Ltd.:Toronto, ON, Canada & Niagara Falls, NY, United States, 2013) pages 14-17.

https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/development-west/essays/american-indians-and-transcontinental-railroad

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/tcrr-native-americans-and-transcontinental-railroad/

https://www.uen.org/transcontinentalrailroad/downloads/G7IndigenousEncountersTranscontinentalRailroad.pdf