My Father's World by Michael Phillips

Author:Michael Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC042030;FIC042000;FIC026000
ISBN: 9781441230751
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2016-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

Dinner with Alkali Jones

Over the next several days, mining and the status of gold in the streams and rivers and hills about Miracle became a major subject of conversation. Pa never discussed the mine with us kids. But when he was talking to Uncle Nick, or to anyone else whenever we’d go into town, that’s mostly what they talked about. And I could tell he was more concerned about it than usual. He seemed to spend every spare minute either at the mine or at the stream.

I wanted to learn all I could about gold digging. It was such an important part of everyone’s life around here. Pa was short on details, but Uncle Nick would answer my questions whenever I’d ask him.

I did learn a little about the two basic kinds of mining—placer and quartz. Most of the small claims around Miracle were placer operations in the rivers and streams. They used sluice boxes of many types, and lots of water. Pa and Uncle Nick had several sluice boxes situated on the stream at places where the water would run swiftly through them and sift out the gold as they dredged up dirt and gravel with a shovel and threw it into the top of the box. Watching them shovel and sift the dirt, and then pick through the bottom sections of the wooden chute looking for the specks of gold left behind, I could tell it was a lot of work for what little they found. I tried to draw a sketch of them working to put in my journal.

A person could find a lot more gold with quartz mining, but only rich men and mining companies could afford to do it profitably. Instead of above ground digging in streams, quartz miners dug and blasted their way into the side of a hill where they figured gold might exist, hollowing out a cavern that went inside the mountain. They searched about, hoping to run across a whole vein of the ore.

Pa and Uncle Nick began placer mining in the stream, but they dug out a cave up there at the mine, too, so I guess they had been trying their hand at both methods. They were digging it out by hand with a pick rather than dynamite, and Uncle Nick said it was slow going because it was just the two of them. But he said that’s where the real gold is—inside the mountains, not in the streams. Pa warned us several times to keep away from the mine, especially the younger children.

“You gotta stay clear of the cave,” he’d tell Tad and Becky every day. “You never can tell when one of them roof timbers’ll give way.” Then turning to me and Zack, he’d add, “You keep ’em outta there, you hear?”

One day, Alkali Jones came out to the cabin and stayed for supper. I learned more from the talkative old miner in that one day than I might have in weeks from our tight-lipped pa and carefree uncle.

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