Chapter VII: I Go to Work in a Mine

Some people, thinking of the shape of Mexico and Central America, have called it a great horn into which United States citizens pour immense sums of money. While it is true that we have many large investments in that region, the horn is rather a horn of plenty, pouring out upon us dividends, silver, gold, copper, and oil.

There are more than five thousand mines in Mexico, between the northern border and Oaxaca, where mountains and mines begin to subside. Some of these mines produced for Montezuma, then for the Spaniards, and now for Americans, who own eighty per cent of the mines of Mexico. The Aztecs of to-day are still delving in the depths of the earth, but for American stockholders rather than for native or Spanish rulers. Of many valuable minerals within Mexico, silver is the most important. Mexico is the largest producer of this metal anywhere; it gives us three-fourths of our silver, and in most silver ore there is more or less gold. Much of its copper and lead also are sent to us. An iron mountain rises in the city of Durango. Mexico is second only to the United States in the production of oil, and in time it may produce more. Even now we import oil from our southern neighbor.

I was so much interested in the subject of mining in Mexico that I decided to go to work in a mine. Agriculture, the other important Mexican industry, I could see while walking about the country; but to learn much about mining and the ways of miners, I should have to go down _into_ Mexico in a different way from that followed by most travelers.

There was no better place to do this than Guanajuato, a great mining center. A schoolmate of mine was superintendent of the most important group of mines there. When he heard of my desire, he quickly offered me a job, advising me to start with the mine named Pingüico.

The city of Guanajuato is surrounded by mountains containing many
valuable mines. The Alhóndiga, once the Spanish headquarters and now
a prison, rises above the other buildings.
]

The Sights of Guanajuato

Before I mounted a horse and rode out to the mine, 8,200 feet above sea level, I roamed all about Guanajuato city. Its name, meaning Hill of Frogs, seems to fit it. Gigantic carved stone frogs are found in one part of the city. With its population it lies huddled down in a great basin, a blue labyrinth of mountains heaped up on all sides. The main street is like a stream at the bottom of the hollow, and many of the side streets are as steep as stairways. The roof of one house is sometimes below the doorstep of the one behind it. The climate is almost perfect. The year round there are brilliant days such as Lowell celebrated in his lines on June, and cool, mosquito-less nights.

A famous old Spanish fortress called the Alhóndiga bulks above everything else, like a huge packing box in the center of a toy city. On one corner of it the head of Father Hidalgo, the “father of Mexican independence,” hung for years, as a warning to others not to try to overthrow Spanish rule. Now the Alhóndiga is a prison. I spent two hours there—though only as a visitor! Inside the building the prisoners seemed to have much freedom. Some lay in the bright sunshine in the stone-paved _patio_, others washed themselves and their clothing at a huge fountain. During the day many of them worked at weaving hats and baskets, making brushes and similar things. These they sold for themselves, so that they could buy food from outside. The cells were much larger than most prison cells, because they were once the chambers of the colonial government.

Prisoners in the Alhóndiga in Guanajuato wash their clothing in one of
the great basins left by the Spanish.
]

Guanajuato is full of color. There are flowers everywhere, even inside the prison. The houses are painted pink, cream, blue, green, or whatever hue the owner fancies. The blankets of the lower-class men, the garments of the women, and the motley array of things in the market streets all make a jumble of colors.

In Guanajuato there are mummies which are not embalmed and purposely preserved, like the mummies of ancient Egypt, but corpses that are naturally preserved by some queer quality in the soil. I went down into a high vaulted corridor where there were more than a hundred bodies shrouded in sheets but looking much as they did in life.

What I Saw at the Mine

From the veranda of the mine building at Pingüico we could look down two thousand feet to a great plain of the Mexican table-land. We could see half a dozen towns, some more than twenty miles away, and many trails like brown threads winding off across the plain and up into the mountains. The travelers plodding along them seemed no larger than ants.

With one or two other Americans I jumped upon a little square platform hanging just below a huge iron bucket that was full of Mexican miners. Someone blew a whistle and down we went, at the end of a steel cable, into a kind of well or shaft drilled in the rocky mountain, a thousand feet deep. Some of the shafts were still deeper. Once in a while, during the descent or the ascent, the hoist engine would get out of order and for ten minutes (which seemed as many hours) we would hang suspended in the inky blackness.

At the bottom of the shaft we stepped out in a long low gallery with walls of solid rock. Far back at the end of this gallery, or some of its smaller branches, miners were digging away at a _veta_, or ore vein. It was very hot in most parts of the mine, and the Indian and peon miners wore only a loin cloth, a pair of leather soles, and a huge straw hat. I wondered what they could need the hat for, with two thousand feet of earth and rock between them and the sun, until I saw a great piece of jagged rock come tumbling down on a man’s head as he picked at the vein of ore.

Some of the men worked in pairs. One held an iron bar like a huge chisel and another struck it all day or all night long with a sledge. There were two or three sets or shifts of miners, and one set came to work when the other left, so that the mining continued all the time. When a deep enough hole had been made, dynamite was thrust into it, someone lighted the fuse and shouted a warning to everyone to keep back, and with a “bang!” down would come a mass of rock ore. However, most of the mining in Pingüico was done with automatic drills, which made holes in the rock much sooner than the hand chisels, but with a terrific noise. The miners were so careless in handling the dynamite that it was no wonder some of them had only one arm or one eye, or were covered with great scars.

My own work was to take samples. Whenever one of the little iron cars filled with ore passed me on the tiny railroad that was laid along each gallery, I snatched a handful of the ore and put it into a sack. The samples were sent up to the office to be assayed (examined) to see how much gold and silver and copper each “heading” or vein was giving. Later I had to go down many hundred feet more, worm my way through small holes, and with a hammer chip rock samples off the top of a gallery. It was terribly hot in such “pockets.” Perspiration ran in streams down the naked brown body of the miner who, holding a big straw hat under my hammer, caught most of the samples I chipped off. Some of the samples dropped into his thick hair and stayed there until he picked them out.

Cutting ore by hand in one of the galleries in Pingüico mine. The
miners could not stand the heat if they wore clothing.
]

The miners were very religious. They set up empty dynamite boxes as altars or shrines, and placed in each either a cross or a cheap picture of the Virgin Mary. They always kept at least one candle burning in such a shrine. When I was ready to leave a part of the mine that was not lighted with electricity, some miner was sure to beg my piece of candle for a shrine. In the morning several of the miners would bring bunches of freshly picked flowers to set before the image. Most of the men wore about their necks a rosary or a charm, such as a prayer written on paper and folded up into a little wallet. Some of them chanted a prayer when the cage was dropping down into the earth. Many of them swore dreadfully, but they stopped it for a moment whenever they passed one of the dynamite-box shrines, and snatched off their hats. Yet they did not care at all if one of the American mine bosses stopped to light his cigarette at one of the candles burning before the Virgin’s image.

It was always very pleasant to come out into the sunshine again after a day down in the mine. There was a hot and cold shower bath for the Americans, but the Mexicans never seemed to bathe. Afterward, we men from the north gathered around a table for a big American-style meal prepared by the Chinese cook. At night the mountain world was very still, but we could always hear the rumble of the hoist engines and the other machinery of the mine, as if a great giant within the earth were grumbling because he could not get out.

Following the Ore

I spent a month at Pingüico mine. During the last half of this time I was a car boss. My work then was to keep constantly after the miners and see that they did not hide one of the ore cars in a dark side passage, or tip a load over, or do any other mischief in order to loaf while we straightened things out or found more cars. At the end of October, I drew my wages and set out to see what became of the ore when it left the mine.

After being hauled to the surface in the great iron buckets which were used as elevators by the miners themselves, the ore was thrown out on a “gridley”—a kind of screen or gridiron made of railroad rails. There it was broken up, and the rocks that had no “values” in them were thrown out on a great hill. This hill, which rose far above a little native hamlet, was entirely made up of waste. A small train carried the rest of the ore to the noisy stamp mill. This was built on the side of a hill, so that when the ore was dumped into the bins at the top, gravity carried it on down until nothing was left but some whitish sand from which all the values had been extracted.

Big stones were broken up by hand. Middle-sized stones, spread by machinery on broad leather belts, moved past several peon women, who picked out the worthless stones and threw them away. Small stones went directly under the stamps, and the others followed as soon as they were ready. Each of the great iron stamps weighed several tons, and struck several blows a second. Water was poured in as the stones were being broken up, and the resulting mixture, smelling much like mortar or wet lime, was run into huge iron cylinders, rolled and rolled, and poured out upon zinc platforms. Over the platforms, which were constantly shaking, water flowed. Finally the heavier, valuable stuff ran into huge vats, in which it was stirred and watered for several days, until the values had settled and could be drawn off at the bottom. That left in the vat only worthless white sand which two peons kept shoveling out and carrying down to the valley below.

Rochester Photo, Mexico City

The outdoor part of the Pachuca mine in Mexico. The ore starts at the
top of the stamp mill and is reduced to almost pure silver or gold
by the time it reaches the bottom.
]

The last samples I took in the mine showed nine pounds of silver and twenty-three grams of gold to the ton of ore. From this you see that a great deal of work has to be done to get a small amount of valuable metal. The Aztecs and the Spaniards had very crude methods of working out the ore. One way was to spread it over a stone-paved _patio_, mix it with mercury, and drive mules and donkeys round and round in it for days at a time. The American methods are so much more thorough that any of the old “dumps” of the Spaniards are worth sending through a stamping mill for the values left in them. In fact I know of one great stone house, a superintendent’s home, that was torn down and sent through the stamp mill. It yielded silver and gold enough for a good profit over the cost of building a new house. When the values have finally been run down into smaller vats and treated with zinc shavings, there comes out a dark metal that is about half pure, silver and gold. This is put into melting pots inside a padlocked room and run into large molds, then melted again and finally turned into dark-gray blocks that look like paving bricks. One of these blocks, so heavy that only a strong boy can lift it, is 85% pure and worth about $1,250. Two or four such blocks are tied on the back of a donkey and taken down to the town office or the railway station under guard.

“High-Graders”

At the mine I had found that whenever a set of miners came up out of the shaft, they were required to stand one by one on a wooden block, with their arms stretched out, and be searched for stolen ore. Workmen toward the bottom of the stamp mill, where the material becomes quite valuable, are locked inside rooms walled with chicken wire. A mere handful of metal, or a flat sliver of it that can be hidden between the sole of the foot and the leather sandal, may be worth several dollars. In some of the mines about Guanajuato there are real gangs of bandits who carry revolvers and take “high-grade” (valuable ore) by force. But most of the “high-graders” are regular miners or workmen who hide a little precious metal on their persons and attempt to get home with it. They try to justify themselves in doing this on the ground that Mexico, with the precious metals inside it, more rightfully belongs to them, the descendants of the Toltecs and the Aztecs, than to the foreigners who own the mines.

Indian miners of Peregrina mine being led off to prison because they
had tried to steal pieces of silver and gold ore.
]

On the day I went to the stamp mill, the American manager had planned a special search for stolen ore. When it came time for the workmen in the zinc room to leave, the _jefe político_, or chief Mexican official of the district, was there to search them. These workmen have to have two sets of clothing, one for outdoors and one to wear while at work. When they come to work, or when they leave, they strip in one room and walk into the next to dress in the clothes they have left there. But even so, they manage to steal scraps and slivers of silver and gold, such as the chips knocked off when the metal is cast in molds. Of the five men searched that day, three had some “high-grade” concealed about them. One wore a pair of shoes, which seemed a strange thing for a Mexican peon to have; a lump of silver was discovered in each toe. Another had a piece of silver about as big as a dollar in the little wallet intended for a paper prayer or the picture of some saint. The third had a scrap of pure metal tucked into the top of his hat.

Mexican soldiers in a mining district have plenty of cartridges and
most of their rifles are modern, but their uniforms are much like
the clothes of civilians.
]

One of the two innocent men was sent running to town for policemen. These officers of the law wore very shoddy uniforms, carried clubs, and had enormous revolvers sticking out through their short coat-tails. But they were so much like the poorly paid and hardworked peons that it seemed very unbrotherly of them to tie ropes about the waists of the thieves and drive them away to prison. Some Mexican prisons are well built and almost too comfortable. But the cold, stone-floored, bedless calaboose in one of these small mountain towns is not a pleasant place, and poor prisoners are kept waiting weeks and perhaps months until the judge is ready to call them for trial.

Mexico may have been the original home of Indian corn. It is the staff
of life of the people. One sees great valleys filled with it.
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