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Mining in Virginia City, Nevada used traditional practices,
but also required several innovations that were then taken to
other mines throughout the world. Mining consists of taking rocks
that contain minerals of interest out of the ground. Here, the
minerals of interest in the rocks contained silver and gold. The
problem the miners had to solve was getting the largest quantity
of the silver and gold while taking out the least amount of rock
that contained little or no silver or gold (waste rock). They had
to do this while maintaining relatively safe working conditions
yet work quickly. The conditions that were considered safe back
in the late 1800s would not be considered safe today, so to
modern miners, the procedures and conditions of mining may look
unsafe. A photograph of a painting (included by permission of the
Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, NBMG) of the Belcher
Mine shows many of the mining steps (taken from Tingley,
J.V., Horton, R.C., and Lincoln, F.C., Outlines
of Nevada Mining History, Nevada Bureau of Mines and
Geology Special Publication 15, University of Nevada, 1993, p.
13). The picture is quite large, and can take a long time to
load.
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