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Moving the Rocks on the Surface
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Once rocks were brought to the surface, miners used gravity
whenever possible to move the rocks through the processing. First
the rocks were dumped from the bucket into an ore cart on the
surface. It may have had to travel on a train before reaching the
processing mill, but that added cost to processing the ore. The
ore cart took the ore rock to the stamp mill to be crushed before
it could be chemically processed. This photograph of a small
stamp mill in Virginia City shows the weights on rods that were
lifted and dropped (stamped) onto rocks at the bottom of the
structure. Then the finely ground rock was fed
into the mill, generally by a gravity feed directly from the
stamp mill. Then the rock was mixed with other minerals to
separate the gold from the rest of the rock (see Ore Processing).
Waste from the ore processing was generally in the form of a
water slurry of finely powdered rock. In the days of the Comstock
mines, this waste slurry was frequently fed directly into the
river, but sometimes it went to a tailings pond to settle and
evaporate the water. This photograph of a more modern, though
abandoned mill on the Comstock shows a former tailings pond in
the center foreground where there is an oval of greener grass and
no shrubs.
The products of the mine, mainly silver and gold, were sent to
population centers such as San Francisco. The legislation to
build the Carson City Mint was passed in 1863, and the mint
actually opened in 1869. It was the silver from the nearby
Comstock Lode and the increased population that came with the
mining operations that made the development of the mint in Carson
City favorable.
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Moving the Rocks on the Surface
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