Memoirs of Kelly,NM and the Mines
Lessons from Mule Drivers and The Uncertainties of Mining:
We had to get the ore to a far-away market, where we bought dynamite and other essential supplies for living. We had a burro train, the only way to navigate those mountain trails. From the burro drivers, I learned a characteristic whistle, which many years later my wife came to recognize readily above other background noises. Once I was to pick her up in front of the New York Public Library. I was driving up the opposite side of the street, pondering how I could get over to the opposite side with all the five o'clock traffic against me. I stopped just below 42nd Street and a cop came over promptly and said, "You can't stop here. Move on!"
"But Officer, let me stop a moment, I have to meet my wife here."
He relented. I got out and gave that whistle. He looked at me quizzically, but in a break of the traffic she appeared and all was well.
We had our moments of relaxation. A nearby tunnel had a grand spring of cool water where we kept our milk and any other perishables we might have. My father sometimes kept beer there and when visitors came it was put to use. I recall having a taste and since then have never found beer with that good hops taste. We hung a swing from a high limb of the big pine that overshadowed the cabin. Coney Island had nothing to compare with that swing. It went far, far out and you really had to hang on.
We first lived in a house alongside the road used by teamsters for hauling ore to the railroad branch at Magdalena, some three miles distant and 1,500 feet lower in elevation. I used to sit on the fence as a little boy and admire the skill with which these men handled their four-mule and six-mule teams ¬¬ and soak up the language that mules seemed to understand. I could use it too when circumstances seemed to demand. One day I followed my father when he was going up the street to the store. He said, "Earl, you go back home."
I retorted: "You go to hell, you long-legged son of a bitch."
He used those long legs to stride down the road to me, picking up a stick as he came. I got a good larruping that cured me of swearing for many a year.
Another little yarn about the burro drivers: They had a tent pitched below our cabin on a flat space. One morning my mother heard the wife of one of the muleteers screaming. She ran down the hill and entered the tent. A big rattlesnake was climbing over the headboard of the wooden bed where a baby lay. My mother grabbed a shovel and killed the snake. It was over six feet long and one of the largest rattlers the men had ever seen.
My mother was a grand person. Only five feet tall and weighing about 100 pounds, she had more drive than a giant. She had the old housekeeping system; wash on Monday, iron on Tuesday, bake on Wednesday – and she did bake good bread and pies. The wash was done by bringing in the water by hand, no running water. The washboard with “elbow grease” took the place of electricity in agitating the dirt out of the clothes. We didn’t have the money to buy even the crude washers that were available and didn’t have electricity even in the boom mining town of Kelly.
That brings me to the chore of cleaning the glass chimneys of the kerosene lamps we perforce used. That chore, usually mine, was one of the lighter ones, to be done while resting from wood chopping or carrying water a quarter of a mile or so for the wash or for the once-a-week Saturday night bath.
After Monday wash day came ironing and the “sad-iron”, an appropriate name if there ever was one. There was I, a trickle down, of all these problems to the chore group. In this case it was to keep wood cut for the ravenous old crude kitchen stove, this heated the sad iron and also heated the house and the housekeeper. Wood-cutting also called for axegrinding. The old grindstone had to be turned, usually a small boy against the inexorable pressure of a heavy-handed adult. I have often wondered how many boys ran away from home rather than face a lifetime of turning a grindstone. On the farm one had the sickle-bars to sharpen, as well as the axes, butcher knives and other edged tools.
You need a quick fire for heating irons; woodchips were a good source of fuel and I recall seeing my mother returning from the privy and never wasting a step, stop at the wood pile to gather an apron full of chips as she hurried back to her tasks.
Money-wise, things grew increasingly difficult. The surface oxidized ores, rich in silver and lead carbonate began to carry increasing percentages of zinc, and it was difficult to reduce in the smelter to which we shipped. So after all our hard work and expense we were penalized for the zinc, so the returns from ore of $400 per ton grade were disappointingly low. My brother and I knew little of this, for our parents were not given to complaining. Minerals Separation Company developed new methods of ore preparation. These formed the basis for great fortunes, but their application required vast capital expenditures. Millions were extracted from nearby mines from the zinc ores that were of great interest to companies like Sherwin Williams, which entered the field in its quest for raw materials for paint and had the capital to invest in mine development.
Many years after our life in the Kelly camp, I chanced to meet one of the Fitch boys in Los Angeles. This family owned the Graphic Mine, which became the center of the great zinc bonanza that brought the dying camp back to life. They also owned a small smelter at the end of the little branch track, which connected with mail line at Magdalena about two miles down the mountain.
I asked him what had happened, for I thought the graphic had been worked out. He said he was going through the mine one day and more or less idly jammed his sharp candlestick into the vein material and knocked off a piece of rock that was popularly known by the miners as "silver glance" limestone and considered to be of no value. He picked up the rock and noted that it was heavy; too heavy to be considered limestone or country rock. He put it in his pocket and took it to his smelter assayer who discovered that it was a rich zinc ore. The zinc had migrated from the oxidized zone rich in silver lead carbonates, which formed the wealth of the Kelly and the other producing mines, including our own Little Bear Mine. I remember that "silver glance" rock as a nice looking rock with a silver leaf pattern on broken faces. Being just a small boy, and no mineralogist, I merely though it was a pretty rock. At any rate, had we known better, we could have done little about it for we did not have the resources of the Fitches, who brought in zinc-hungry easterners like Sherwin Williams.
Even Sherwin Williams would have faced difficulties in reducing refractory ores except for the new metallurgical processes that had been developed for separating difficult ores. These flotation processes have given us the great porphyry copper mines of the Rockies where entire mountains, as at the Bingham Mine of the Utah Copper Company, are ground up and put through the concentration plants to give a profitable return from extremely lean ores – much of it with less than one per cent copper, or say two pounds per ton of rock pressed. Of course, tremendous investments are required for such operation; also massive reserves of ore to justify such expenditures.
We could only piddle along and hope to make enough to satisfy the store where we got mining supplies, food and other necessities. It was a losing struggle for my parents, I realize now, but I never heard them complain. No wonder shoes were a luxury. We had no trouble getting permission to go barefoot when spring came; in fact I recall that even in winter, which was severe in those high elevations, we had to wrap gunnysacks over our shoes and legs to keep out the snow. Adlai Stevenson with the famous hole in his shoe sole had nothing on us, but no one took our picture for the paper. My brother and I would take a Sears Roebuck catalogue and each claim alternate pages, quarrelling noisily, frequently, over who had the best things on his page.
Memoirs of a Miner, Magdalena, NM
Sally Parsons forwarded us the memoirs of her father who was born in 1885 in Kelly, NM and lived there until going to prep school in Socorro. Thank you Sally for sharing this history. Her words of her father are in the sections below:
Part I: The Beginning and The Early Days (From the Lion's Jaw)
Part II: Lessons from Mule Drivers and The Uncertainties of Mining.
Part III: School Days.