![]() ![]() Immigrants from England, Ireland, Wales, Germany, Mexico, China, New Zealand, and other countries joined members of the Northern Paiute tribe and Anglo-Americans from across the Midwest and the East Coast to create the communities of Virginia City and Gold Hill, Nevada. ![]() Many of those people had been California goldminers and laborers. Courtesy of Library of Congress.įrom the 1860s until the mines went bust in the 1890s, the promise of silver lured men and women to the Comstock Lode on the slopes of Mount Davidson, 25 miles south of Reno, Nevada. Dawes engraved and printed by Le Count Bro's., San Francisco. When those malfunctioned or collapsed, men could plummet to their deaths. Hoists and cables lowered men nearly 3,000 feet down the mineshafts in cages. Water in the mines could reach 170 degrees. Dynamite, mechanical rock drills, and new hoisting and timbering technologies allowed miners to tunnel deeper where they worked in temperatures between 100 and 125 degrees Fahrenheit. ![]() New developments in mining technology simultaneously lessened some of the dangers, while increasing others. An intricate network of tunnels ran beneath the towns of Gold Hill and Virginia City, supported by a honeycomb of square-set timbering. Hard rock mining like that on the Comstock required tunneling deep into the ground to access pockets of silver ore. ![]()
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