On a rainy afternoon in Colorado Springs, after our other plans had fallen through, Dianne and I spent a fascinating ninety minutes with volunteer tour guide Skip walking through the Western Museum of Mining & Industry. He led us not only through the simple, rustic building but also on a time and technology journey, beginning with the first gold discovery in the English colonies in 1799 all the way up to current mountain removal in nearby Cripple Creek. It was a deep and educational experience.

For all the things we as humans need and want, if it can’t be grown, then it probably has to be extracted. Everything made requires some raw material, and if those materials aren’t grown, most of it will come out of the earth. As a result, mining plays a much bigger role in our lives than I ever thought. It’s easy to think of gold, silver, coal, iron, and salt as mined items, but I never thought about baby powder, sheetrock, laundry detergent, crayons, or my daily vitamins as coming from a mine. The computer on which I’m typing, and the phone with which I communicate, are products formed from the processing of minerals and other elements extracted from the earth. In fact, we even dig up materials to fertilize the things we grow. I now realize that we can’t really live without mining.

While there’s some coal mining and natural gas fracking in the eastern part of the country, in the west, mining is a way of life. As we drove through Colorado, there were mines, quarries, and other extractions happening practically everywhere. There were huge trucks pulling either gigantic equipment designed for extractive work or enormous loads of rocks for processing. Knowing now the importance of this industrial effort, I probably should have been more grateful and patient on those two-lane roads. 

I went down in a salt mine once, in Austria, and it was a strange experience. They lowered us down in a small elevator about a thousand feet, right into the middle of the mountain. What a weird feeling, to be that far underground, to be surrounded by so much earth and rock, to know that there is only one way back to safety, and to be totally dependent on the equipment lowering, and hopefully raising, you. Perhaps you remember the episode in 2010 when a mine in Chile collapsed and 33 miners were trapped 2,300 feet underground for 69 days before they all could be rescued. I’m glad I didn’t know about such an event when I went down into the salt mine. 

The technology of mining progressed rapidly after the California gold rush (see my earlier post on Gold Mountain), and Skip described and demonstrated each of the major improvements using exhibits in the museum. Individuals initially panned for gold in a stream, using an actual pan or a rocker to separate gold nuggets from regular rocks; since gold is much heavier, it would drop to the bottom of the pan or rocker. Soon, companies began to automate as much of the process as possible: grabbing, shaking and filtering much larger batches of material at a time; transporting the rocks to a powerful crusher on a conveyor belt; and then removing the leftover rocks out of the way. But when the stream beds no longer contained enough gold nuggets to justify the effort, miners had to go underground to find more gold.

The museum contains a working model of an early mine, showing the mine shaft with its bucket for lowering men and equipment and raising rocks and, at the end of the day, those same men. At left is the above-ground portion of the mine.

At left is the below-ground portion of the mine. Note that from the shaft, horizontal tunnels were constructed at multiple levels so that the vein of gold could be dug out more quickly. In each tunnel, men hammered and chiseled out rock, loaded it into a wagon, and pushed the wagon back to the shaft where another miner shoveled the rocks into the bucket for hauling up and out of the shaft. The work continued day in, day out, until the mine went dry.

Improvements to the mining process came quickly. Horses were lowered into the mine to pull the wagons full of rocks to the shaft–a horse could move 3 wagons at once compared to a man being able to push only one wagon at a time. Then the wagons were mounted on rails, enabling them to be moved more easily. With the invention of the steam engine came a new power source, and the horses were replaced in the mine by a small engine, able to move 6 wagons at a time. Steam-driven power drills enabled men to dig out more rock more quickly. Soon, dynamite helped miners blow up a full section of rock wall simultaneously, further speeding up the collection and removal of rocks so that more gold could be retrieved more quickly. Similar improvements were taking place above the mine as well, as rock crushing became more automated and powerful and as the separation of rock and gold occurred faster and with greater accuracy. Thanks to Skip, we learned about all of these inventions and enhancements and saw nearly all of them in action.

Eventually, mining companies realized that there were many other minerals that could be collected from mines using similar technology, and the race was on to extract a wide variety of materials which could be processed into useful products. The museum had an exhibit showing a  selection of products that come from such minerals, and It was quite an eye-opener.

It’s probably obvious that I, as a consumer, haven’t thought much about where the raw materials for most of our daily products come from. I don’t think much about the safety of the men in the mines, or even the environmental impact of such massive extraction activity. We as an American society have recently begun to think more about our food and how it is grown, and organic farming is now a big deal. Perhaps it is time for us to begin to think more about the rest of our materials, their processing, and their impact on humans and the environment. Thanks, Skip.

Note: Our travel map for our Mountain West trip has been updated, if you’re interested in following our progress.