New Idria, July 24, 1861
The matrix rock is metamorphosed slate, porous, fractured,
the ore distributed capriciously.
Tunnels diverge in all directions threading unmined seams,
the veins of cinnabar diffused in streaks across drift faces
brilliant blood red under our candlelight,
the miners naked above the waist, their shoulders burnished copper,
a hard sort—Cornishmen, Chileans. The mines
are profitable to stockholders. Nine hundred flasks per month
are shipped in pairs by mule for San Francisco. In brick furnaces
the ore, reduced and roasted, distills quicksilver.
The atmosphere it vents of arsenics, sulfurous acids,
and vapors of mercury is ruinous.
The men who go inside to clean the condensation chambers
do not recover, yet the higher wage commands fresh victims yearly,
and all are poisoned by the furnace work.
We reemerged into the scorching daylight world at noon
and took our observations for altitude.
Lunch hour blasting shook our instruments sporadically
like thunder underground, far off, the sand hot through our boots.
North and south from the summit chain after chain
of mountains without one tree, a scene of unmixed desolation,
steep bluffs cut in stratified gravels, hardened,
tilted and stood on edge in recent epoch by earthquake,
eastward across the San Joaquin above the veil of dust
the sawtooth crest of the Sierra glitters.
William Brewer, C.S.G.S.