I am researching Rocky Mountain ghost towns for a fiction project, but something I haven't quite been able to find good, clear sources on is exactly how silver/gold mining was done in these places that, at their peaks, had about 300-1000 people. It seems that most the stuff I can find are either from large scale operations from that era, or just random pictures of miners that don't provide a lot of context of the mine itself.
Was the process not to different from what we picture when we think of mining: a large shaft with an elevator and then the miners dug out well-planned tunnels? Or, for what I imagine would be smaller operations, did the miners just start at the top of the mountain and dig more haphazardly until they ran out of ore?
Any sort of visual like a cross-section would be helpful!
Thanks!
Successful mining at in the nineteenth century always involved finding an outcropping of ore and then following as it "drifted" underground, whether that was vertically, horizontally, or at an angle. Sometimes, one hears of a prediction (from a spiritual or other comparable source) that resulted in underground exploration. Stories about these sorts of undertakings almost always end with the statement that the miners lost everything and found nothing.
Silver ore was notoriously not profitable given the expense of retrieval and milling versus the reward. The nineteenth-century saying was that "it takes a gold mine to run a silver mine." Successful silver mines were either large industrial efforts with lots of high grade ore or they exploited ore bodies that combined gold and silver. Fortunately, the milling of both precious metals was similar enough, so there was no need for separate processing.
For small scale mining, it was often the case that the most current mining technology was not employed. Instead, miners often resorted to technology that was cheaper and had been around for several centuries. This report, "Little Rathole on the Big Bonanza," describes a project that I was involved with, exploring a 1,000 foot adit in the Comstock Mining District in Nevada (the site of the "Big Bonanza"). The report may give you insights into the level of technology your miners may have used.