Making Silver From Ore I Found In An Abandoned Mine

hello there in this video i'm going to take this piece of galena and try to turn it into pure silver now do i know how to do this no but i found this book published in 1886 that goes through every step of the process and this is gonna be my guide as i try to create my first batch of silver here the way they did 150 years ago [Music] so right now i'm staying in the assay office at cerro gordo and back in the 1800s something like 500 million dollars of minerals were pulled from these mountains all around me and the quality of those minerals would have been determined in an office much like this here an assay would have taken the ore samples from these different claims or mines reduce them down and try to determine how much silver could have been in a ton of the minerals in that deposit and the primary mineral that they were mining at cerro gordo was galena and galena contains a lot of lead and a very little bit of silver and over the past three years owning cerro gordo i found deposits of galena left in the you know 30 miles of mines underneath the town and i always wondered what does it take to go from this down to a pure silver because that process you know this pursuit of silver is the reason i'm here you know it's the reason that this hatch of earth has the history that it does you know the pursuit of silver brought thousands of men and women to come and live here you know it required hundreds of buildings to be built and i developed that history that i've dedicated my life to try to understand and to teach to people that come up and on this channel so it would seem that a big part of understanding the history of serogordo is understanding how they mine the minerals and how they refine them here at cerro gordo so this week after three years i'm going to take this book from 1886 that i found here in the assay office called notes i'm asking and try to create silver for myself you know i'm sure there's much more sophisticated ways these days to go about this process but i'm really interested in you know what that process took and sarah wars hated and this was 1886 that was kind of the peak of cerebral's activity and so in this video i'm going to go through how they assayed minerals back in the 1800s some of the history of the refining here at cerro gordo and hopefully in the end create the very first batch of seroguro silver in a very very long time all right to understand the refining process game here at cerro gordo we first have to come to these this is a very early furnace put up by some of the mexican prospectors that came up to serogoto before it was even established as a main town you know 1860s these were what they would use to refine the silver these are called vasos and these vasos before the town was a major production is how they would refine and reduce the minerals into the lead and silver not only were these big in the early days of serogoro these played a crucial role in making cerro gordo into what it became because as the story goes around 1868 mortimer belshaw and his future business partner victor beaudry walked these hills and they would come across old vassals like this these crude furnace operations and they realized that if these types of operations could create the quality and quantity of ore they're seeing back in san francisco and these major towns that there were surely untapped amounts of silver and lead in these mountains just waiting you know to be refined and so after seeing stuff like this bellshaw decided to invest in what would become the union mine that is just up the hill a little bit and his investment wasn't just money he invested a promise to create a better furnace to be able to refine more ore and that was his contribution to get his start here into cerro gordo so belshawn beaudry had all sorts of ways of seizing control this mountain you know what beaudry would do is he had the general store and if you couldn't pay your bill he would take your mining claim in exchange you know on credit though he didn't pay him he would take over your claim and similarly when bellshot and beaudry had their furnaces going they would charge fifty dollars a ton to refine anybody else's ore in the area you generally have another option you know if you're mining a different claim at cerro gordo or in the surrounding area you have to use their furnaces but the thing is a lot of times this ore wouldn't even assay for that amount so at the end you won't be able to pay your bills leaving to take over your mind so no matter which way you're coming these two guys just seized control of the entire mountain one way or the other so this is it this would have been the site of bell shaw's furnace they built in 1868 and just up there is the union mine but down here we can start seeing all the red rock this is where his furnace was this is where he created the water jacket which was a revolution in the day you know not only was belle shaw smart enough to do everything else he did at the town but he actually invented a new type of furnace that was able to increase output tremendously that not only got used here but he got used at all the other mines and bellshaw chose this location because it was by the union mine but also there's this cliff where you could throw off all the extra slag this is slag so this would have been the waste rock that they used during the refining process of the silver and the lead so this has been left over and in the early days there would almost be 40 of the silver and lead left in this because they weren't able to refine it properly at the time the chemistry wasn't there but then in the early 1900s they actually came back through here and re-refined this because if you could get you know 40 more out of this slag then you're doing pretty good you know you can see some of the old cribbing and even some more of the slag up there and the red rock that was used to make the chimney for these furnaces and i'd speak this furnace they used to sit here there used to be this massive building and you can see this photo of the building with tons of cords of wood on the hill and tons of bars waiting for shipment bradspeak this furnace could refine 24 tons of ore per day and they needed 350 bushels of charcoal and up to 30 000 gallons of water to run this thing back in the day which is crazy you know because bellshaw just insisted that the furnace be run 24 hours a day you know so there's always these smoke clouds in the skies by 1876 belshaw was getting 60 tons of ore per day from the union mine and so what do you do is you bring it to the surface over there wagons would take it the 150 yards over here where it would start to be refined and to support the bellshop furnace which was humming you know it was rocking and rolling 24 hours a day his partner victor beaudry in 1870 created an additional furnace down closer to town which is where we are going to go next bojie was the business partner of mr murderer belshaw and this was a construction in 1870 as you can see it's right close into the middle of town here and back in the day there used to be a massive wooden boating around this that's gone but a lot of the traces of how active this area used to be are still here and this furnace at its peak employed 25 different guys which is hard to believe that 25 people were working here full time and the payroll back then was 3 000 a month which is about oh sixty thousand dollars in today's money so this was a serious operation that was also going 24 hours a day at its peak they were using about eight tons of charcoal to refine 25 tons of cleanness the amount of wood and water that these two furnaces bellshaw's which is way up there by the union and beaudries which is here was just crazy this furnace that furnace we're creating 400 bars per day for cerro gordo there are so many bars that when they used to ship them down to the lake there there was a backlog of 30 000 bars waiting to be shipped down there and there are so many that the miners used to just build houses out of them literally used to stack them like you would stack rocks right here put a canvas tarp over them and then use them as housing see these bars that belshawn beaudry are making something like this oh very heavy or what they called base bullion and base bullion was still basically lead and silver just with the other impurities removed that means that you had to have a certain level of expertise to refine these bars so they were less likely targets for bandits you know people that have robbed the stagecoaches if they knew that they would have to then take it and find somewhere to separate the lead from the silver that place is gonna probably ask hey how do you have all these bars stamped cerro gordo on them and that's gonna cause a lot of concern and so what it is these bars were shipped to san francisco where they are further refined into lead and the silver was sent off to the u.s mint remember back in that day lead was at least relatively more valuable than it is today it was used for a lot more things so even the cost of lead for beldshaw and beaudry would cover the shipping cost and the refining cost and the silver would almost be pure profit [Music] now i've wanted to make silver up at cerro gordo for as long as i've had cerro gordo and so the first step in all this is i had to collect galena today the mission is to find some galena to then refine i always thought it'd be cool to take you know the raw silver lead ore here and make it down into pure silver and make it some jewelry so the quest for the next few days is to collect all the glean i can find around the property this is the stop and hopefully that is the galena that's galena see the sparkle that's galena oh i got a big boy piece yeah there's a bunch up here is this no blends in so well see the shiny metallic [Music] see how shiny that is glitter city all right that's going in the backpack this little pocket seems to have a lot see there's another see that it's another 5-10 pound piece getting a good amount this pocket oh there's another piece i think we only need like 20 pounds to get the amount that i want to make how easy that is to see what it looks like we'll feel heavy this first super that's good that's um definitely 30 pounds at least that's that figure you see a tiny little bit up there she'll have that where are you finding this thing well that was relatively quick you know came wanted 20 pounds of galena probably got at least that i'm gonna get out of here because this is over stopped and all these big boulders have fallen down over time so no reason to spend more time in here than we need to so we're gonna get out here go back home weigh this clean that we got see how many pounds it is try to make this into some silver [Music] 25 pounds that'll do sweet so step one collectively step two came back here had all the chemicals arrive in the mail that i needed and from there i was just exploring so notes on ass saying so somebody had this one was learning in 1901 and i think that i'm here sitting trying to learn the same thing 120 years ago from the same book is a super cool way to start this all right so if we dive into this book there are five steps in making this galena down into silver simple obviously is not true so step number one sampling and pulverizing all right we're here in the assay office pulverize using the grinding plate and rubber which we have down here all right we have pulverized very shiny as you can see very excited i think we're gonna knock it out first try step one we're gonna nail this have perfect silver do it the old school way of doing it kind of like they used to the really exciting thing for me about going through this process is just having a deeper understanding into the assay process and just the life of an assayer the job of the assayer was trying to determine how much the value of the mineral content in a certain claim and he would do the math he would say hey i put in 30 grams of ore i got out one gram of silver i can extrapolate that to tell you that the value of the tonnage of your claim is x and so really like miners dreams came into an office like this to either be made or be crushed and the majority of the time in assayer's job was crushing miners dreams but because of that excitement you have to imagine the assayer back in the mining towns knew more about that hill than anybody else even more than the big owners you know there are stories where investors engineers everybody used to huddle around asset offices like this just weighing the news of the next big strike you know so there's always potential excitements inside of walls like these you know guys just coming here and knowing that maybe that was gonna be the day where they finally struck it rich or that was the day where they were gonna have to go out find another claim and do it all over again as you can see it's getting much it's kind of like powder something through here that is what we're looking for nice fine grade kalina yeah tablespoon of that a day well you'd probably die but you know we're not gonna die we're now gonna try to make it about [Music] 30 grams and this is the counterweight is about 27. now we need to weigh out all the charges so the things we put in then you get into the roasting so you want to roast the oar so day one i decided to go the most tried and true way that the book outlined and that was fire assange with the step of having to roast the galena i went for the hoist there we have a kiln from an unknown date probably 80s or 90s if i had to guess that is not the most efficient kiln so there's a lot of standing around the roasting is going to remove the sulfur and so it's a pretty specific process you know it's not one that they get into too close of detail here you know things that you might think that they would include like oh you know temperature at which to roast the ore that they conveniently left out all right now this stuff let's make sure i glean and sand it's going in here all right so we're almost at 15 hundo and if you see we're getting the fumes that we want the white fumes getting a little clumpy not smell good you do not want at this point fusion you do not want the gleaner turning into like a solid you want to keep it in the granular form but just roast off all the sulfur which is easier said than done i had numerous cases where i burnt it or i melted i had to discard it and start over no more real fumes coming off so we're gonna let it cool down and then from there we're gonna add all the charges you've pulverized and weighed now you've roasted number three comes when you add in all these additives and you are looking for fusion over the course of days i changed the formula of additives borax lead oxide and stuff a lot as i would experiment because if you're looking through this book you can see there's ranges for everything you know every formula they give you in here is ranges and so it takes a little bit of experimentation yes it's a science but it's also a bit of an art and obviously i'm not going to master an art over the course of a few days so first i'm going to put in the toasted galena borax now i'm going to add in the letharge or lead oxide finally baking soda it's crazy to think about back in the day how they figured this out you know how do they figure it out to put this this this how do they get all these chemicals to fill this much crucible and at the end of this you have to imagine we're doing all this in the end we hope to have a tiny little button of silver that's barely gonna fill the bottom of this thing step three you got yourself in the crucible you throw it in and with that we will see you when you're closer to being silver [Music] so to lead up to this thing that we're going to do later in the video i'm going to need a lot of galena crunched up that's gonna happen over here and as a little teaser of what trying to do [Music] yep this process has been taking a while as you can see we're running up against the sunset now look at that dang this took legitimately all day and into the night you know i remember being up there just twiddling my thumbs for hours and hours and hours waiting for this kiln to get the speed all right as you may be able to see it is properly dark out this kiln was not getting there it needed to be wrapped with some tin foil but now we are officially at 17 50 fahrenheit so the timer is set this needs to sit for another 45 minutes it's like the opposite of an easy bake oven [Music] that is how hot it is i'll wait for this to cool down a little bit for that slag to form on top so you pull out your slag you break it and at the bottom you get the next step which is the lead button alright this is the moment of truth [Music] now if everything went right you're left with lead and silver and so after that you come to the second to last step in this process cooperation and cooperation is where you take a kupel what you're going to do is you put the silver and lead in here this lead button heat this thing up this thing is made out of animal bones and so it's going to allow the lead to do is to oxidize when the silver won't oxidize and the lead will get absorbed into this bone ash and you'll be left with a tiny little bead of silver and in the end you get that the tiniest bead of silver from that amount of glena so that night i went back slept on it thought you know what i'm not really satisfied with that result i don't think that was as good as it could be so decide to go back up to the hoist and try method number two under fire assay where you add additives in and that way you don't have to roast the galena all right back on another stormy day all right with the new day there's gonna be a little bit different formula a little bit different additives kno3 nitrate because that is gonna prevent us from having to roast the galena today so we'll try this new formula see if it can't settle out the silver and lead better we're gonna try it in these little cups today as soon as that's ready this is going in this is what we're trying to reduce down to the actual silver and this straight galena they're gonna try to melt down and move over into this crucible went in crucible came out crucible got poured into this little form thing all right so you can see at the bottom of that cone there's this little bead see it we're gonna melt that down to further refine away any of the lead that might be in there is gonna get absorbed into this bone see that [Music] after you get on with that you'll go to your final step in the assaying process which is calculating the results ideally if we did this right it would be 0.15 grams of silver and if you look [Music] if you're asking me looks like it's just about perfect which means this is high quality galena so if you would have got a result like this from the assayer's office you have been a pretty happy minor back in the day alright so probably the biggest thing i learned during this is acting is not easy after four days of assaying what did i get about that much silver a few grams or a couple dollars with the silver puts it all in perspective for me i was being so in awe of the process after the bead was created that i couldn't fully wrap my head around how to express it you know is this like immediately this weight of how many people had to do so much stuff in pursuit of such a tiny amount of silver that it was almost overwhelming and so after that was done my goal after creating the silver was to create a bar like this a special present as a present to you all to say thank you so much for the support and the encouragement over the past 17 months you know it's driven me to pursue new interests and passions and a new life that i could never imagine before yep gonna need a lot of this all right it's late [Music] [Music] the amount of time to create a bar of this size from crucibles this big is intense my goal is to fill up this old mold from cerro gordo but at the rate that this is going i don't think i'm gonna fill that all up i'm probably just gonna fill in the name plate there i didn't create a full bar but i'm happy to announce i did create the face that just says cerro gordo on it that i am going to mount on a piece of wood from the property from the 1800s with a square nail on it i wrote a little note on the back you know something special and the date and that's going to be given away so down below there's a link put in your email and in the next month update video i'm going to choose the winner and send one of you guys this first piece of bass bullion created at cerro gordo in 150 years if nothing else the process of taking a week of my life to make 1.5 grams of silver has left me with just a deep amount of gratitude and wonder towards all of these everyday items around us you know think about like the last time you went to the mall and you went to the parking lot you turned on your car and it started right away did you think about the lead miner who was working in who knows what conditions that got the lead that went in the battery that made that car start you know probably not or you know the last time you're at a fancy dinner and you're eating did you think about the silver miner that got the silver to make that fork or you know why even stop there what about the prospector that found the claim that became the mine they got the silver to make the fork or the assayer who you know determined that that mine was worthwhile to mine to get the silver to make the fork or the truck driver who took the ore from the mine to the factory or the guy that created the mold for the fork you know you could basically go on forever like that and i was thinking about that while i was waiting for some of the order roast and just filled me with a lot of gratitude you know like it made me want to like thank all these people involved in these things that we just take for granted you know it's it left me curious to know what all is lower down the totem pole in the process of creating all these items around us and i don't think you have to melt down lead you know to have that sense of appreciation or wonderment you know even just thinking think about all the people that went in to making the laptop or the tv or the computer you're watching this video on you know it's remarkable when you think about it it's like so many people came together in their own little roles and those little roles were their lives and it just makes me curious about all the other roles here at cerro gordo which is something i'm gonna definitely be pursuing in future videos but until then i'm gonna stop rambling i hope you all have an amazing week i hope you guys take a minute or two to think about all these people that went into the items all around us and i hope you all come back next week as there'll be a new video and if you're interested in taking home this piece of sara gordo history uh it's free to sign up there's an email link below and i can't wait for one of you to have this in your home see ya [Music] you

Channel: Ghost Town Living

Views: 1,953,313

Keywords: abandoned mine, brent underwood, cerro gordo, cerro gordo ghost town, ghost town, ghost town living, living in a ghost town, making silver, making silver from ore, mining silver, silver, silver mine, silver mining, silver ore

Id: zvgyv-EhW6w

Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 08 2021