Riches to Rust

Riches to Rust is Eric Twitty's guide to mining in the old West, written to serve two readers at once. For a visitor standing in front of an abandoned mine, it works as a field guide to the relics strewn around the site. For a historian, it explains the processes behind nineteenth century mining in the United States.

The description says the book includes chapters on mine development and organization, along with details on prospecting, mining, milling and transporting the ore. Library catalog records add a subtitle, A Guide to Mining in the Old West, and list chapters on building surface plants, surface plants for mine tunnels and for shafts in the Gilded Age, mining during the Great Depression, and interpreting the remains of historic mines. An appendix holds tables for identifying machinery and facilities.

Open Library dates this book to 2002 and lists Western Reflections Publishing Co. as publisher. Its subject headings are mines and mineral resources, equipment and supplies, history, mining machinery and mine buildings. Library records describe a bibliography and an index. The record we hold says 390 pages and library catalogs say 383, so we give no page count.

Riches to Rust is for hikers and four wheel drivers who come across old mine sites and wonder what the rusted equipment did. It also suits mining historians, preservationists, and museum interpreters who need to describe nineteenth century methods accurately. The description puts both the tourist with a casual interest and the serious mining historian in its audience. Libraries in mining states will find the bibliography and index useful. It is long and detailed, so expect a reference you return to rather than a one sitting read.

Eric Twitty also wrote Blown to Bits in the Mine and Basins of Silver for Western Reflections. Together with this book, they make up the three Twitty books in our library, all of them about mines. We looked for a biography of Twitty and found none we could verify, so we leave it out rather than guess. For a closer look at the other two books, use his author page.

More about Eric Twitty →

Much of what Riches to Rust teaches you to read is the machinery of crushing and milling. Wikipedia explains that a stamp mill crushes ore by pounding it: heavy steel stamps slide up and down in a frame, lifted by cams on a rotating shaft, and fall to crush the rock. Each frame and stamp set is a battery, and mills are often named by stamp count.

Because stamp mills were large, their remains often appear at abandoned sites as rows of foundation sets. Ore processing used a lot of water, so mills were often built near water. The first United States stamp mill was built in 1829 at the Capps mine near Charlotte, North Carolina, and in Colorado two Nissen stamps were installed around 1909 at the Sound Democrat Mill near Silverton.

Underground, hard rock mining reached ore through adits, which are horizontal tunnels driven into a hillside, or shafts, which are vertical excavations beside the ore body. Development work included drilling the face, loading explosives and blasting. Those are the same working parts a visitor may still spot at the portals and headframes the book helps identify.

Source: Wikipedia, Stamp mill