Empire Mine

Hi, this is Sean😀.  We are still in Grass Valley.  Today after a breakfast of oatmeal I went to allergy shots.  After allergy shots mom and I went to the store and got a lot of food.  We went home and had lunch and decided to go to Empire Mines.  Empire Mines is a gold mine with multiple mines.  We walked to the "cottage" Mr. Bourn's manor. It was called a cottage because some of his houses were castles in Ireland. We saw minnows, frogs, fish and a huge turtle.  There was a gold fish and a white gold fish.  I don't know how a gold fish can be 'white' but this one was white.  

This was the cottage.  Mighty big for a cottage.  

       Then there was a gold mine tour.  The gold mine was 5000 ft deep through granite, quartz, pyrite, and GOLD.  Pyrite is fools gold.  Today gold is $1295 per ounce.  When the mine operated In the 1940's gold was $35 an ounce.  To extract the gold you pulverized the rock and pour the powder onto a copper table with Mercury on it.  The murcery and gold would form a silly puddy substance with the gold. Then workers would take the puddy and separate out the gold making bars.  30% of the gold was still on the copper table so they took the mixture and added cyniade to extract it.   They melted the gold in a big furnace making bars.  The bars weighed 69 pounds, as heavy as me.  The mine opened during the gold rush in 1849.  The mine has over 376 miles of tunnels.  After we saw how the gold was extracted we went into the actuall gold mine.  

The mine stayed at the same temperature, 64 deg.  Miners has really hard jobs, in England you could be 10 and work in a mine.  

To get down into the deep mine the workers would sit on a "man skiff" shown above. 12 workers fit on one man skiff.  When they started using electricity in the mine they took mules into the mine.  To get the mules in they covered them with a tarp and tied them down on the man skiff.  The mules never left the mine and all their food was brought to them and all their "waste" was brought out.  The mine grounds was like a small town.  I would not want to be a miner you worked 10 hour shifts but be in the mine for 12 hours.  I had fun at and in the mine.