Geez, I was just thinking how much fun it would be to get all the HISTARCH
gang together in Atlanta and have a little Gold Roast. But if we have to
cook pot-luck dinners with cyanide and chlorine...forget it! I'll go for
chicken nuggets instead.
Dan Mouer
Virginia Commonwealth University
[log in to unmask]
http://saturn.vcu.edu/~dmouer/homepage.htm
On Mon, 8 Dec 1997, JuliaCoste wrote:
> Neville,
>
> My geologist-mining consultant here, Willard P. Fuller, says that they did do
> some ore roasting in the early years of the California Mother Lode -- the
> 1850s and 1860s -- but it never worked very well. It was mostly surface
> roasting, just piling up the wood and crude ore, although Young (Western
> Mining, 1970, U. Okla. Press) describes an 1850 roasting furnace using iron
> tubes made from musket barrels (p.120). For refractory ores, the California
> miners generally worked on the concentrates, not on the crude ore itself.
> Fuller wonders if they ever experimented with chlorine leaching on
> concentrates in New Zealand. It preceded the cyanide process (first used at
> the Crown Mine, Karangahake, New Zealand, in 1889!) and could have perhaps
> been more successful than roasting.
>
> Young describes ore roasting kilns in the US Southwest that are beehive shaped
> and located around old Spanish mine workings (p.67-68). These sound closer to
> what you have.
>
> At the Mother Lode copper-mining town of Copperopolis, they did some roasting
> of copper ore at one phase in the 19th century. This was commonly used in
> antiquity in the development of copper working in Cypress, Greece, Spain, and
> Central Europe (and other places).
>
> Good luck
>
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