Silver_City

Silver City area

Silver City has its origins in mining: Silver, turquoise, gold, and copper. Some mines became famous (Santa Rita), and some infamous (Empire Zinc), and some left their imprint on a town (Mogollon, Tyrone). Today there are over a dozen mines and half a dozen quarries in the area.

Step up on the boardwalk and stroll through Silver City: http://www.zyworld.com/gilariver/about.htm

Santa Rita:

Santa Rita is one of the oldest copper mines in this country. Apache Indians directed a Spanish commandant to the area in 1800. Soon afterwards, colonials built a fort and penal colony there, using slave Indian and child labor to dig shafts to the rich copper-bearing seams. By the end of the century, the high-grade ore was playing out, and skirmishes with the Indians left the mines abandoned.

The village of Santa Rita got a temporary reprieve when the Chino Copper Company bought the rights in 1910. Steam shovels began excavating what has become one of the largest open pit copper mines in North America. The town was undermined, and eventually subsumed by the operation.

You can stand at the edge of the new stratigraphy: a mile by two of ore-bearing earth that produces 165,000 tons per day. Phelps-Dodge pipes it to a smelter in Hurley, seven miles away.

Facts and Figures:

Electric rotary drills bore holes 60 feet deep, five or six per day.

Hole is charged with 650 pounds of ammonium nitrate, stemmed (packed) with screened dirt. Blasting cap fused to 60 separate holes shot at once.

Rail cars of broken rock loaded with 80 tons of ore or waste material.

Central tower directs electric locomotives by radiophone back and forth out of the pit and over to Hurley.

Cars are unloaded by rotary dumpers, ore is crushed, screened and fed into ball mills, mixed with water, poured into settling tanks, back to ball mills and classified, mixed with reagents, fed into flotation tanks, skimmed off, dewatered and shipped to the smelter for refining.

Smelter heats concentrates in reverberatory furnaces to over 2,800^oF with natural gas (4million cubic feet per day). Slag floats to top, is drawn off and dumped. Sulfur dioxide goes out the chimney 500 feet up. Matte, (copper and iron sulfides), drawn off at the bottom of the "reverb" is poured into converter furnaces. Iron fluxed with silica is blasted with air and takes off, leaving: ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure copper.

More refining, poling with green pine logs thrown into the mix to remove oxygen. Seasoned with soda ash and charcoal to remove selenium = 99.9^opure copper.

Tons of rock mined per day………67,500

Tons of ore sent to mill per day………. 22,500

Average 2,000 pounds of ore yields 15 pounds of copper. That's only ONE PERCENT!

The mine:

See the sights, learn the facts. Phelps Dodge will arrange an inspection of mining, smelting and refining operations for visitors. With a miner as a guide, the three hour tour will include a close-up of the Santa Rita mine, Ivanhoe concentrator, solution extractor/electrowinning plant and, if your lucky, a hot pour at the Hurley smelter. This is a unique opportunity for anyone interested in history, mining or how things work. Don't miss it! Call ahead: 505-537-3381

"How big is it?" http://www.wnmu.edu/univ/sntarita.htm

"How did that copper get there?" http://www.huntel.com/~artpike/rita9.htm

"More land…More ore…" Proposal submitted for expansion onto BLM property.Read about POOs and FONSIs at: http://www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-IMPACT/1997/August/Day-14/i21542.htm

The town: "The town that vanished into thin air." http://www.zianet.com/snm/santarit.htm

Photo archives: http://www.huntel.com/~artpike/rita7.htm

Other mining towns:

Hanover: (copper under ground) http://www.huntel.com/~artpike/rita8.htm

Pinos Altos: (gold in them hills?)

http://www.zianet.com/snm/pa.htm http://www.zianet.com/snm/pabob.htm

Coming soon:

Mogollon: (the town and how to say it)

Tyrone: (city in the desert)

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