ECCENTRIC MINING.

Dunstan Times, Issue 2481, 17 May 1909, Page 8

ECCENTRIC MINING.

(By Donald Pearson.)

The town of Bend, Oregon, remote from a railroad, and situated l in a desert region recently made habitable by the introduction of irrigation, is furnished with ice from a quarry. Bend is in Crook County, and Crook County is a strange place. Along its southern border extends a great laval bed, drier than any parchment the mustiest library ever contained. Throughout this bed no water is visible for miles, yet it may bo heard gurgling tantalisingly somewhere below one’s feet. Stranger than this, however, is the fact that at an elevation of four thousand two hundred feet, in the depths of a cave, is a hoard of ice more precious, in that arid region, than gold. The presence of this treasure so far above the sea-level and at so remote a distance from the nearest visible water supply—fifteen miles—has puzzled geologists. There seems to bo but one explanation. The Deschutes River twists its devious course, for some distance, at a greater elevation than the ice cave. The soil of this region, of volcanic origin, is a porous ashen substance. Perhaps from the Deschutes, water slowly soaks through these fifteen miles of peculiar soil to the ice cave on a lower level. Be that as it may, aw owtcvpvisiwg private company already has possession of this gift of nature, and is putting it to good commercial use. The cave is entered by a steep declivity of some fifty feet in extent. Thence one steps directly upon tho floor of the outer ice chamber. Through a narrow opening the inner chamber is entered.

The method of marketing the ice is as follows: Huge cubes or blocks, varying in weight from two hundred to five hundred pounds, are cut directly from the floor of ice. These aro dragged to the foot of the declivity, where they are hauled up a wooden chute by means of cords, and placed upon the wagons waiting to receive them. One wagon can carry two tons, and with blocks of tho proportions that are hewed it requires but a few minutes to secure a load.

Meantime a curious thing 3S taking place. In the course of a few hours it will bo found that the cavity made by cutting out the block of ice has filled with water and that this has, in. turn, frozen. Thus an inexhaustible supply seems to have been provided by nature for the men who quarry it. Rubber is an article which hitherto has had no association with mining operations. Yet, now that the supply from the usual .source, the rubber tree, is beginning to be unequal to the demand, it seems probable that in the future we shall have to obtain a substitute from the depths of the earth. “Mineral rubber” is the term applied to a substance dug chiefly in three places in the world: Coorony, South Australia; Altcland, South Australia, and Wasatch County, Utah. Its scientific name' is clatcrite, and in color and elasticity, and in other characteristics also, it bears a close resemblance to india rubber or caoutchouc. Nature seems to have been sparing in her deposits of this substance, for it is far from common. First discovered at Angers, France, later the three chief fields mentioned were discovered and opened up. Though this product has many of the qualities of rubber, chemists and manufacturers were for a long time baffled in their attempts to put it to the use they most desired as a substitute for rubber.

In 1907 the United States imported fifty

million pounds of crude rubber, at a purchase price of Idol, a pound, almost irrespective of quality. Yet this amount hardly half-supplied the national demand. Annually, beginning many years back, the shortage has increased until the longprophesied rubber famine begins to loom ominously near. Worst of all, the situation is not improved with the scientific cultivation of the rubber tree. The new uses for rubber are multiplying too rapidly for the professional planter to keep pace. The growing of rubber trees is a slow process. It takes twelve years from the planting of a tree to the day when the cultivator may hope to tap it. Moreover, at this first tapping not more than two ounces of the gum should be extracted, it the plant is to flourish. To produce a ton of rubber by this method requires the product of sixteen thousand young trees and a period of twelve years. Thus if, for the year 1921, wo should wish to make provision for the fifty million pounds, or twenty-five thousand tons, wo use at the present time, we should be obliged to plant in the year 1909, four hundred million rubber plants. But some of these would not come to maturity. Moreover, undersupplied as we now are with the elastic substance, and compelled to eke out the comparatively scanty quantity with various adulterants, in all probability twice fifty million pounds, in twelve years’ time would hardly suffice. It one-fifth of the trees planted die, that would mean the setting out this spring of perhaps one billion rubber trees. Many substitutes have been tried. In England alone the records of the patent ollice show that over three hundred in-

venters believe they have found something that will take the place of the real article. All these, for one reason or another, seem to have failed. A combination of elaterite with a new mineral known as “tabby ite - ’ —named after old Chief Tabby of the Unita Indians, who revealed the deposit—appears to have brought about the long-sought result. In chemical terminology, elaterite is a- hydro-carbon, belonging to what is known as the elastic group. Tabbyite is also a hydro-carbon, of the resinous group. The amalgamated product of the two can not be distinguished by any ordinary test from the crude genuine rubber. All the requisite characteristics are there. The texture is the same, as is also the bounce. Ignited, a piece of the tabbyite-elateritc substance gives off the peculiarly pungentodor of burning caoutchouc. Chemical analysis reveals about the proper proportion of constituents for rubber: 87.12 per cent, carbon; 12.88 per cent, hydrogen. A factory is now being built at Salt Lake City. Already rubber matting, rubber flooring, belting, vulcanised goods, especially those used for insulation purposes, have been manufactured, and are ■giving satisfaction to those using them. \Vnile the elasticity of the best grades of caoutchouc has not yet been produced, laboratory experiments made in Salt Lake City have given great encouragement in this direction. In making the tabbyiteclatcrite amalgamation, one part of the former substance with two of the latter is combined.

So far the United States has a natural monopoly in tabbyite, as the only vein located up to the present time is in Utah. The deposits of this mineral are estimated at one million tons. They are comparatively easy of access. Deep canyons cut at right angles across the beds, offering broad faces of the mineral to the miners.

There are other uses for claterite be sides that of a' substitute for rubber

Eldridge’s rcjxirt, “Asphalt and Bituminous Bocks,” gives these: “For preventing electrolytic action on iron plates of ships’ bottoms; for coating barbed-wire fencing; for acid-proof lining for chemical tanks; for coating seal walls of brick and masonry; • for covering facing brick; for roofing pitch; for insulating electric wires; for smokestack paint; for lubicants for heavy machinery; for preserving iron pipes from corrosion and acids; for coating poles, posts, and ties; for teredo-proof pile coating.” Evidently claterite is a useful product.

Centenaries, bicentenaries, and tercentenaries are quite the rage. Every week wo do homage to the memoiy i f some great man whose genius the world has taken one, two or throe centuries to recognise. It is somewhat lato and often ridiculous.