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Willoughby: Twelve hundred pages of useful information

Aspen silver ore from Midnight Mine.
Tim Willoughby/Courtesy photo

You hear complaints about what our government bureaus produce, but I have evidence of the contrary: a twelve-hundred-page book produced by the U.S. Department of The Interior in 1968 titled, “A Dictionary of Mining, Mineral, and Related Terms.”

I used to frequent bookstores that featured a section of books about the West, many going back as far as the California Gold Rush. Most of them are COVID casualties and are now closed, including the one in Nevada where I found this treasure.

If you love rocks and minerals, you may have toured the Denver Museum of Natural History, The Los Angeles Museum of Natural History, or the Smithsonian, which have magnificent collections. Sections are sometimes organized with different versions of the same mineral, like zinc, and you are amazed by the different names and the length of them. You get to the zinc listings in this dictionary near the very end, with nearly 80 words related to zinc. Here are three: zirconium dioxide, zirconia baddeleyite, and zinc sulfide monohydrate.



If you took a geology class in college, you likely spent some time learning how to identify rocks and minerals but in their simplest forms usually with simple names, like recognizing sulfur from its yellow color. I think I might have enjoyed the subject less if I had been required to know the differences among sulfoarsenite (sulfur with arsenic), sulfuret  (chiefly applied in mining to auriferous pyrites), or sulfo-antimonite (sulfur with antimony).

My father knew silver in all of its local forms and many details as he did assay work. But I doubt that even he would not know how many different silver ores there are. Native silver he knew, but acanthite, argentite, brongniardite, bromyrite, calaverite, cerargyrite, dyscasite, embolite, freibergite, freieslebenite, hessite, petzite, polybasite, proustite, stephanite, stetefeldite, stromeyerite, and xanthoconite?




Cornish miners were a large part of the mining workforce in most mining towns/camps. They brought their mining terms with them from Cornwall, and many were picked up here. The dictionary has many of them. “Bal” is Cornish for mine or a group of mines. You will see “adit” in many local accounts; it is a word describing the tunnel entrance. The name for a man-made underground cavity was “gunnies.” A larger cavity, usually going vertically, was termed a “stope.” An area of underground mining is referred to as “workings,” more commonly used for coal mines.

The word “discovery” has many meanings, but the mining one, in this dictionary, is quite detailed: “The term has a technical meaning in mining. It may be defined as knowledge of the presence of the valuable minerals within the lines of the location or in such proximity thereto as to justify a reasonable belief in their existence. But in all cases, there must be a discovery of mineral, in both lode and placer claims, as distinguished from mere indications of mineral.”

Here is how The Aspen Times used the word in 1890: “The recent discovery in the second level of the Bushwacker looks fully as well as at any time since the ore was met with. Several loads of ore have been shipped, and there is as much in sight as there was at first. The grade of this mineral is very good. When it was first opened an average sample returned 108 ounces, and on Wednesday an average across a face of four feet went 228 ounces. It is thought that it will mill run at least 100 ounces!”

The dictionary qualifies the use. The Times description of the Bushwacker might fit the definition, but it should be pointed out that the author, B. Clark Wheeler, was both the owner of the Times and a major owner in the Bushwacker.