Fashion Notes - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

century ago. Hidden in the high sagebrush
are old steel safes and milling
machinery, and from the mine dumps
and bordering canyonsides rockhounds
harvest cerussite, sphalerite, pyrites,
brachiopods and trilobites.
Elsewhere in the Battle Mountain
vicinity, collectors have found cuprite,
chalcocite, arsenic, bismuth, bornite,
stibnite, copper, fluorspar, scheelite,
titanium placer, manganese, rhodochrosite,
uranium, garnets, barite, antimony,
coal, jade and calcite crystals.
Along the east edge of Buffalo Valley
are several small dead volcanic craters,
and in their red cinders and black lava
I have collected tiny "Nevada diamonds"
(obsidian) hard enough to
scratch windshield glass. Farther south
at Dacie Creek is petrified wood.
Every summer for the past dozen
years, I've made at least one collecting
or exploring trip in the Battle Mountain
area. Soon after arriving last
June, I ran into my friend Bill Swack-
hamer, a local merchant who knows
this area like the inside of his coat
pocket. It was he who told me of the
old Silver Cloud Mine.
"It's about 35 miles from here over
a good dirt road that leads through
some fine cattle country. At the Silver
Cloud there's probably 100,000 tons
of white opalite heavily streaked with
rose-red cinnabar," Bill said.
"Be sure to take water and plenty
of blankets," he added. "The elevation's
high up there, and the nights
are chilly—even in June."
Early next morning I left Battle
Mountain on a graveled road that intersects
U.S. 40 directly across from
the Swackhamer store. Soon after
bumping over the Southern Pacific
railroad tracks, the road crosses the
Humboldt and embarks upon an
earthen dike that carries it through
a wide slough bordering the river.
Spread over hundreds of acres is a
sheet of dead water so shallow that
PERMISSION TO
COLLECT SPECIMENS
Soon after Nell Murbarger
made this trip to the Silver Cloud
Mine, the Big Butte Mining Company
resumed mining operations
there — but rockhounds are
welcome. Here is a letter from
General Manager E. T. Carlou
outlining the mining concern's
policy:
Battle Mountain, Nevada
February 24, 1958
Dear Miss Murbarger:
Yes, you may run this story
about our beautiful rock. As
long as rockhounds don't haul
off highgrade — some runs 200
pounds to the ton—they will be
welcome.
Beautiful jewelry has been
made from some of our rock,
and we will be glad to select
samples and save them for rock
cutters. Yours very truly,
E. T. CARLOV
General Manager
BIG BUTTE MINING CO.
much of its surface is whiskered with
tall thin cattails and reeds. In this
unstable world live a multitude of redwinged
blackbirds and lesser numbers
of their gaudily-plumed relatives, the
yellow-headed blackbirds. Swinging
from reeds along both sides of the
road were their neat pouch-shaped
grass nests, and only the screaming
avocets and killdeers could make themselves
heard in the uproarious bedlam
created by the ringing "ok-a-lee" cries
of the male redwings and the rustyhinge
croaking of the yellow-heads.
Long-legged herons and egrets, each
ingeniously balanced on one foot,
scanned the water for food, and hordes
of mudhens and ducks paddled silently
through watery lanes in the reed forest.
Small islands protruding from the
surface of the slough were covered
with impenetrable 12-foot high thickets
of wild pink roses so laden with
bloom that the area smelled like the
inside of a florist shop.
After five miles of alternately traveling
between aquatic sloughs and arid
alkaline flats speckled with greasewood,
my road crossed the Western
Pacific tracks at the North Battle
Mountain siding, and turned northward
up the trough of a wide dry valley.
Extending west 30 miles to the
Sonoma Range, and north even farther
to the Osgood and Santa Rosa moun-
16 DESERT MAGAZINE