The Best Little Cinnabar Mine In Nevada

This unique, abandoned cinnabar mine in Nevada had been on my list for years and so I was quite happy to finally be able to explore it… Cinnabar, of course, is the only important ore for mercury (also known less commonly as quicksilver). Mercury’s historical use in everything from treatment for syphilis to dental amalgam to thermometers to, perhaps most relevant to this channel, the separation of gold from stream sediments and crushed ore is widely known. And, in fact, cinnabar has been mined and heated in furnaces for thousands of years in order to obtain mercury.

However, cinnabar was also widely used in the past. The bright red color was attractive for use as pigments and the physical properties of cinnabar made it appealing to carve into jewelry and ornaments. To quote directly from an article by Hobart M. King, “People began using cinnabar for pigments thousands of years ago in Italy, Greece, Spain, China, Turkey, and the Mayan countries of South America. Through time, people in almost every country where volcanoes are present discovered cinnabar and realized its utility as a pigment. Cinnabar is one of a very small number of minerals that was independently discovered, processed and utilized by ancient people in many parts of the world.

Cinnabar was mined at the volcano, ground into a very fine powder and then mixed with liquids to produce many types of paint. The bright red pigments known as ‘vermilion’ and ‘Chinese red’ were originally made from cinnabar.

Cinnabar has been especially popular for making red lacquer in China. Its use in lacquer has declined because of its toxicity, but some use of cinnabar in lacquer continues. Cinnabar has also been used in powdered form for ritual blessings and burials. Powdered cinnabar was used as a cosmetic in many parts of the world for thousands of years.”

Did you guys know all of that? I didn’t until I started researching the topic for this video…

The operation of this particular cinnabar mine started in the early 1900s and it was worked very intermittently until the early 1940s. The records report that less than 400 flasks of mercury were produced in total... So, no one got rich off of this mine. Interestingly, when the potential for mercury production was “discovered” at this mine, an abandoned prospect was already present. Obviously, someone had already noticed the unique mineralization at this site. However, whether they were after gold or recognized it as mercury, but didn’t have the means to process it is unknown.

I didn’t include it because the video was already getting long, but where the road switched back on itself to reach the top of the ore bin and the main haulage adit, there were the remains of a structure that included a can dump. So, it seems likely that that structure was the miner’s bunkhouse. The back end of an old flatbed truck and a vehicle seat were really all that was left at the presumed bunkhouse. It seemed the building had been stripped clean before collapsing. Set into the hillside next to the downed structure was a small wooden structure, which may have been used for refrigeration as it is extremely unlikely that dynamite would have been stored that closely to the living quarters. However, that is predicated on the assumption that those were actually living quarters, which is entirely based on the presence of the can dump. However, it is possible that the miners ate their lunch and drank their beers and such at the workshop and pitched the cans over the side. However, it seems equally unlikely that a dynamite storage locker would have been next to a workshop. Boxes of dynamite next to a blacksmith’s forge? I don’t think so. I'll stick with the bunkhouse/refrigeration theory.

My apologies to "The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas" whose name inexplicably popped into my head when I was trying to think of a title for this video...

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And a small gear update here: https://bit.ly/2p6Jip6

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Thanks for watching!

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Growing up in California’s “Gold Rush Country” made it easy to take all of the history around us for granted. However, abandoned mine sites have a lot working against them – nature, vandals, scrappers and various government agencies… The old prospectors and miners that used to roam our lonely mountains and toil away deep underground are disappearing quickly as well.

These losses finally caught our attention and we felt compelled to make an effort to document as many of the ghost towns and abandoned mines that we could before that colorful niche of our history is gone forever.

I hope you’ll join us on these adventures!

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