Robert Horton (1926-), the son of Frank Horton, a prominent miner in Nevada, spent many of his early days in mining camps and learned about mining processes at a young age. After his enlistment in the Navy, Horton entered the Mackay School of Mines in 1946. He started his career in mining at the U.S. Geological Survey, and over his long career in mining would work for the Nevada Bureau of Mines, for the Bendix Corporation, and for himself as an independent contractor. Horton was interviewed by Victoria Ford in 1999. You just named several serious issues for mining in this country: the environmental impacts, exporting those impacts into other countries, and also exporting those jobs into other countries. I’ve heard various people say that the job opportunities are not here. They are in China, or they are in South America, or they are in Africa. Yes, because companies can’t afford the expense of not necessarily complying with the environmental regulations. It’s complying with the unknown, because the rules keep changing all the time. If you fund an exploration program in the United States and you find something, there’s absolutely no guarantee that you’re going to be able to develop it. Mr. Babbitt, or some other Secretary of the Interior, may just foreclose on it, and you can’t do that. You have several risks overseas. [laughter] Those governments may nationalize your mine. Now, that’s happened in the past. Many countries in the world now are open to mining, and mining companies are again outside of the U.S. They weren’t for many years. Nevada for many, many years remained as the sole place where miners could come explore and have some certainty that they’d be able to develop their properties, but that is even changing, as the public from my point of view gets sold a bill of goods. But you don’t find the public interested in hearing that, either. I’m not out on the streets yelling, because it’s very difficult for the mining industry to sell something to the public. Advertising kills you. When you see an advertisement about agriculture, it’s quite likely that what you’ll see in the picture is a farm table with a checkered tablecloth on it, the father in bib overalls, a girl, and two boys. The boys are in bib overalls, and the mother is pouring a glass of milk, and that’s agriculture. For mining, it’s some poor bastard that just came out of a coal mine. He’s black from head to foot, and the mine is blowing up in back of him. That’s the Americans’ picture of mining. Some of that was real. In the five years before the formation of the Bureau of Mines in 1910, 13,000 miners were killed underground. Since I've been in the mining industry, most of the mining has been underground. It then went to open pit. Now, open pit’s been going for a long time. Jackling started open pit with the Bingham Pit out of Salt Lake City. That was a Kennecott operation. But open pits in Nevada followed closely out of Ely, at Ruth, Nevada. For many years, copper mining was about the only open-pit activity, because they were the only large ore bodies. We did not know of these large gold ore bodies, so most all metal mining—leads, zincs—was underground in smaller deposits or veins. It was underground, and it wasn’t until some of these very large deposits were discovered that gold mining took off, and I can think of one lead and zinc operation, largely zinc, that’s open pit. The copper still stays open pit. So it has changed in that affair. The mines were quite small, up until these huge gold mines of today. Even the Comstock was small. The amount of tons per day produced underground was rather small. From the beginning of time until World War II, I guess, a miner was a fellow that could go underground, rig up a drill, drill holes in a face, load them with powder, blast them, muck them out, extend the track and the pipes there and the water line, set up, drill another round. Perhaps two people at the face—and those were miners. There are no miners in that sense today, unless it’s an old prospector out someplace. [Now you have] a fellow sitting on a large jumbo, where he’s twenty feet from the face, and he’s running the drills hydraulically. Somebody else comes in and loads it. Somebody else fires it. Somebody else comes in with a mucking machine and mucks it out. So they’re underground miners, they might be multi-skilled—I wouldn’t sell them short, but they’re only using one skill at a time now. It has to be large scale now. In 1930, it wasn’t unusual for a gold mining company to be mining a vein that might be four-feet wide, dipping sixty degrees, two miners working on it, and they’re taking it out to a little fifty-ton mill, or, more likely, taking it down, loading it on a railroad car, and shipping it off to a smelter. Well, now there’s probably no smelters he could ship it to. It would cost too much per ton to mine it in that small quantity now, so the small mines are just uneconomic. If you can’t run it large scale and keep your costs down, you can’t do it. |