Roughing It · Chapter
XXXVI explained
The narrator describes the grueling process of silver milling, from breaking ore to amalgamation and fire-assay, highlighting the tedious labor, the tricks of speculative mining, and his brief stint in the mill before quitting over a wage d
What happens
The narrator describes the grueling process of silver milling, from breaking ore to amalgamation and fire-assay, highlighting the tedious labor, the tricks of speculative mining, and his brief stint in the mill before quitting over a wage dispute.
Themes in this chapter
Work and Labor
The chapter details the exhausting, repetitive work of milling silver, emphasizing the physical and mental toll.
Get-Rich-Quick Schemes and Speculation
The narrator's absurd wage demand and the practice of rigged fire-assays illustrate the speculative frenzy.
Humor and Exaggeration
The narrator's hyperbolic request for $400,000 a month and the tale of the grindstone assay add comic relief.
Characters to notice
- The Narrator
Works in the mill, describes the labor, quits after asking for an exorbitant raise.
Key passages
“There is nothing so aggravating as silver milling. There never was any idle time in that mill. There was always something to do. It is a pity that Adam could not have gone straight out of Eden into a quartz mill, in order to understand the full force of his doom to 'earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.'”
Silver milling is endlessly frustrating and busy; the narrator jokes that Adam should have been sent to a quartz mill to truly grasp the curse of hard labor.
Highlights the theme of work and labor with a biblical allusion.
“I told my employer I could not stay longer without an advance in my wages; that I liked quartz milling, indeed was infatuated with it; ... still, I felt constrained to ask an increase of salary. He said he was paying me ten dollars a week, and thought it a good round sum. How much did I want? I said about four hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was about all I could reasonably ask, considering the hard times.”
The narrator quits his mill job after jokingly demanding a massive raise from $10 a week to $400,000 a month.
Illustrates the theme of get-rich-quick schemes and humor.
“The sagacious reader will know now, without being told, that the speculative miner, in getting a 'fire-assay' made of a piece of rock from his mine (to help him sell the same), was not in the habit of picking out the least valuable fragment of rock on his dump-pile, but quite the contrary.”
Miners would choose the richest rock samples for fire-assays to inflate the value of their mines and deceive buyers.
Exposes the fraudulent practices in speculative mining.