THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER

Herbert Hoover began his mining career very simply and practically by taking his place as a real workman in a real mine, with no favors shown, following in this the emphatic advice given by Dr. Branner to every student graduating from his department. He went up into the mining region near Grass Valley in the Sierras where he had already studied with Waldemar Lindgren, and became a regular miner, a boy-man with pick and shovel working long hours underground or sometimes on the surface about the plant. But always he had his eyes wide open and always he was learning. He preferred the underground work because he wanted first to know more about the actual occurrence of the ore in the earth than about the mill processes of extracting the mineral from it.

Here he worked for several months, and gradually rose to the position of night shift-boss or gang foreman. But he began to realize that he was exhausting the learning opportunities of this particular place and kind of work, and so one night deep down in the mine, when for sudden lack of ore-cars or power or some other essential, work was held up for the last half hour of his shift, he went off into a warm corner, curled himself up in a nice clean wheelbarrow and slept away the last half hour of his pick and shovel experience.

He had decided to get into association, some way, with the best mining engineer on the Coast. There was no question about who this was at that time. It was Louis Janin in San Francisco. So he appeared at Mr. Janin’s office as a candidate for a job, any job so that it was a job under Louis Janin.

But the famous engineer, well disposed as he was toward giving intelligent, earnest young men who wanted to become mining engineers, a chance, had to explain that not only was there no vacant place in his staff but that a long waiting list would have to be gone through before Hoover’s turn could come. He added, as a joke, that he needed an additional typist in his office, but of course . The candidate for a job interrupted. “All right, I’ll take it. I can’t come for a few days, but I’ll come next Tuesday, say.” Janin was a little breathless at the rapidity with which things seemed to get settled by this boyish, very boyish, young man, but as they were apparently really settled he could only say, “All right.”

Now the reason that the new typewriter boy could not begin until next Tuesday this was on a Friday was that he had in the meantime to learn to write on a typewriter! Trivial matter, of course, in connection with becoming a mining engineer, but apparently necessary. So learning what make of machine he would have to use in the office, he stopped, on his way to his room, at a typewriter shop, rented a machine of proper make, and by Tuesday had learned to use it after a fashion.

That kind of boy could not remain for long a typist in the office of a discerning man like Louis. Perhaps certain idiosyncrasies of spelling and a certain originality of execution on the machine helped bring about a change of duties. But chiefly it was because of a better reason. This reason was made especially clear by an incident connected with an important mining case in which Janin was serving as expert for the side represented by Judge Curtis Lindley, famous mining lawyer of San Francisco. The papers which indicated the line of argument which Judge Lindley and Mr. Janin were intending to follow came to Hoover’s desk to be copied. As he wrote he read with interest. The mine was in the Grass Valley region that he knew so well. He not only copied but he remembered and thought. The result was that when the typewriter boy delivered the papers to the mining engineer they were accompanied by the casual statement that the great expert and the learned attorney were all wrong in the line of procedure they were preparing to take! And he proceeded to explain why, first to Mr. Janin’s indignant surprise but next to his great interest, because the explanation involved the elucidation of certain geologic facts not yet published to the world, which the typewriter boy had himself helped to discover during his work in the Grass Valley region.

The outcome was that Janin and his new boy went around together to Judge Lindley’s office where after due deliberation the line of argument was altered. The further result was that the boy parted from his typewriter, first to begin acting as assistant to various older staff men on trips to various parts of the Coast for mine examinations, then to make minor examinations alone, and finally to handle bigger ones. The letters from the young mining engineer to the girl of the geology department, still at Stanford, came now in swift succession from Nevada, Wyoming, and Idaho, and then very soon after from Arizona and New Mexico. Little mines did not require much time for examination and reports signed “Hoover” came into Janin’s office with bewildering rapidity. Janin liked these reports; they not only showed geological and mining knowledge, but they showed a shrewd business sense. The reporter seemed never to lose the perspective of cost and organization possibilities in relation to the probable mineral richness of the prospects. And the reports said everything they had to say in very few and very clear words.

Herbert Hoover was not only moving fast; he was learning fast, and he was rising fast in Janin’s estimation. He had a regular salary or guarantee now with a certain percentage of all the fees collected by Janin’s office from the properties he examined. What he was earning now I do not know, but we may be sure it was considerably more than the forty-five dollars a month which he had begun with as typewriter boy, a few months before.

The work was not entirely limited to the examination of prospects and mines. In one case at least it included actual mine development and management. Mr. Janin had in some way taken over, temporarily for such work was not much to his liking: he preferred to be an expert consultant rather than a mine manager a small mine of much value but much complication near Carlisle, New Mexico. This he turned over to his enterprising assistant to look after.

It was Hoover’s first experience of the kind, and it was made a rather hectic one by conditions not technically a regular part of mining. The town, or “camp,” was a wild one with drunken Mexicans having shooting-bees every pay day and the local jail established at the bottom of an abandoned shaft, not too deep, into which the prisoners were let down by windlass and bucket. It was an operation fairly safe if the sheriff and his assistants were not too exhilarated to manage the windlass properly, or the malefactors, too drunk to hang on to the bucket. Otherwise, more or less regrettable incidents happened. Also, it led to a rather puzzling situation when the sheriff had to take care of his first woman prisoner, a negro lady of generous dimensions and much volubility.

But the mine was well managed and Hoover acquired more merit with his employer. And soon came the new chance which led to much bigger things. It was now the spring of 1897, two years after Hoover’s graduation, and the time of the great West Australia mining boom. English companies were sending out many engineers, old and young, to investigate and handle mining properties in the new field, and were looking everywhere for competent men. Janin was asked by one of these London firms to recommend someone to them. He talked it over with Hoover, telling him that it might be a great opportunity. It might, of course, not be; it would depend on the prospect and the man who handled it. Janin expressed his entire confidence in the young man before him, and his belief that the opportunity was greater than any the Pacific Coast then had to offer. He would be more than glad to keep Hoover with him, but he wanted to be fair to him and his future. The young man was all for giving hostages to fortune, and so the recommendation, the offer, and the acceptance flew by cable between San Francisco and London, and Hoover prepared to start at once to England for instructions, as had been stipulated in the offer.

Just before he started, however, Janin caused him some uneasiness by saying, “Now look here, Hoover, I have cabled London swearing to your full technical qualifications, and I am not afraid of your letting me down on that. But these conservative Londoners have stipulated that you should be thirty-five years old. I have wired that I was sorry to have to tell them that you are not quite thirty-three. Don’t forget that my reputation depends on your looking thirty-three by the time you get to London!” And Hoover had not yet reached his twenty-third birthday, and looked at least two years younger even than that. He began growing a beard on his way across the continent.

The London firm had stipulated, too, that their new man should be unmarried. Hoover was still that, although he had begun to get impatient about what seemed to him an unnecessary delay in carrying out his decision already made in college. As a matter of fact, there was still no definite engagement between him and the girl of the geology department, but there was an informal understanding that some day there might be a formal one. So Hoover appeared before the head of the great London house perhaps the greatest mining firm in the world at that time without encumbering wife and with the highest of recommendations, but with a singularly youthful appearance for an experienced mining engineer of thirty-five. In fact, the great man after staring hard at his new acquisition burst out with English directness, “How remarkable you Americans are. You have not yet learned to grow old, either individually or as a nation. Now you, for example, do not look a day over twenty-five. How the devil do you do it?”

The days were days of wonder for the homegrown young Quaker engineer. Across America, across the ocean, then the stupendous metropolis of the world and the great business men of the “city,” with week-ends under the wing of the big mining financier at beautiful English country houses with people whose names spelled history. And then the P. and O. boat to Marseilles, Naples, Port Said, Aden, and Colombo, and finally to be put ashore in a basket on a rope cable over a very rough sea at Albany in West Australia. There he was consigned, with the dozen other first-class passengers, mining adventurers like himself, to quarantine in a tent hospital on a sand spit out in the harbor with the thermometer never registering below three figures, even at night.

And then he came to the Australian mine fields themselves in a desert where the temperature can keep above one hundred degrees day and night for three weeks together. Also there is wind, scorching wind carrying scorching dust. And surface water discoverable only every fifty or sixty miles. Of course one expects a desert to be hot and dry that’s why it is a desert but the West Australian desert rather overemphasizes the necessities of the case. It is a deadly monotonous country although not wholly bare; there is much low brush just high enough to hide you from others only half a mile away; a place easy to get lost in, and hard to get found in when once lost.

All of this desert was being prospected by thousands of men of a dozen nationalities, all seeking and suffering, for gold. The railroad had got in only as far as Coolgardie, but the prospectors were far beyond the rail head. They carried their water bags with enough in them to keep themselves and their horses alive between water holes. In the real “back blocks” they could not carry enough for horses, so they used camels with jangling bells and gaudy trappings of gay greens, orange, scarlet, and vivid blues, making strange contrasts with the blue-gray bush. Along the few main roads moved dusty stages, light, low, almost spring-less three-seated vehicles, with thin sun-tops overhead and boxes and bags in front, behind and underneath, and all swarmed about by pestilential flies, millions of flies, sprung from nowhere to harass the thirsty, weary travelers.

But only the agents and engineers rode in the stages; it cost too much for the little prospectors, the “dry-washers,” who carried their few provisions and scanty outfit in packs on their backs, and tramped the trails, stopping here and there to toss the dry soil into the air and watch for the gold flakes to fall into the pan while the lighter earth blew off in the wind.

In the camp were gathered a motley crew, mostly hard, reckless men, who drank and bet their gold dust away as fast as they found it. But everywhere they were finding gold, and all the time came new reports and rumors of more farther on. The headquarters of Hoover’s employers were in Coolgardie when he arrived, but were soon moved on to Kalgoorlie, following the railroad. The offices were in one of the three or four stone, two-story buildings, which lifted themselves proudly above the ruck of sweltering little toy-like houses of corrugated iron. Forty thousand people were supposed to be living in this “camp” at one time, buying water at two shillings six pence the gallon, which was cheap they were paying seven shillings in some other camps. At first it was all brought by rail from the coastal plains four hundred miles away, but when the mines began to get down they struck water at a few hundred feet. But it was salt, and expensive condensing plants had to be set up, which kept the price still high. Coolgardie once boasted of having the “biggest condensing plant in the world,” with rows on rows of enormous cylindrical corrugated iron tanks lying on their sides, over acres of ground, with all the pumps and boilers and steam pipes to keep these tanks supplied. Water was cheap there, only twelve or fifteen shillings the hundred gallons.

But out in the prospects and on the trails there was no such aqueous luxury. There was no water for washing and little to drink. And that little was mostly drunk as a terrible black tea, like lye, heated and re-heated, with now a little more water added, now another handful of leaves. I have a well-vouched-for story of an Australian girl who went into this gold-paradise with her husband who was manager, at a large salary, of one of the first mines. She used to take a cupful of water and carefully wash the baby and afterward the little girl, and then herself. After that it was saved for the husband to rinse the worst off when he came home from the mine. But he could have an additional half cup to finish with because he was so dirty. And they tried not to use soap with it so that finally, after letting it settle, it could be added to the horses’ drinking water. It was not that the family could not afford to pay for water, but there was simply no water to buy.

Into this cheerful hell came the young Quaker engineer, from the heaven of California and the “city” offices of London where sat the big men who were intent on having their share of the big things in West Australia. He was to do his best for his particular big men, but how he was to do it was mostly for him to find out. His firm had already acquired interests in several promising properties. He was to help develop these mines and perhaps to find new ones to be taken on. A junior member of his firm was already on the ground when Hoover arrived, but he remained only a few months. It was a long way to London and Hoover could get few instructions. It was up to him. It was a hard life with many opportunities to go wrong in any of many ways. But he kept his brain clear, his body and soul clean, and just everlastingly worked.

There were all kinds of work to do, and all sorts of new things to learn about mines and mining. The ore occurred in the rock in a manner different from that in any other known gold field, so finding it and getting it out, and then getting the mineral out of the strange new kind of ore, required resourcefulness, “original research,” as the scientists say, and constructive imagination. And the technical problems of discovering and manipulation once solved, there was still needed organization, system, and administration to make the mine a paying one.

But all these things were exactly the young engineer’s specialties. He was from the beginning, as we already know, and conspicuously is today, resourceful, original, capable of prompt decision, an organizer and administrator. Although there were many trained engineers in West Australia, there was no one to equal him in these specialties of his. And very soon his firm’s mines, which had so far had little benefit of executive ability coupled with technical knowledge and originality, began to pay and their stocks went up on the London market which was the criterion of success in the eyes of the men in the “city.” About the stock ratings Hoover knew little and perhaps cared less. He did care, however, about making good mines out of bad ones. And that was exactly what he was doing.

And very soon he did the other successful thing that the big men in London hoped for and that he kept always working for. He uncovered the big new mine. He had turned up several promising leads but their development proved disappointing. But the “Sons of Gwalia” realized his hopes from the beginning. It was out from Kalgoorlie four or five days hard riding, near a smaller camp called Leonora. He went out and took personal charge of the opening up and equipping of the whole mine and plant, living in a little “tin” house and gathering about him a staff of the best of the firm’s assistants collected from all over the Colony. It was hot, although the climbing mercury usually stopped at about one hundred degrees. But that only further inflamed the enthusiasm of the group. They had the real thing, and they had a real leader a very boyish looking boy of scant twenty-five. They forgot to watch the thermometer. They were more interested in water and transportation and labor and all the other things that are as necessary to a good mine as the gold in the ore-veins.

Occasionally, however, they had some relaxation. For one thing, they thought sometimes about food. One of the men had his wife with him, and she imported chickens and later even ducks which never, however, set web-foot in water. And they had a garden because they decided they were so in need of green vegetables. They turned a little priceless water from the condenser into the garden; but not enough for the vegetables and too much for the accountant’s books. After estimating that the one undersized cabbage they raised cost them L65 worth of water, he discouraged further gardening.

They had also a pet emu. So did the wife of the manager of another mine near-by. They used to arrange to have the émus meet occasionally and there was always a glorious fight. Once when they had got the lady’s emu over for a visit, one of the Australian boys thought it would look amusing in trousers. So he took off his overalls and after immense exertion got them on the legs of the creature, with the straps securely fastened over its neck and back. But the great bird became so enraged that the men could not safely get near enough to it to get off its clothing, and even its mistress feared ever to approach it again. There was also a pet goat named Sydney that ate several boxes of matches and had to have its internal fires extinguished by the only available liquid, which was the tinned butter that had yielded to the one hundred and ten degrees. Sydney lived through the experience but had always after that a delicate interior and was petted more than ever in consequence. And there was a tennis court occasionally wetted down with the beer that always went stale while they were saving it for state occasions. It was all a happy, glorious time because they had discovered and were making one of the great mines of West Australia.

Hoover was now twenty-four, and a man of large reputation in mining circles in Australia and London, with a salary to correspond. He had spent about twenty-four months in West Australia, although they ran over all of one and parts of two other years, so that he is generally credited with having remained there three years. And he could have gone on among the Australian mines for as many years as he liked, for the big men in London now fully realized that they had in this young American engineer the unusual man, and that his only limit in Australia would be the limit of the possible. But the new opportunity and the new experience were calling.

Just about this time a young Chinaman of royal family in Peking had made a successful coup d’etat and had formed a cabinet for the first time in the history of China, and this cabinet decided, naturally also for the first time in the history of China, to effect a cooerdinated control of all the mines of the Empire. There was, therefore, established a Department of Mines, with a wily old Chinaman, named Chang Yen Mow, at its head. He understood that Chinamen knew little about mining, and hence decided to find a foreigner to help him manage the mines of the Empire. He also thought that a foreigner, thus attached as an official to his department, could be of particular help to him in dealing with other foreigners inclined to exploit Chinese mines more for their own benefit than China’s. This official was to be in a position much like that of an undersecretary in a cabinet department, and was to be given the title, in the Chinese equivalent, of “Director-General of Mines.” He was to have a salary appropriate to such a large title. With all this decided, it only remained to find the proper foreigner, who should be a man who knew much about mines and was honest. There was, as we know, just such a man in Western Australia.