Proceedings

of the Tomsk Technological Institute

of Emperor Nicholas II,

Vol. 9, 1908. No. 1.

IV.

L. L. Tove.

Report on a Journey to Inspect the Mining Enterprises of the Altai District

in 1905.

1–13.

REPORT

on a trip to inspect certain mining enterprises of the Altai District

in 1905.

In connection with a trip through the mining districts of the Tomsk and Yenisei provinces, the Council of the Tomsk Technological Institute of Emperor Nicholas II assigned me to inspect the Barnaul Mining Museum and models of certain devices and deposits which, in view of the abolition of the museum, the Administration of the Altai District intended to donate for the replenishment of the mining museum of the Tomsk Technological Institute.

With the exception of the model of Polzunov’s steam engine and three models of workings of ore deposits of the district—two models of the Zmeinogorsk mine and one model of the Salair mine, which the Administration intended to keep in its possession in the future as well—all the models of machines proved to be of very little use for the Institute’s teaching museum.

The models of workings of the ore deposits of the district proved to be so broken and scattered that restoring them would have been tantamount to constructing them anew according to the existing archival plans of the silver-lead mines.

The models of metallurgical furnaces and machines had for the most part been made by pupils of the Barnaul Mining School and are of very little interest: the types are now completely obsolete, the workmanship of the models is crude, and the models themselves are badly damaged.

All these considerations led to the conclusion that it was undesirable to transport the models to Tomsk for the new museum being organized for instructional purposes, and therefore a proposal was submitted to the Council to decline the offered donation.

Ten or twenty years ago, when the models were still better preserved, they would have represented for the local museum a certain, purely historical, interest as an illustration of the former industry, but

at a time when mining in the district was already in decline, the museum was abandoned, and now it is scarcely possible to restore it.

At the present time the decline of mining in the Altai District continues, since the chief attention of the District Administration is directed toward land settlement, agricultural colonization, and the use of the district’s forest wealth. This circumstance is striking at the very entrance to Barnaul: the Barnaul Metallurgical Works has now been converted into a sawmill. The entire Altai District has been divided into estates, exploited chiefly by the leasing method, and also by contract.

Such a method of exploitation was proposed in the mid-1890s for the use of mineral wealth as well, with the exception, perhaps, of gold, some branches of which were exploited by the Cabinet on a managerial basis. However, the exploitation of gold had even earlier passed, at least in some parts of the district, into private hands. Two large companies with aristocratic shareholders leased from the Cabinet entire gold-bearing systems: the Altai Gold-Mining Enterprise leased, under the contract of June 21, 1880, the systems of the Kondoma and Mrassu rivers, and the South Altai Gold-Mining Enterprise, under the contract of August 20, 1881, the systems of the Balyksha and Lebed rivers. Both leased enterprises are in difficult conditions owing to the high rent and, because of this, having worked out the richest areas, are gradually reducing production.

Of the silver-lead mines, the Zyryanovsk Mine was the first to be leased in 1897, to the Zyryanovsk Mining Company, formed among Moscow capitalists.

By 1902 the Company had incurred up to 1 1/2 million rubles in expenses, had prepared considerable stocks of ore, and had built a concentrating mill with electrical equipment designed to use the stored energy of the Turgusun River; unfortunately the hydraulic structures proved unsuccessful, and the entire enterprise, having cooled off as a result of the participants’ considerable expenditures, was liquidated.

At the present time the Cabinet is conducting negotiations on transferring the exploitation of the Zyryanovsk, Zmeinogorsk, and Ridder mines to the Austrian capitalist Prince Thurn und Taxis, whose representatives are studying the conditions of exploitation of these deposits, and are also visiting certain other deposits of the district. How successfully matters are proceeding is difficult to conclude, since, until an agreement is reached and a contract concluded, the parties do not consider it advantageous to spread information about the factual side of the question. Certain works

...based on samples from the Zyryanovsk and Ridder ores, were carried out in the Barnaul laboratory. However, judging by the fact that this matter has dragged on for a very long time and the work is proceeding rather sluggishly, it is hardly possible to expect especially large successes.

A large, but also regrettable, role in the history of the Altai mining business was played by the Society of East-Siberian Iron-Founding, Iron-Making and Mechanical Works, formed in 1896 by the Moscow capitalist S. I. Mamontov, which leased from the Cabinet the coal and iron deposits of the Kuznetsk basin. The Society’s broad plans for establishing coal and iron production in the region could not be realized partly because of the discovery of coal near the Siberian Railway itself, and partly, insofar as iron was concerned, because of the general collapse of Mamontov’s enterprises and because of a certain irresolution with respect to expanding the Guryev works. This may be explained by the fact that the chief attention of the Society’s metallurgists was directed toward the Nikolaev works in Irkutsk Province and toward the urgent orders for rails for the Siberian Railway given to it—orders which likewise were not fulfilled.

At present the Guryev works and the coal mines have been taken back by the Cabinet from the East-Siberian Society and are operated on a very small scale by an economic method. Since the introduction of coke smelting at the Guryev works by the East-Siberian Society did not take place, and the planned large-scale prospecting for iron ores did not come about, it is difficult to expect any expansion of iron production here in the immediate future. The works, with one small blast furnace producing 100–120 thousand poods per year, satisfies mainly the local needs of the Altai District.

In recent years, with the introduction into the district of agricultural machines of American and German origin, the works has acquired significance as a repair shop that prepares replacement parts for worn-out ones. From here it is not far to the introduction at the works of its own production of agricultural machines. Besides the agricultural region, the works finds some market for its products in the gold-mining region, both to the west and to the east beyond the Tom.

The works administration has paid due attention to this and is striving with all its might to strengthen the equipment of the mechanical workshops with the necessary machine tools.

Unfortunately, the war and the resulting reduction of credits have deprived it of the possibility of carrying out this highly desirable undertaking.

L. L. Tove.

Of all the mining enterprises of the district, gold mining is of the greatest importance at the present time. Of the districts being exploited by the Cabinet, two had to be visited—the Egoryevsk and Salair districts. In the Egoryevsk district, gold-mining works are being conducted on various sites, and dredging is being introduced.

Some data concerning the geological character of the deposits are available from A. A. Inostrantsev—Transactions of the Geological Section of the Cabinet of His Imperial Majesty, vol. 2; but these data are of a more or less preliminary character. The results of the detailed study of the gold-bearing region of the Georgievsk gold fields, carried out by Prof. Inostrantsev in 1896 and mentioned by him on p. 30 of the same volume, have not yet been published. In the same works there are references to earlier investigators—Chikhachev, Shchurovsky, Helmersen. On pp. 107–109 of vol. III, issue I, of the same works, G. G. von Petz, on the basis of the investigations only just indicated, gives some notes characterizing the placer along the Omikh River, the first discovery of gold in the region of the Georgievsk field; here “the gold-bearing bed lies directly on limestone, and in places on dense clay, which fills depressions in the limestones.” On pp. 94–96 of issue 3 of vol. II of the works, A. A. Inostrantsev also records the occurrence of the gold-bearing bed of the Georgievsk field on soil of crystalline limestone and expresses the supposition of the possible discovery of new gold placers in the area of development of the crystalline limestone, among other places in the region between the M. Taily River and Krokhaleva.

The indicated conditions of occurrence of the placers immediately attract attention when one inspects the gold-mining operations.

It proves especially unfavorable for work by the dredge installed for the Cabinet on the Upper Taily River, the O— of the Putilov Works. The dredge was described in detail by mining engineer I. P. Beresnevich in the Bulletin of Gold Mining, No. 11 for 1903, and represents an attempt to adapt the type developed by the American firm Bucyrus for washing highly clayey, mealy sands. The success of such an enterprise is not especially likely, and clean washing can be achieved only at the expense of reducing the productivity of the dredge. Unfortunately, the assembly of the dredge dragged on until the autumn of 1904, so that definite and convincing results were not obtained. On November 4 of the same year the dredge burned down, apparently because of the stoker’s carelessness, and the spring and summer of 1905 were spent on restoring it. Thus 1905 also could not yield final results.

Report on a Trip to the Altai District

On the basis of acquaintance with the conditions under which gold occurs in the limestones—gold-bearing material that is difficult to wash, judging from the dumps of the prospecting works, and red clay lying on the limestones, with the stratum frequently sinking into depressions washed out in the limestones, from which extracting it with scoops is hardly possible, if not impossible—one can only be surprised, on the one hand, at the Cabinet specialists who installed the dredge where it had the least chance of success, and, on the other, at the Putilov Works Company, which gave guarantees of a definite productivity.

In general, this experiment cannot be classed as successful, and it is very fortunate for the Putilov Works Company that the order for the dredge from the Cabinet did not remain an isolated one; otherwise the Vesuvius type, though distinguished by many advantageous features, would have been badly compromised in the eyes of Siberian gold miners. At the present time, however, when the company has installed several dredges in other districts, where, thanks to favorable conditions, they operate quite successfully, a single failure, under conditions that gave no hope of significant success, cannot substantially harm the matter, which has also been appreciated in broad circles of gold and platinum industrialists.

Among the gold-mining works in the area of the Georgievsk mines, three types must be noted: a) ordinary operations—open-cut, shaft, and adit workings—which, owing to their being generally known and to their small scale, need not be discussed; b) work connected with washing peat by spring waters; and c) small-scale work on under-bedrock deposits.

The washing of peat and the partial concentration of sands by spring waters is the simplest of the methods of hydraulic working of placers. No proper hydraulic management is carried out, and no considerations regarding the possibility of establishing more permanent operations, not connected exclusively with the melting of snows, have apparently been developed up to now. The matter is reduced merely to this: the gold-mining artels, by means of rather simple sluices and shields, direct the snow waters into a definite hollow, the gold-bearing character of which has been established, and, to a slight extent, by manual caving of the banks, assist the action of the water. As a result, the water washes out gullies up to 5–6 sazhens deep and more, down to the limestone bedrock, on which gold-bearing enriched sands are deposited in various irregularities. These sands have to be extracted by manual labor, made difficult by the circumstance that the sands have to be obtained between large limestone blocks, sometimes up to 1 cubic sazhen and more, standing in an extremely varied—

in different positions, often not especially stable, which sometimes makes the work rather dangerous. These sands are then washed on ordinary butaras.

No preliminary prospecting is carried out.

Work on the bedrock deposits is still more primitive.

I had occasion to inspect the work along the Shirokii log. The gold proved to be here in a barely noticeable hollow on a rather steep mountain slope; the entire thickness of the placer from the surface to the underlying limestone does not exceed 1½ arshins; the gold, apparently, was retained in the irregularities of the limestone, which appear here in the form of ridges. The bed consists of ocherous sandy clay; the richest parts proved to be the more ocherous ones over a distance of only 5–6 linear sazhens. Gold is observed throughout the entire thickness of the placer, which is washed whole, together with the roots of the surface vegetation. In all, about two pounds of gold were extracted from this small plot; the sands were carted down to the stream for a distance of about a verst and were washed on butaras.

The search for bedrock deposits is conducted by the prospectors themselves, and they have no general guiding instructions of any kind.

The impression left by the Georgievskii mine is rather discouraging—one senses the extreme neglect of the work. The productivity of the mine, as may be seen from the following figures, is very insignificant.

Another gold-bearing district visited, the Salair district, leaves a somewhat better impression, although the technical and economic organization of the work here still leaves very much to be desired.

Detailed investigations of the Salair district by parties of the geological section of the Cabinet have not yet been published, and all available information about the locality relates to the older works of the same Gelmersen, Shchurovskii, Cotta, and others.

In the report of Prof. A. A. Inostrantsev there is only information about an inspection of the vein gold deposit of the so-called Nemetskaya Mountain (Vol. I, issue 2, pp. 3–5): “Along the slopes of the so-called Nemetskaya Mountain there are known, in narrow strips, gold placers consisting of clayey sands containing pieces of limestone and ocherous quartz. The divergence of the strips of placers radially from Nemetskaya Mountain, natu—”

Report on a Trip to the Altai District.

... naturally should have given occasion to the search here for a primary gold deposit, which, apparently, was indeed found. Shafts sunk on the summit of the mountain along a line perpendicular to the strike of the beds revealed, beneath the drift, a quartz vein running along the boundary between chlorite schist and limestone. Closer to the surface, and now beneath the drift, this vein is strongly destroyed and, in the form of separate pieces of ocherous gold-bearing quartz, among which samples were even found in which inclusions of gold could be seen with the naked eye. The same vein, or perhaps its continuation, was discovered by Mr. Krupsky at the top of Poganyi Log. According to Mr. Krupsky, “the gold content reaches 17 zolotniks per 100 poods.” With these words and with the rather uninformative plan of prospecting works on Nemetskaya Mountain, placed in V. S. Reutovsky’s book Minerals of Siberia, part I, p. 217, the information about the primary gold deposit at Salair is exhausted.

There is perhaps even less literary information on the placer deposits. At the present time the works in the area of the village of Salair are comparatively small—the reworking of the Salairsky (Poganyi) Log and Opletikha.

The placer of Salairsky Log has a thickness of from 6 to 22½ sazhens. Its bedrock is limestone, strongly pitted: very large blocks of limestone are constantly encountered in the pay layer, sometimes blocking the entire face of the working. In the layer there is a very large amount of brown ironstone, red ferruginous clay, pieces of ocherous quartz, and a somewhat smaller quantity of pieces of limestone. The gold-bearing layer is rarely distinguished from the peats, but in the layer itself there are many streaks and lenses that strongly mask the placer and make it extremely difficult to separate the gold-bearing material from the barren material. A lesser thickness of the placer is observed both in the upper and in the lower part of the log, and in general the placer does not correspond to the present-day relief of the locality. The width of the placer varies from 3 to 15, and in places even up to 20 sazhens. The layer, a sazhen thick, is often interrupted by washouts that reduce it sometimes to 0.30 sazhen; in places, depending on the erosion of the limestone bedrock, the layer thickens to 3 sazhens. The average content at present may be taken as 50 dolyas per 100 poods. Sometimes it rises to as much as 1 zolotnik.

The placer of Poganyi Log is little washed because of the considerable presence of clay resembling soapstone. A characteristic distinction of the analogous placer of Opletikha Log is the presence of a considerable quantity of cubical pyrite (oxidized gray pyrite).

Washing is carried out in two Amerikankas with troughs 30 sazhen long, about \(3/4\) arshin wide, lined with iron grates made of strip iron 1 vershok wide, set with a certain slope in the direction toward the head of the sluice. The slope of the sluice is \(1/10\). Washing is performed with an excess of water, the layer of which reaches from \(1/2\) to \(3/4\) arshin. The washing process begins with soaking the sands; at the head of the sluice, near the hatch, the water acts upon the sands by impact; as the sands move downward along the trough, they must be guided, i.e. moved with special rakes, while the coarser pebble, which then is finally thrown out of the trough, is removed. Four men are assigned to a trough, one to the dump, two to cart away the pebble, and, as needed, two men to clean the ditch.

The capacity of such an Amerikanka on the loamy Salair sands reaches 10 cubic sazhen; on more easily washed sands, for example at the Tyaguno-Talovsky mine, which is administered by the same Salair office and is 50 versts distant from the Salair settlement, the capacity reaches 20 cubic sazhen. The cost of constructing an Amerikanka is about 1000 rubles, not counting the iron; the cost of the trafaretki is 5–6 rubles apiece. The floor under the Amerikanka is paved with cement to prevent theft of gold.

In addition to the mines in the immediate vicinity of the Salair settlement, the Salair administration has under current working the Tyaguno-Talovsky mine and, near the abolished Tomsk plant, the mines along the Naionikh River and the Third Log along the Uksunai River. Concerning the placers of the last two mines, it was possible to obtain only brief, fragmentary information. Along the Naionikh the placer is schistose; chloritic and clayey schists, more or less hard, are encountered in the bedrock; the lower part of the area has not been prospected by shafts, and it is difficult to say anything about the bedrock. The entire thickness of the placer is about one and a half sazhen; of this, the pay streak is about 0.40 sazhen. The width of the working bed is up to 10 sazhen.

The ground of the Third Log consists of talc schists; there is very little quartz, no brown ironstone at all, little cubic sulfur pyrite; the principal mass of the heavy sand is ironstone.

The total thickness of the placer being worked does not exceed 1 sazhen; of this, the bed is about 0.5 sazhen; the width of the placer is about 10 sazhen, and it occupies the entire narrow log. The placer in no way corresponds to the present-day relief.

Both placers were discovered by the Kabi­net parties with very scanty funds, which made it possible to carry out the searches only sporadically, without

of a strict system. It is beyond doubt that, with a broader organization of prospecting within the limits of the Salaír Cherny alone, more than one industrial placer deposit will be discovered.

The productivity of the Salaír mines in recent years was as follows:

In an even more unsightly state is, as has already been mentioned above, the Cabinet’s coal and iron business.

The principal explorations of the Kuznetsk coal basin were carried out by the Cabinet even before the transfer of the Kolchugino mine on lease to the Society of West-Siberian Works. The results of these explorations, as well as of a detailed investigation of the district, were published in the Proceedings of the Geological Section of the Cabinet,

vol. II, issue I, P. N. Venyukov. Sheet Balakhonka.
" " " II, B. K. Polénov. Sheet Kolchugino.

In addition to these works, some information concerning the margins of the basin is also found in other issues of the 2nd and 3rd volumes, in the works of Inostrantsev, von Petz, and Derzhavin.

The work of B. K. Polénov is of the greatest practical interest, relating to the only district now being worked, the Kolchugino district (the Bachat mine, the first to have worked in the district and to have supplied the best metallurgical coke for the Gavrilov Works, is at present completely inactive). In this work a section of the entire deposit is given, of that series of seams whose outcrops are conspicuous along the banks of the river Inya near the village of Kolchugino itself; the section was compiled on the basis of prospecting works by mining engineer N. P. Liflyand. At present only two seams are being worked—the Brusnitsyn and the Mayer seams, and these with extremely small operations, very poorly equipped from the technical side.

From the data reported by B. K. Polénov on pp. 72–76 of the cited work, it is evident that the seams of the Kolchugino deposit, seven in number, are of considerable interest in terms of the correctness of their occurrence and the reliability of their reserves. The thickness of these

seams, according to the data from certain boreholes of N. P. Liflyand, the following:

In the Uspekh mine the Brusnitsynsky seam is already workable at a thickness of 0,33 sazhen.

On p. 50 of Part II of V. S. Reutovsky’s book Useful Minerals of Siberia there is a plan of pillar workings in the Mayerovsky and Brusnitsynsky seams; the work is being carried out on a very small scale. Further, on p. 52 Reutovsky gives the characterization and composition of the coal of the principal seams:

Composition of the organic part:

On the basis of these data, Prof. Alekseev (Mining Journal, 1895, no. 4, pp. 81 and 82) assigns the coal of the Zhurinsky seam to Grüner’s 1st group—dry coals, and the coals of the remaining seams to Grüner’s 2nd group, i.e. gas coals.

The extremely low productivity of the mine, according to the data of the Mining Department, is represented by the following figures.

The price at the place of coal extraction is 6 kopecks, of coke 16 kopecks per pood.

With regard to the inactive Bachatskaya mine, information is available from Reutovsky, V. S., part II, pp. 46–47: a plan of the workings and the composition of the coals according to Prof. V. F. Alekseev.

Composition of the organic part:

On the basis of this composition, Alekseev assigns the Bachatsk coals to Grüner’s 3rd group—smithy coals.

At the present time Bachatsk coke could be used for the needs of the blast-furnace smelting of the Guryev plant, but despite its good qualities and the high cost and middling quality of charcoal, smelting is carried out with the latter, and the plans of the East Siberian Works Company regarding the introduction of coke smelting have remained unfulfilled.

The Guryev plant, the only ironmaking plant in Altai, as was already said above, has by no means reached those dimensions of productivity which would justify it at the present time

monopoly position. Its productivity at the present time is negligible; according to the data of the Mining Department it is expressed by the following figures.

The table shows the extremely uncertain state of production, especially in 1901 and 1902, when the blast furnace yielded only an insignificant part of normal productivity.

With regard to the technical organization of the work at the Guryev Works, there are two sources in the literature—for the 1880s, the articles by N. A. Iossa in the Mining Journal for 1883—85, issued in 1885 as a separate booklet, “Mining Production of Altai and the Causes of Its Decline,” and I. P. Beresnevich in Vestnik zolotopromyshlennosti for 1893, Nos. 6 and 7.

Both refer to pre-Mamontov times. At the present time the works is in an extremely uncertain position, both with respect to ore reserves and to fuel material.

However, despite the major shortcomings in the conduct of affairs noted above, both the coal-mining district and the environs of the works exert a certain influence on mining technology in Siberia. Since 1900 the Kolchugin mine workers and foremen have been working in the Cheremkhovo coal-mining district; the Guryev craftsmen are the only experienced workers in the iron industry in all of Altai, and at the gold placers they are valued as skilled blacksmiths, locksmiths, and so forth. With the reduction of the iron and coal business on the spot, they are becoming more and more scattered throughout Siberia.

The district in which both the mines and the works are located is entirely agricultural and supplies bread not only to the local population, but also exports it to the taiga gold-mining districts. Recently, dairying has made good progress in the coal-mining district. Market gardening is also successful. Thanks to this, the gold enterprises situated along the western slopes and in the mountains of the Kuznetsk Alatau, with respect to the supply of all agricultural products, depend almost entirely on these so-called podzavodskie villages.

The routes of communication from the Podzavodsk district, situated on the left side of the Tom River, to the gold-bearing districts of the Kuznetsk Alatau are, in summer, very difficult to traverse; cart roads run only to the nearest mining operations, while to the greater part—especially those located in the Kiya system—there are pack trails. The winter sledge road, along which the principal supplies are transported to the mines from the Podzavodsk district, is entirely satisfactory.