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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
The Sierra Nevada for more than a century. Inside the Silver Legacy casino I picked up a brochure that purported to reveal the “secrets of the Silver Baron’s rig.” I sat by a slot machine on a balcony overlooking the headframe that looms over the activity on the casino floor. “In the 1850s, a young prospector named Sam Fairchild journeyed west in search of a dream,” the brochure said. “He found silver, the largest strike ever. But earth does not give up her treasures freely. Silver mining was a difficult and dangerous profession. So Sam enlisted a team of top engineers to design a revolutionary machine to simplify the mining process. The rig you see before you is an exact replica of that machine. Twelve stories high, it stands directly over the site of Sam’s original claim.” The brochure goes on to explain how the over-stylized machinery of the mine works:Inside the mining shed, workers load all the raw material into large ore carts. When the ore carts reach the crusher, twenty 300 pound blades crush the massive rock. Then the conveyor belt brings the powdered ore up to the smelter burning continuously at temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees. The liquid silver is poured into silver bars and cooled at the top of the rig. The bars are then sent down the conveyor belt to the coin pavilion and minted into special “Sam” gaming coins. The coins are then dropped from a large funnel into the carousel windows, where
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