Page 94 - Vol. 1 Walks In The Black Range - 2nd Edition

The Bonanza Mine is in the Hillsboro Mining District. It was first mined in 1877. The entrance to the Bonanza mine, photo above, is located at:32°56’43.76”N 107°33’31.01”W.
found “numerous pieces in which broken pyrite crystals were prevented from falling apart by heavy wires of gold”. It is safe to say, that all of that is gone now. Now it is hard to find pyrite crystals period.
Although the shape of the production between 1877 and is not known by me, we do know that “The deposits in Snake and Wicks Gulches were mined by hand methods, mostly during the years immediately following the placer discovery in 1877.” (p. 26, Placer Gold Deposits of New Mexico, by Maureen G. Johnson, Geological Survey Bulletin 1348, USGS 1972). Tunneling through hard rock by hand is hard work, even when some blasting is possible. In the middle of the photograph below, beneath the rope, a haul cart is visible. Rock, all of the rock excavated to make the tunnel, was loaded into carts like that pictured and hauled out of the tunnel, sometimes donkeys or mules were used to do the hauling, sometimes it was human power.
Mining is dangerous work, especially where the veins vary in size. Sometimes the vein was higher than the tunnel. In such cases, scaffolding was built inside the tunnel so the miners could stand on something higher than the tunnel floor and mine out the vein above. The scaffolding also provided some protection from rock fall, a leading cause of injury and death. The internal scaffolding shown at the top of the next page is at the point of the first cave-in in the Bonanza tunnel (the cave-in opened a hole to the surface).
A mill was constructed at the Bonanza in 1904, initially with 10 stamps - later increased to 20. In 1932 the mill was remodeled, “consisting of a grizzley, small jaw crusher, automatic disc feeder, a small gyratory crusher, and 10 stamps.” (Harley, Bulletin 10, p. 151). The cost of the remodeled mill was between $25,000 and $30,000 (1932 dollars).