A
meeting was held in Reno, Nev., September 4, 5, and 6, 1923, which was
attended by representatives of nearly all the large producers and
marketers of silver in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The
meeting was harmonious, and no effort was made to minimize the
difficulties of the silver situation, nor was any hostility shown to
existing methods of fixing the price of silver, and there was no
discussion or thought of departing from the gold monetary standard. The
sole object of the meeting was to devise ways and means of helping the
mining industry to obtain a reasonable profit in mining gold and
silver. Under a resolution adopted at this meeting W. Mont Ferry, the
chairman, has appointed a committee composed of C. F. Kelley, Charles
Booking, F. H. Brownell, Fred Carroll, Stanley A. Easton, John Hays
Hammond, Alfred Harrell, C. A. Holder, J. G. Kirchen, E. J. Raddatz, F.
Y. Robertson, and Robert E. Talley, to whom is delegated the task of
formulating a plan for the organization of an association under the
Webb-Pomerene Act. Three more members of the committee are to be
selected from Canadian and Mexican mine operators. The plan of this
committee will be submitted to a permanent Pan American silver
conference, which is to be formed according to methods approved by
another committee, of which Alfred Harrell, of San Francisco, is
chairman.
MINE REPORT.
METHOD OF COLLECTING STATISTICS.
The
first table in this report presents the final official figures of the
production of gold and silver in the United States in 1922 as agreed
upon by the Bureau of the Mint and the United States Geological Survey.
With the comparatively unimportant exceptions of domestic gold and
silver contained in ores and mattes exported for reduction
during the year, these figures record the actual production of gold and
silver bullion from domestic ores in marketable form as metals, either
refined or unrefined.
Owing
to the difficulty of tracing this total gold and silver produced back
to its source by States, counties, and mining districts, however, the
Geological Survey attacks this problem of distribution by systematic
investigation of the "mine production" of ores containing gold and
silver during the calendar year and of the output of the placer mines.
In this way the state of the mining industry is studied in detail, and
the output is classified by methods of production and by kinds of ore,
as well as by mining districts. The resulting figures form the basis of
the mine reports.
Of
the two plans for ascertaining the gold and silver production of the
United States one is a measure of the mining industry and the other a
measure of the metallurgic industry; one reports the mine output and
its recoverable content and the other the metal actually recovered in
marketable form. The two methods will not produce exactly corresponding
results, but the figures for a period of years sufficiently long to
compensate for overlap or lag should agree within allowable limits of
error due to the complexity of the problem involved.
