12-20-20(Nightingale_mine)

Mill for concentrating scheelite (calcium tungstate, CaWO4, the usual ore mineral of tungsten) out of raw tungsten ore. Nightingale district in the Nightingale Range, Pershing County, Nevada. The concentrates would then be shipped elsewhere for further refining into tungsten metal. Mining here was active intermittently from World War I up to about 1956, when the US Government removed the subsidies for strategic metal production. As might be expected, tungsten prices had been high during the World Wars, and during the early years of the Cold War the Federal Gov't continued sponsoring the production of materials that might be important in wartime, including metals like (yes!) tungsten, but also chrome, moly, manganese, cobalt, and so on. When the Feds decided they didn't need any more, lots of these small-scale operations collapsed overnight. The scheelite mineralization occurs at the contact of an intruded granite body with high-grade metamorphic rock, so the mining consisted of open stopes following the contact. The stopes were discontinuous because the ore grade varied along the contact. One such excavation in the vicinity is shown in the inset. The Nightingale Mine itself is right behind this mill--which would have been convenient!--but there were a number of mines in the area whose output would also have been trucked to this mill. And last, I don't know whether the Nightingale Mine gave its name to the Nightingale Range, or vice versa, but in any case it's incongruous that this dry Nevada mountain range is named after the Eurasian songbird! Nightingales are _not_ native to North America. UPDATE: Turns out the range is named for Alansion Walker Nightingill, who participated in the so-called Paiute War (a military encounter with some of the local Native Americans) and was later prominent in Nevada politics. Presumably someone later "corrected" the spelling of his name. Thanks to Don Barrett for tracking this down!

Stopes following scheelite (calcium tungstate, CaWO4) mineralization along a granite-metamorphic contact. Nightingale Mine, Nightingale District, Pershing County, Nevada. For more about the mining here see the enclosing photo.