So, I happened to run across a book on the state of mining in the US in 1876. The company I work for owns several mines, amongst other things, and someone brought it in as a curio. It caught my eye when I read they were burning 600 cords of wood per day, or 219,000 cords per year in the Comstock. (A cord of wood in 1876 is was the same measure as it is today, right?) I cannot imagine the amount of work that went into that into that in pre-chainsaw days. I believe this was before they made the connection to the transcontinental railroad, so they didn't have access to coal. Anyways, I'll throw some of my thoughts in as well, but I'm not guaranteeing my math... Assuming this was mostly pine @ 17m BTU per cord, this would be about 510 tons of coal per day. Maybe less, as I'm sure they were burning it as fast as they could cut it, rather than stacking nearly a quarter million cord of wood for drying. For comparison, I believe a modern 1,000 MW coal fired power plant uses ~9,000 tons of coal per day, and that's about 80 train cars, or nearly a full train load per day. At least 80 cars seems to be 9,000 tons, and I think that's about as much as the railroad will take from us at a time. I'm told that we shoot for 80 cars, because then we basically become a moving roadblock on the rail line, and always get a direct run, rather than getting shunted aside. So... If those numbers are correct, they were using the equivalent of 56 mw of electricity in the 1870's there.
$2.25 in 1876 would be $54 per cord today. That doesn't seem unreasonable to pay someone to cut down a cord before splitting it? I'd be very interested to see a video of how they were splitting their firewood with powder...
A sizeable part of Lake Tahoe must have been all floating logs. I can't imagine how fast they de-forested the area there.
