scram

To scram is to extract ore from ground that has already been worked over, typically from old mines or worked-out sections where a previous operator extracted the bulk of the payable ore. The scammer (as the worker was called) would pick through waste rock, follow thin veins that larger operations had abandoned as uneconomical, or rework tailings dumps looking for overlooked concentrations of metal. This was subsistence-level mining, not industrial extraction.

Scramming depended entirely on the economics of the deposit and the price of the target metal. A vein too narrow or too low-grade for a large mine operating on tight profit margins might still reward a single worker or small crew willing to live cheaply and work slowly. Copper, tin, lead, and precious metals were all targets for scammers. The practice was most common in worked-over hard rock districts where good ore had already been found and removed, but marginal material remained.

Why it survives in memory

Scramming was widespread enough in nineteenth and early twentieth century mining regions to leave behind place names and local history, but it had largely vanished by mid-century as mechanization made even small-scale mining expensive. The term itself is archaic industrial vocabulary, rarely used in modern mining engineering. It captures an economic reality that no longer exists: a situation where manual labor and patience could make a marginal deposit worth working.

The word scram itself has unclear origins. Some sources suggest it derives from Old English or Scandinavian roots meaning to squeeze or scrape; others propose it comes from dialect speech for scratching or searching. Its meaning in mining was always regional and local rather than standardized across the trade, which is one reason it never became part of formal mining vocabulary.