I am examining the materials for a silver discovery in Mexico in which a significant portion of the silver is refractory, hosted within argentiferous pyrolusite and aurorite. There is also the more easily accessible halides cerargyrite and bromargyrite, plus native silver. I interpret this to be a distal, lower temperature phase of an epithermal silver deposit environment.
Dear Ben Whiting many thanks for your interesting technical question. Although I'm an inorganic chemist, I would certainly not call myself a proven expert in mining and mineralogy. From what I teach in my inorganic chemistry classes I would have spontaneously suggested cyanide leaching. Notwithstanding the high toxicity of alkaline metal cyanides, this is perhaps the most effective way of recovering silver form various ores and minerals. My initial guess is supported by the following potentially useful article which might help answering your question:
Mineralogy and silver distribution in argentiferous manganese ores from la encantada mines in Mexico
Article Mineralogy and silver distribution in argentiferous manganes...
This article is freely available as public full text on RG. It's also advisable that you use the "Search" function of RG to find and access other relevant articles on the topic. Such search for terms like "silver recovery from ores" or similar. As you can see from the link cited below, this will provide you with numerous potentially useful articles which have been posted on this platform:
https://www.researchgate.net/search.Search.html?type=publication&query=silver%20recovery%20from%20ores
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