UNION MINING DISTRICT.

335 they took out $30,000 in dust. A creek claim in Gold Run embraces one hundred feet of the stream and extends seventy-five either way. A bank claim is one hundred feet square. Anybody is entitled to hold one creek claim and a bank claim in each tier of claims on either or both sides of the creek. Claims hold good without representation from the Ist of November to the 1st of July. There are more than eight hundred claims in the district. Most of the pay has been taken from the west side of the stream, that bank having been washed off a thousand feet in width.

Buffalo Flats is in the same district (Union) as Gold Run; its production of gold is larger. Water is brought by two ditches from French Gulch. In the mining season about two hundred people find employment in the district. Their attention has been so entirely turned to gulch mining that only twenty lodes have as yet been recorded, and these were discovered in gulch mining. They are immense, however; for instance, the Discovery, 44 feet wide, Adelia 43 feet, Inferno, 30 feet, auriferous and argentiferous quartz, seamed and mixed with galenous and pyritous ores. The flume last spoken of crosses these lodes, and being sunk eight feet in the bed-rock, there can be no mistake in their stated width. It may be doubted however, whether such extraordinary width of vein is an advantage. It certainly is not if only the same amount of the precious metals be distributed through it as in those more confined. In French Gulch strong, rich lodes occur, on some of which a good deal of work has been

done-shafts and tunnels excavated, &c. In 1865 a stamp mill was set up in the gulch, the only one by the way west of the Range, but it merely started and has since been idle.

The above description of mining in Gold Run applies to the business wherever it is carried on in Summit County, Gold Run and Buffalo Flats being the most important gulch mining localities.

The basin of the upper Blue, which is twenty to thirty miles in diameter, is one of the richest mineral sections in Colorado. Generally its minerals consist of silver, gold, copper, lead, iron, coal, salt, sulphur, and indications are not wanting of platinum and quicksilver. There are slates and shales, marbles and limestones, sandstones, and fire clay. Timber and water and pasturage are in the greatest abundance.

Communication with the eastern slope is possible through numerous passes from Georgetown round to the Arkansas River, and with the western via Gore's Pass, or the North Park under the RabbitEars. Of course the fall of snow is deep in the Winter, not less on the average than one hundred and fifty inches, and the whole basin suffers an elevation above sea of nine thousand feet and over; but the Range, though a terrible is not an impassible barrier, even in Winter; (loaded trains have twice passed it at the coldest season) and the climate is not half so disagreeable if it is a very little colder than the climate of Chicago.

Beyond the Middle Park and this basin of the upper Blue, little is certainly known of the vast

WESTERN PORTION OF SUMMIT COUNTY. 337 mountain wilderness included in Summit County. In July, 1860, a party numbering one hundred left Breckenridge for the purpose of exploring the White and its tributaries for mineral deposits. They went up Ten-Mile ten miles, crossed over south-west on to Piney, down that to its kanyon, then over on to Roaring Fork, as large as the Grand, which they followed to its junction with the latter. Here occur immense hot and cold saline springs, acid and thermal springs. The party "claimed" them, crossed the river and struck for the head of the south fork of White River, which they followed down to its junction with the Green. They found no gold in the undisturbed stratified rocks. Turning to the south-east, they traveled three hundred miles (estimated) over ashy and sandy deserts and flat rocks to the sources of the Animas and Del Norte in the San Juan Mountains. Down the latter and via Fort Garland to Denver finished this grand exploring tour, and since that the greater part of the region within the bounds of Summit County has been regarded as destitute of minerals.

15

CHAPTER XIV.

Processes-The Stamp Mill, In Australia, Lake Superior Copper Mines, California, Nevada, Colorado-Improvements, Keith's Desulphurizer, Crosby & Thompson's, Mason's, Monnier Metallurgical Process—Smelting, James E. Lyon & Co.—Making of Regulus, &c.

Of the methods in use for getting gold, silver, and copper out of their gangue or matrix, the stampmill is the general favorite in all countries. A minute description of the process can hardly be necessary at this day. The ore is crushed fine by the percussion of heavy iron stamps, and in case of gold, escapes from the stamp batteries through screens of any desired fineness, and is carried evenly over amalgamated copper plates by a gentle sheet of water, constantly running through the batteries. The gold unites with mercury, which is put in the batteries and on the copper plates, and the ore, being lighter and having no affinity for mercury, runs away. When the mercury becomes loaded with gold, it is taken up, strained through buckskin to as small bulk as possible, and then driven off the gold in the form of vapor by the application of heat, when, the vapor having been con

THE STAMP-MILL IN AUSTRALIA.

339

densed into mercury again in the same operation, it is ready to be used over.

In Australia this operation has been so perfected, and mining at the same time so systematized, that, in large ledges in which the gangue is not combined with sulphur nor full of substances deleterious to the action of quicksilver on gold, rock which yields but two pennyweights ($1.60) per ton, is made to pay a handsome profit. The mine from which this is done consists of the principal portion of the Black Hill, on the Yandrie-about fifty acres. Tunnels have been run into it at different levels, and connected with the open workings, or shafts. The average width of the lode is ninety feet, and it has numerous leaders and feeders. The cost of mining per ton is two shillings, (English) and of crushing, two shillings, sixpence. Ninety men and four horses are employed, 150 tons of fire-wood per week used, and 1000 tons of quartz, or 1500 of soft casings, crushed in the same time. The material is conveyed into the mill on dump-cars, the mill containing six batteries of ten 770-lb. stamps each, and driven by a 100-horse engine. One man, assisted by a self-feeding apparatus, supplies the batteries with quartz. The screens have one hundred and twenty holes to the square inch, and the crushed material is conveyed by gentle water currents through sluice-boxes with quicksilver rifles, and then over blanket surfaces twenty-four feet long. The blankets are washed every eight hours in tanks, which move on wheels, and the rinsings thus collected amalgamated in revolving barrels