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No wonder the miners go ever westward for the precious gold, to Colorado and Nevada and California, to Sitka and the Copper River, to Anvil City and the Nome beach and across the straits to Siberia. Never a clear night falls but they see the alchemy at work and the precious element going down in dust and nuggets and wide lodes behind the peaks and into the canons just beyond.
It is true that mineral veins contain many minerals that could not exist together undecomposed with even a moderate degree of heat; but it is only here contended that the original filling of the lodes was an igneous injection, not that the present arrangement and composition of all the minerals is due to the same action.
In fact they are rather deposits than veins, and though often extremely rich are soon exhausted, while the lodes which run across the stratification, run far and deep, and have a regular and straight course and dip. Lodes lying between two different kinds of rock, are usually richer than those which have the same kind of rock on both sides.
No common correspondence could possibly have had the number of attractively boxed gifts, the amount of handsomely printed literary and il-lustrated matter, and certainly not the unfailing persistency of flow, that constituted the correspondence of Mr. Simcox. The mine once discovered proved to be a mine inexhaustible and containing lodes or galleries of new and unsuspected wealth. Mr.
Next morning he rose, and announced his intention of setting out for the West on his tour of inspection. He would recreate by revelling in Colorado silver lodes. We packed our own portmanteaus, for Charles had not brought even Simpson with him, and then we prepared to set out by the morning train for Saratoga. Up till almost the last moment Charles nursed his dispatch-box.
In this way, I passed two hours wandering underground with a candle in my hand, and inspecting the gold-bearing lodes of one of the richest mines in the Randt. This mine possesses magnificent lodes, and millions of tons of gold-producing quartz. There is a prospect of most profitable results in it for years to come.
A few hardy prospecters braved them in the search for quartz lodes, but many perished, and others were brought back to the city with frozen limbs. The mines lay idle, and the business of the city, dependent upon them for support, was completely stagnant. It was humanity living a squirrel life among its little garners of roots and nuts.
They followed the courses of these streams, and gutted them, sending the gravel up in buckets to the upper world, and washing out of it its enormous deposits of gold. The next biggest of the two monster nuggets mentioned above came from an old river-channel 180 feet under ground. Finally the quartz lodes were attacked. That is not poor-man's mining.
I once saw a minute parasitic fly hovering over a column of ants, near a nest, and every now and then darting down and attaching an egg to one entering. Configuration of the ground at Santo Domingo. Excavation of valleys. Geology of the district. Decomposition of the rocks. Gold-mining. Auriferous quartz veins. Mode of occurrence of the gold. Lodes richer next the surface than at lower depths.
One feature in the distribution of gold in the quartz lodes of Santo Domingo led to a most exaggerated opinion of their value when they were first mined by English companies. On the hills, near the outcrops of the lodes, the ore was in some places exceedingly rich.
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