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"Life is a mining for gold," said he, "and every human breast is a mother-lode of the precious metal if only some one can find the out-croppings, locate a claim, and come upon the ledge. There are toils, privations, and sufferings, which the search for gold brings forever in its train. There are pains and miseries and woe in the search for the gold in men, but, boys, it's a glorious life!
Representation work was expensive, and he was compelled to travel often over the various creeks in order to decide which claims should lapse and which should be retained. A quartz miner himself in his early youth, before coming to Alaska, he dreamed of finding the mother-lode. A placer camp he knew was ephemeral, while a quartz camp abided, and he kept a score of men in the quest for months.
Imagine a country where men prospect till they are seventy, with no fear of fever, fly, horse-sickness, or trouble from the natives a country where food and water always taste good! He told me curious things about some fabled gold the Eternal Mother-lode out in the North, which is to humble the pride of Nome. And yet, so vast is the Empire, he had never heard the name of Johannesburg!
When he prophesied to his old cronies, in the Moosehorn Saloon, that within five years town lots in Dawson could not be given away, while the cabins would be chopped up for firewood, he was laughed at roundly, and assured that the mother-lode would be found ere that time. But he went ahead, when his need for lumber was finished, selling out his sawmills as well.
Measure thirty-two feet from the mouth of the tunnel, dig one foot in depth, and you came upon the mother-lode of this gold-bearing rock. This, then, was the secret of the cave. The Chinese knew the richness of the deposit, and exploited its treasures by quarrying from the other side of the hill. But their crass ignorance of modern science led to their undoing.
Richest of all are the quartz mines, where beautiful white rock, rich with sparkling gold, is found in veins, or "lodes," cropping out of hillsides or dipping down under the earth. The great "Mother-lode" of our state runs like an underground wall across Amador, Calaveras, Tuolumne, and Mariposa counties and has been traced for eighty miles.
The mother-lode was never found, and, years afterward, he estimated that the search for it had cost him fifty thousand dollars. But he was playing big. Heavy as were his expenses, he won more heavily. He took lays, bought half shares, shared with the men he grub-staked, and made personal locations.
Smoke looked out over the river. "Get ready for visitors. There are two crossing the ice now." "Huh! Wait till Breck files that string of claims at nine o'clock. There'll be two thousand crossing over." "And every mother's son of them yammering 'mother-lode," Smoke laughed. "'The source of the Klondike placers found at last."
We had systematically prospected the various mountain-streams in the west for gold without result; but here we had discovered unmistakable traces of the precious metal; and our hearts being gladdened accordingly, we prepared to explore still farther into the mountains in search of the mother-lode. "It's rather a curious thing," said Phil at this time, "that we have met none of the Sakis so far.
The explanation of the aged wanderer that the dust and particles came from many sources, seemed to enrage them further. "Just where was this mother-lode?" They wanted to know. "Here was wealth aplenty-enough to buy everything." And they applied the third degree with all the fiendish deviltries of their distorted minds, to get the exact location of this rival of the Comstock lode.
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