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Updated: June 24, 2025
Though I was a late comer in the district, and Cripple Creek had fully caught its stride as one of the greatest gold-producing camps in the world some time before my advent, "strikes" were still occurring frequently enough to keep the gold seekers' excitement from dying out.
"Jimmy" was a handsome beast, the handsomest I ever owned and the costliest, but, as I learned later from one who knew his history, had "travelled on his looks all his life." He earned the name of "Jimmy the Fake." Midway to Cleary "City," on the chief gold-producing creek of the district, our first day's run, we encountered the gold train.
Nearly forty square miles of gold-bearing lands are being worked by Europeans and Chinese in the district of Ararat, a hundred and fifty miles north of Melbourne. From these several sources of mineral wealth there flows constantly towards the capital a stream of riches, making it probably the greatest gold-producing centre on the globe.
It lies nearly a hundred miles north of the capital, at an elevation of fifteen hundred feet above sea-level, and is accessible by railway. This is thought to be the centre of the richest gold-producing district in the world. Beechworth, one hundred and seventy miles northeast of Melbourne, at an elevation higher than that of Ballarat, is nearly as populous, and as prolific in the precious metal.
For the purpose of opening up the country by means of railways, great facilities were given to companies who undertook to construct lines through the country districts; and active search was made for gold and other metals. But, in spite of these reforms, the population was steadily decreasing, owing to the attractions of the gold-producing colonies.
I would not, even if I had the requisite knowledge, wish to bore the reader by giving a scientific account of gold-mining, but Western Australia presents so many appearances differing from those in other gold-producing countries, and so varied are some of the methods of obtaining gold, that I hope a short account of the usual ways of winning the precious metal, purely from a prospector's point of view, will be of interest.
We can scarcely suppose, however, that the Phoenicians, if they penetrated so far south as this, could remain ignorant of the fact that West Africa was a gold-producing country, much less that, being aware of the fact, they would fail to utilise it.
Years before this, however, the shores of the Hauraki Gulf had been systematically worked, and in 1871 the gold export from Auckland had risen to more than £1,100,000. New Zealand still remains a gold-producing colony, albeit the days of the solitary adventurer working in the wash-dirt of his claim with pick, shovel, and cradle are pretty nearly over.
Chena is at the virtual head of the navigation of the Tanana River and is quite as near to the gold-producing creeks as Fairbanks, which latter place is not on the Tanana River at all but on a slough, impracticable for almost any craft at low water. For every topographical reason, from every consideration of natural advantage, Chena should have been the river port and town of these gold-fields.
Here you not only touch an American interest but you enter upon the region that Rider Haggard introduced to readers as the setting of some of his most famous romances. We will deal with the practical side first. Rhodes had great hopes of Rhodesia as a gold-producing country. He wanted the economic value of the country to rank with the political.
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