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Updated: May 24, 2025
After mopping his perspiring forehead he once more commenced digging here and there in a most tantalizing fashion. Toby could not comprehend what it could mean. Was there gold or some other precious deposit to be found up here among these hills, and might this strange man be an old prospector from the West who had had long experience in searching for mineral lodes?
Her instincts keyed to the highest pitch, for an instant she thought she discerned an unfamiliar tone, hard and hateful, in his voice. But his eyes and his lips were smiling; and evidently she was mistaken. "I never get tired," she responded. She glanced at the tools in his arms. "I suppose you've found a dozen rich lodes already this morning." "Only one." He smiled, significantly, into her eyes.
"The subject is one which has long had a special attraction for the writer, who has published several articles thereon, wherein it was contended that not only was gold deposited in the lodes from aqueous solution, but that some gold found in form of nuggets had not been derived from lodes but was nascent in its alluvial bed; and for this proof was afforded by the fact that certain nuggets have been unearthed having the shape of an adjacent pebble or angular fragment of stone indented in them.
It may be worth while here to speak of the probable reason why gold, and indeed almost all the metals generally occur in shutes in the lodes; and why, as is often the case, these shutes are found to be more or less in a line with each other in parallel lodes, and why also the junction of two lodes is frequently specially productive.
No class of men is keener or more enterprising in its applications of the latest practical science to the getting of money than mining speculators. Nor have they at all missed the significance of moist bands occurring in any underground workings as a very favourable augury for the close approach of highly mineralised lodes.
The deposition of various spars one on the other in cavities is a secondary operation even now going on, and has nothing necessarily to do with the original filling of the lodes; indeed, their arrangement is so different that it helps to prove they have been differently formed.
Auriferous quartz veins have resisted these influences better than others, because neither the veinstone nor the metal is easily altered, and such veins therefore form better guides for the study of the origin of mineral lodes than fissures filled with calc spar and ores of the baser metals, all readily dissolved and re-formed by hydro-thermal agencies.
The placer gold, when freed from the baser material surrounding it, is much of it in coarse particles, which are easily caught by their specific gravity; the quartz gold must be reduced to a fine powder before it be set free from its gangue, and with the fineness of the particles increases the difficulty of catching them. Auriferous quartz lodes are often found by accident.
Wilkinson found that when the solution of gold chloride was as strong as, say, four grains to the ounce of water, that the pyrites or other base began to decompose, and the iron sulphide changed to yellow oxide, the "gossan" of our lodes, and that though the gold was deposited, this occurred in an irregular way, and it was coated with a dark brown powdery film something like the "black gold," often found in drifts containing much ferruginous matter.
The Sierra Butte Quartz Mining Company has some of the best auriferous quartz lodes in the state. One lode called the Cliff Ledge, is twenty-five feet wide; and another called the Aërial Ledge, is about three feet wide. In the Cliff Ledge, the paying rock averages about six feet in thickness next the foot wall. The average yield is eighteen dollars per ton.
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