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"Surprise" working parties visited his claim with spasmodic essays towards helping him, and great good humor and hilarity prevailed. It was not an unusual thing for an honest miner to arise from an idle gathering in some cabin and excuse himself with the remark that he "reckoned he'd put in an hour's work in Uncle Billy's tailings!"
They mostly work at sludge, which Englishmen have already washed; and they are found hanging on to the tailings of old workings, washing the refuse in order to extract the gold that had been missed. Old tailings are often thus washed several times over, and never without finding gold to a greater or less amount.
The principle of the miner's tool known as the "sand-auger" may prove itself very useful in this connection. From a heap of tailings the miner can select a sample, by boring into it with a thin tube, inside of which revolves a shaft carrying at its end a flat steel rotary scoop.
The pulverized sulphurets are decomposed by exposure to the air, and after the tailings have been preserved for a time, they may pay better at the second amalgamation than at the first. A mixture of common salt assists the decomposition of the pyrites. Chief Quartz-Mills. The most productive quartz-mill in the state is the Benton mill, on Fremont's Ranch, in Mariposa county.
It was a rude shanty of boards and rough boulders, half burrowing in one of the largest mounds of earth and gravel, which had once represented the tailings or refuse of the abandoned Indian Spring Placer.
I told my employer I could not stay longer without an advance in my wages; that I liked quartz milling, indeed was infatuated with it; that I had never before grown so tenderly attached to an occupation in so short a time; that nothing, it seemed to me, gave such scope to intellectual activity as feeding a battery and screening tailings, and nothing so stimulated the moral attributes as retorting bullion and washing blankets still, I felt constrained to ask an increase of salary.
"Holy Moses!" cried one of them, as he drew his forefinger through the bright, yellow dust, "there's more than an ounce there." "There is," affirmed Grainger: "there are twenty-five pennyweights, and all that came out of not more than 250 lbs. of tailings!"
The creek, recently a limpid rivulet, was now a sluggish, muddy stream, winding about its tumbled bed; but a bright sky was over all, and a benignant sun smiled upon the gully, scintillating among the tailings and burnishing the muddy stream to silver. The tents looked white and clean, and the smoke from the camp-fires rose straight and high in the peaceful atmosphere.
In a few moments he was clattering down the single narrow street that lost itself in a chaotic ruin of races, ditches, and tailings at the foot of the hill, and dismounted before the gilded windows of the "Magnolia" saloon.
And there would be a landing-grid. Handling only one ship at a time, it might be a very small grid. It could be only hundreds of yards across and less than half a mile high. But its shadow would be distinctive. Calhoun searched among low mountains near unforested prairie in a temperate zone. He found a speck. He enlarged it manyfold. It was the mine on Orede. There were heaps of tailings.
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