liman, who made a report on the mine, is striated in lines dipping to the southeast. The quartz is soft, fissile, and ferruginous. The stope north of the shaft yielded 15,000 tons, from which, according to the books kept at the mill, $450,000 were obtained. A large part of the claim is unexplored, and its value is merely conjectural beyond the pay chimney at the shaft. The Cosumnes lode is 120 feet west of the Union, and has the same dip and general course, although there are some bends in it. It is three or four feet thick, and the quartz bears a strong resemblance to that of the Princeton mine. The walls are of coal black shale, and there is a black putty gouge on the eastern wall. This vein has a shaft 120 feet deep. Some of the croppings were very rich and yielded most of $150,000 taken out by the mill from rock that did not come from the Union mine. WILDER.-The Wilder quartz mine, a mile and a half west of El Dorado, is on a vein three feet wide, containing quartz that yields $9 per ton. An eight-stamp water-mill has been running two years.

POCAHONTAS.-The Pocahontas mine, two miles south of El Dorado, has a vein four feet wide and a pay chimney a 100 feet long, averaging $15 per ton. There is a 10-stamp mill which has been at work one year, and has paid for itself and for all the work done in opening the mine.

UNION CHURCH.-The Union Church Gold Mining Company have claims on three veins, three miles southeast of El Dorado. The Union claim has been worked since 1852, has been stoped to a depth of 160 feet, and has yielded a large amount of gold. There is water in this claim now, and it is being taken out preparatory to sinking. The Cosumnes claim is now being worked, and the rock yields $10 or $12 per ton.

GRAY.-The Gray mine, three miles east of Shingle Springs, is a rich deposit of decomposed quartz in a vein five feet wide. On one occasion specimens worth $10,000 were taken out in one day. A depth of 60 feet has been reached.

There is a 10-stamp mill, built in 1865.

BRYANT.-The Bryant mine, two miles south of El Dorado, yielded $20,000 in one pocket, which was emptied in three days in 1857. Considerable quantities of quartz, sent to a mill four miles off, paid well. The mill ran several years, then was abandoned, and now a 20-stamp steam mill is to be built. A depth of 150 feet has been reached, and drifts have been run 600 feet on the vein.

BEARD.-The Beard mine, two miles south of El Dorado, has yielded $250,000, proving very profitable at times. The gold was deposited chiefly in numerous little chimneys or streaks, which the miners followed. There was a 10-stamp mill in 1860, but it was moved away to the State of Nevada.

The Jamison mine, at Aurum City, has been worked about a year with an

arrastra.

INDEPENDENCE.-The Independence mine, 1,200 feet long, at Brownsville, is on a vein which runs east and west, is three and a half feet thick, and has granite for a hanging wall and "blue trap," as the miners call it, for a foot wall. A tunnel has been run 400 feet on the vein, in pay all the way; 250 tons have been worked, and the yield has been $30 per ton, in the Tullock eight-stamp mill, rented for the purpose. The Independence mill is now being built and is to have 10 stamps. The quartz contains a large proportion of rich sulphurets. STILLWAGON. The Stillwagon mine, also at Brownsville, is on a vein similar to that of the Independence. There is a five-stamp mill, which, with the labor of six men, took out $4,600 in May, 1867. The average yield is $25 per ton.

There are no other quartz mines regularly at work at Brownsville.

SLIGER.-The Sliger mine, 400 feet long, is four miles southwest of George town, on a vein four feet wide, between granite on the west and slate on the east. Five thousand dollars were taken out of a pocket near the surface. The mine is now being opened.

GREENWOOD.-The Greenwood mine, five miles southwest of Georgetown,

has been opened by a cross-tunnel 400 feet long. A 15-stamp mill has just been erected, but work is not yet commenced at crushing.

TAYLOR.-The Taylor mine, 3,000 feet long, is two and a half miles south of Georgetown, on a lode that runs north-northwest and south-southeast, and is two feet wide at the surface, and six feet at a depth of 100 feet. A depth of 107 feet has been reached by an incline, and drifts have been run 41 feet. The vein is filled with seams of slate, but the quartz shows free gold in all parts of the mine. There is a black putty gouge two feet thick in places. The west wall is bastard granite, the east slate. There is no mill.

ROSECRANS.-The Rosecrans mine, 900 feet long, adjoins the Taylor on the south. The shaft is down 40 feet; and 60 tons crushed at a custom mill yielded $12 on an average. The vein has been uncovered for 280 feet along the surface, and it shows gold all the way.

BLUE LEAD. The Blue Lead, three miles south of Georgetown, has been opened by a San Francisco company to a depth of 250 feet and to considerable length. The quartz is mixed with blue slate and shows some fine specimens, but has not paid. A very fine 20-stamp mill has been erected, and about $250,000 have been invested permanently in the mine. Work has ceased.

COLLINS.-In the Collins mine, one mile south of Georgetown, the vein has been reached 170 feet below the surface by a tunnel 250 feet long. The vein is eight feet wide, and the rock in sight will yield $15 per ton.

ALPINE.-The Alpine, on the same vein, is four feet wide, is working with an arrastra, and obtains $12 per ton. The quartz is extracted through a tunnel 150 feet long. The Mount Hope Company, of San Francisco, own a claim of 3,000 feet adjoining the Alpine. The vein is six feet wide, but is split up considerably. The shaft is 61 feet deep.

The Philadelphia Slide Company, of San Francisco, have 3,000 feet on a vein half a mile south of Georgetown, and have levied an assessment for the pose of erecting hoisting works.

pur

The Clipper mine, two and a half miles northeast of Georgetown, is 5,000 feet long, on a vein two and a half feet wide, running north and south between a granite foot wall and a slate hanging wall. The deepest workings are 80 feet from the surface. About 700 tons of quartz have been crushed, and the yield was $15 per ton. There is a stamp mill which is not running.

WOODSIDE.-The Woodside mine in Georgetown is 1,200 feet long, on a vertical vein, which is two feet wide and runs northeast and southwest between slate walls. A shaft has been sunk 110 feet, and drifts have been run 40 feet on the vein. The average yield has been $30 per ton for mill rock, exclusive of specimens worth $12,000. On one occasion a mass of rock was found so tied together with seams of gold running through it that a cold chisel had to be used to cut it. The pay chimney dips to the northeast. There is a five-stamp mill driven by water power, but it has had little to do lately, the mine having been filled with water last winter. The lode is rich in sulphurets, and has peculiar sheets of sulphurets about an eighth of an inch thick, with transverse crystals running from side to side. Mr. Woodside is the inventor of a concentrator which he uses in his mill. It consists of a sheet of India-rubber cloth, 22 inches wide and about eight feet long, sewed together at the ends and stretched over two wooden rollers four inches in diameter and three feet apart. The rollers are placed on a frame horizontally, one three inches higher than the other. The rollers turn so that the cloth makes three complete revolutions in a minute. A water pipe perforated with little holes passes above the cloth near the upper roller and discharges a number of little streams, which wash away the light sands and leave the heavy sulphurets to be carried up over the upper roller, and after passing that they drop down into a box beneath. The concentrator has been used in this mill for a year to the satisfaction of the inventor, but nobody else has adopted it. The mine was discovered by the gentleman whose name it

bears. He picked up a piece of auriferous quartz in a little ravine, and then sought for croppings, and when he prized up a piece of rusty rock that peeped out of the ground, he found the under side of it speckled with gold. He immediately commenced work, and the mine paid its way from the surface to its present depth.

JAMES'S MILL.-James's custom mill, with five stamps, eight miles south of Georgetown, is standing idle.

EUREKA. The Eureka mine, on the same vein, north of the Woodside, is 900 feet long, and has been opened to a depth of 130 feet. There is a steam hoisting establishment, but no mill, on the mine.

GEORGIA SLIDE.-Georgia Slide, one mile north of Georgetown, is a mining camp on a hillside, where, under rich placers, are found a multitude of small seams of decomposed auriferous quartz. Three companies are sluicing; one is working with a seven-stamp mill and another is putting up an arrastra. hillside has yielded an immense quantity of gold.

The

MOSQUITO.-The Mosquito mine, eight miles east of Kelsey's, is in granite. A mill built in 1866 had its roof broken in by the weight of snow last winter. PLYMOUTH.-The Plymouth mine, a mile and a half west of Kelsey's, is on a vein very irregular in width, but averaging seven feet. The rock averages $18 per ton; but 15 tons, selected carefully from 700 tons, yielded $8,000. The quartz contains eight per cent. of sulphurets.

GOPHER.-The Gopher mine, a mile west of Kelsey's, has three veins, with an aggregate thickness of eighteen feet. Most of the pay is in the western vein. The rock is a ribbon quartz, rich in sulphurets, and there are slate walls on both sides. A depth of 100 feet was reached, but the old works have caved in, and the mine has not been reopened. In 1858 the mine yielded $15,600. There was a mill, which has been moved to Washoe.

LAST CHANCE.-The Last Chance mine, 800 feet long, is opposite Coloma, on the north side of the south fork of the American river. The vein runs north and south, dips to the west at an angle of 50°, and varies in width from 2 to 12 feet. The eastern wall is greenstone, and the western granite; but on the western side, for a depth of 400 feet on the hillside, there was no wall-only a bed of gravel, which has been sluiced away, leaving the quartz exposed, so that an immense quantity of rock can be obtained without using either shaft or tunnel. Two men can take out 20 tons in a day ready for the mill. Both free gold and sulphurets are abundant, but some selection is necessary. The total yield, as reported by one of the owners, has been $60,000, though rumor among outsiders says it has been $200,000. One lot of 500 tons of quartz paid only $2 per ton; then 30 tons yielded $250 per ton; and five tons of the best yielded $40,000. There is a 10-stamp mill, with a Joinville turbine, driven by 60 inches of water under 70 feet of head. Amalgamation is effected in the mortar and on copper plates; the tailings are concentrated on blankets, and the blanket washings are worked in an arrastra. A railway track, 2,100 feet long, is being laid from the mine to the mill, and when it is finished the proprietors expect that their entire expenses will not exceed $3 per ton. The owners of this mine are Danes, and it is generally known as the Danes' mine, though that name belongs to the next claim.

The Danes' mine, 2,200 feet, is on the same vein as the last, but has produced nothing and is unopened.

REWARD.-The Reward is 1,400 feet long, one mile southwest from Uniontown. The rock prospects well, and the walls are slate on the west and granite on the east. A tunnel is being run in to strike the vein 135 feet from the surface.

SECTION VIII.

PLACER COUNTY.

Placer is a large county, and the only one that reaches from the Sacramento river to the eastern boundary of the State. It extends with the meridian from the middle fork of the American to Bear river.

Its chief mineral wealth is in the Blue lead, which crosses the county at an elevation of 3,000 feet above the sea, and is worked at Dutch Flat, Gold Run, Indiana Hill, Iowa Hill, Picayune Divide, Yankee Jim, and Forest Hill. Ancient gravel deposits appear also at Todd's Valley, Paradise, Bath, Michigan Bluff, Damascus, and Monona Flat.

The surface placers of the county produce very little now. The county, in proportion to the richness of placers, has, so far as known, the poorest quartz mines in the State. The Green Emigrant mine, lately opened, has produced some rich specimens, but the owners keep the amount secret, and they have no mill; and no other quartz mine in Placer has paid any considerable profit.

MISCELLANEOUS RESOURCES.-Nearly all of the Central Pacific railroad in California is in this county, and the people have derived considerable profit from it in one way or another. The county is also crossed by the unfinished road from Lincoln to Marysville.

The county is supplied with water for mining and irrigation by the Bear river, South Yuba, Dutch Flat, Michigan Bluff, and numerous smaller ditches. Their total number is 29; their length, 699 miles; their cost, $2,000,000.

The western and lower part of the county has much good farming land. There are 60,000 acres of land enclosed, 20,000 cultivated, including 3,000 in wheat, 310,000 grape vines, 30,000 apple trees, as many peach trees, 5,000 head of neat cattle, 20,000 sheep, 20 saw-mills, which turn out 10,000,000 feet of lumber annually, 14 toll-roads 131 miles long, made at a cost of $350,000, and $3,000,000 of taxable property.

THE FOREST HILL DIVIDE.-The Forest Hill ridge, on the southern line of the county, at an elevation varying from 3,000 to 3,500 feet above the sea, has the rich mining camps of Todd's Valley, Forest Hill, Bath, and Michigan Bluff, on the south side of the ridge, and Yankee Jim and Damascus on the north. Todd's Valley, Michigan Bluff, and Yankee Jim had chiefly hydraulic claims, and are now nearly worked out. Bath has cement claims, and is more prosperous than ever, besides being a pretty town prettily situated. Forest Hill has declined much, but it has a large body of rich ground, and will probably see a return of prosperity.

Yankee Jim was a long time the chief trading point for this divide, but now it has lost its trade, as well as exhausted its placers.

The gold at Damascus has the peculiarity that a tin-cup-full of it will weigh 20 per cent. more than an equal measure of the common dust.

FOREST HILL.-Forest Hill, which has been the most productive cement tunnel-mining district in the State, is situated 22 miles eastward from Auburn, at an elevation of 3,400 feet high, on the summit of the divide between the middle fork of the American and Shirt Tail cañon. The town is 2,500 feet above the level of the middle fork, and about a mile distant. The scenery along the cañon is grand. Five miles further up the divide is Michigan Bluff, and the Auburn stage runs through to that point; but there is no other stage running to Forest Hill. The cañons north and south are too deep and steep for much wagon travel. The Forest Hill ridge appears to be composed of auriferous gravel covered by volcanic sand, but the Forest Hill diggings are in the Blue lead which crosses the ridge from north to south. These diggings are 500 feet below the summit and 2,000 feet above the level of the river.

THE BLUE LEAD AT FOREST HILL.-In the Blue lead the lowest stratum

resting on the slate-bed rock is the blue cement proper, from 5 to 20 feet in thickness; above that is a red gravel, 100 feet thick; and over that is volcanic sand, which is covered in places by a stratum of trachytic boulders and soil. The blue cement is harder than the red gravel. The boulders and pebbles in the red gravel are all of quartz; those in the blue are quartz, slate, and greenstone. The red gravel has smooth gold in coarse pieces, most of them weighing two pennyweights or more, and some as much as seven ounces, and 900 fine. The gold in the blue cement is fine, flaky, S60 fine, the largest piece not worth more than 75 cents. The slate-bed rock is soft, and the gold is found in its seams to a depth of four feet. This gold is coarse, and is black externally, so that a person not familiar with it would not suspect its value on looking at it. The Blue lead contains large quantities of sulphurets, which are rich in gold. The claims at Forest Hill are 50 feet along the side of the hill to the person, and extend in to the middle of the hill, a distance varying from 2,000 to 5,000

feet.

CARELESS WORKING.-Instead of working the claim regularly from end to end, the companies generally sought to get out the richest and the softest dirt; and they changed about from place to place nearly every week, so they had not much room to work. They could not afford to lay tracks down to haul out their gravel; many of their drifts could be used for only a brief period, and the top caved down in the spots which they had worked, enclosing good ground, the position of which cannot now be ascertained without much expense. The New Jersey claim was the most notable exception to this mode of procedure in the district.

FUTURE OF FOREST HILL.-J. W. Reamer, superintendent of that company, is of the opinion that Forest Hill might be made more productive than ever by consolidating the claims and working them systematically on a large scale. There ought to be a large tunnel for each, half a mile, 60 feet below the level of the present tunnels, so as to be certain of having drainage for the deepest gravel that could be found. These tunnels should be made for the purpose of using mules to haul out the gravel and haul in the cars. There should be large mills to crush the cement; the sulphurets should be saved carefully, and all the pay dirt should be removed so that a place should not be left until everything of value had been extracted.

In 1859 Forest Hill shipped $100,000 of dust monthly; now $25,000 or $30,000. Forest Hill is one of very few places where the pay dirt swells; but a tunnel cut in the blue cement, as well as one cut in the slate, will soon close up here by the swelling of the earth if it is not trimmed frequently.

THE PRINCIPAL CLAIMS.-The principal claims at Forest Hill and in the vicinity have been the following:

The Dardanelles has yielded $2,000,000; the Jenny Lind has yielded $1,100,000; the New Jersey has yielded $850,000; the Independence has yielded $450,000; the Deidesheimer has yielded $650,000; the Fast and Nortwood, the Rough and Ready, and the Gore, have each yielded $250,000; the Alabama has yielded $150,000.

It is said that the claims within rifle-shot of the express office have produced not less than $10,000,000. No other placer district in the State can show a yield equal to this, and yet it is certain that a large proportion of the gold has been lost. The gravel or cement extracted was hard, and a considerable proportion of it was carried away by the water in lumps rich in gold. Mr. Reamer says that if he could have another claim like the New Jersey to work, with a cement mill, and with sufficient means to cut his tunnels and drifts in the most economical manner, he could obtain $2,000,000 instead of $850,000 from the same quantity of dirt.

CLAIMS AT TODD'S VALLEY.-The Golden Calf claim, near Todd's valley,