A Sportsman 147 



$100,000,000. But I saw no evidence of the slumber- 

 ing wealth when I was there, or mineral indications 

 enough from which to obtain specimens for my collec- 

 tion, though we did not look very attentively. 



The day after my arrival I saw a small tract fif- 

 teen hundred feet long and six hundred feet wide, 

 which has since yielded over $10,000,000 in silver. I 

 purchased for some friends of mine a part of this tract 

 one hundred and fifty feet in width for $300,000, 

 which yielded a ton of silver per month for over two 

 years. The silver ore found and worked primarily at 

 Leadville was found in a blanket-spread form over and 

 below the surface, instead of going down vertically as 

 found in fissure veins, and was combined with a carbon- 

 ate of lead This blanket deposit was pretty well worked 

 out in a few years, and mixed with it, and below were 

 large bodies of iron ore, worthless for silver, but with 

 an admixture of manganese, making it valuable for 

 flux in smelting, and especially valuable in the manu- 

 facture of Bessemer steel, so that the anomalous con- 

 dition of many of the silver mining companies was 

 exhibited, after the exhaustion of their silver ores, as 

 existing by furnishing material for steel rails. 



We made a third removal of our hunting camp over 

 to a beautiful and grassy but limited valley on the 

 headwaters of the Blue River, a tributary of the Rio 

 Colorado, at the base of a precipitous and rocky moun- 

 tain which we named Fletcher. This mountain, one of 

 the most prominent of the continental range, towering 

 up fifteen hundred feet from the little valley we occu- 

 pied, was very difficult to ascend, and rather dangerous 

 on account of loose rocks of mammoth size, which 

 needed but little encouragement to go crashing down 



