MINING. 293 



reaching over twenty miles, it still extends further. Hundreds 

 of tunnels have been run in search of it. Where the line it 

 follows was adhered to, they have always found it, and have 

 been well rewarded for their labor. Millions of dollars have 

 been taken from this lead, and its richness, even in portions 

 longest worked, is yet undiminished. These tunnels have cost 

 from $20,000 to $100,000 each, and interests in the claims 

 they enter sell readily at from $1,000 to $20,000, in proportion 

 to the amount of ground within them remaining untouched, 

 and the facilities which exist for working it. Many of these 

 claims will yet afibrd from five to ten or more years' profitable 

 labor to their owners, before the lead itself within them is 

 exhausted. As in some of them quartz veins and poorer pay- 

 ing gravel have been found, many of them may be valuable to 

 work from the top down as hydraulic claims." 



This idea that the blue lead occupies the bed of an an- 

 tediluvian river is however not universally accepted. Mr. 

 B. P. Avery, who has written numerous newspaper articles 

 upon the mineral deposits, asserts that the " blue lead," as 

 it is called, is not a " lead" but an extensive stratum which 

 is many miles wide, and is found all the way from the foot hills 

 to the summit of the Sierra Nevada. In reply to this, it is 

 said that while a bluish stratum of clay similar to that of the 

 blue lead is found over a wide district, that it is evidently 

 different in origin from the blue lead itself, which is confined 

 to a narrow bed, and marked by the signs found in all the other 

 ancient river-beds of the state. 



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 

 Aerial 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. The 

 quartz is bluish-white in color, and very hard when first taken 

 from the lode, but on exposure to the air it slowly crumbles 

 into sand. 



