138 Reminiscences of 



I purchased some of the nuggets, one of which weighed 

 a pound, for which I paid three hundred dollars, and 

 altogether I bought nuggets to the value of two thou- 

 sand dollars. It then occurred to me that I would 

 make a collection of Colorado ores, which I did, build- 

 ing up from the nuggets bought, and when I returned 

 to Central City I employed several men to follow up 

 the opened mines in Gilpin and several other counties, 

 until I secured a large and representative collection 

 from several hundred mines, which I afterward ex- 

 hibited at the World's Fair in Paris in 1867. 



I also secured specimens from the few opened 

 mines then shown up over the range, which from assays 

 made at the Denver United States Mint I found to 

 be distinctive from the ores about Central City, and 

 more predominating in silver than gold, which induced 

 a belief in my mind that the over-the-range mineral 

 veins would ultimately make a record in the silver 

 line, which was not then expected. In fact the gen- 

 eral view existing at that time was that Colorado was 

 wholly a gold-producing region, and that silver was an 

 incidental feature of no particular importance. I was 

 so much impressed with the value of the silver mines 

 from the Denver assays that I wrote a small book on 

 the subject, entitled Silver Mining Regions of Colorado, 

 of between one hundred and two hundred pages, of 

 which I had five thousand copies published by D. Van 

 Nostrand & Co. of New York. This gave an account of 

 the silver mines, with a general history of Colorado and 

 its mining methods, and was the first work published 

 on Colorado. This work, published in 1865, was se- 

 verely criticised by the gold-mining region newspapers, 

 and in some instances ridiculed as preposterous and 



