HOLMKs] ABORICxINAL AMERICAN ANTIQUITIES PART I 245 



readily discovered. xVt first the worlv would be simple, since the 

 schists which form the walls of the veins are hardly more difficult to 



handle than well-compacted loam and hence are easily 

 Vein Material worked witli liaud-wielded tools. The same is true of 



the feldspar, which constitutes in many places half 

 or more of the vein material. The quartz in large bodies is exceed- 

 ingly difficult to work, but when forming, as it usually does, only 25 

 or 30 per cent of the vein mass, it is broken up and removed with 

 comparative ease. 



In April, 1913, the writer visited the mines of western North 



Carolina, making such observations as seemed neces- 

 North Carolina ^ ^^^, ^ reasonalde comprehension of the nature 



Mines ■' ^ _ 



and extent of the ancient operations. The mines 

 visited are in the vicinity of Spruce Pine, Bandana, and Bakersville, 

 Mitchell County. Some of these were visited in 1893 by ]Mr. De 

 Lancey Gill, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, under the 

 writer's direction, and valuable information was collected, but his 

 observations have not been published.^ 



Of the several mines in the vicinity of Spruce Pine only two re- 

 tain traces of the prehistoric operations, and these 

 Spruce -Pine Mines tiaccs are but slight as a result of the recent mining 

 operations, which consisted in entering and deepen- 

 ing the ancient excavations along the mica-bearing veins. Mr. S. E. 

 Blood, who accompanied the writer to the Deake mines, a mile west 

 of Spruce Pine, pointed out the old pit margins so far as preserved 

 or exposed and described the conditions as they existed before the 

 modern mining began. The aborigines had discovered the outcrop 

 of the mica-bearing vein in the hillside and had follow'ed it for a 

 short distance into the slope, opening a trench just wide enough to 

 enable them to break up and remove the partially decomposed feld- 

 spar and the quartz, which form the principal part of the vein ma- 

 terial, thus freeing the crystals of mica. The vein as exposed in the 

 quarry face to-day is 4 or 5 feet in thickness. The mica occurs in 

 small and irregularly placed crystals in a matrix consisting of dis- 

 integrated whitish feldspar so soft as to be readily worked with 

 the pick, and a small percentage of white quartz. In the deeper 

 mines the feldspar remains so hard as to require blasting. 



A second mine, wnthin half a mile of the railway station at Spruce 

 Pine, exhibited somewhat more decided evidence of the old work, 

 and it is said that at the bottom of one of the ancient shafts 25 feet 

 in depth traces were found of branching horizontal tunnels, as if 



1 In the Enghirering and Mininr/ Jaurnal for March 31, 1877 (p. 121), it is stated 

 tliat a paper minutely describing the aboriginal mica mines of North Carolina was read 

 liefore the New York Academy of Sciences. It does not appear that this paper has been 

 published. 



