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THE CHANNELS: SIEREA COUNTY. 



211 



Nebraska and American Hill, both of which have proved its richness, and finally on toward Eureka 

 south, in Nevada County, where it is extensively opened and worked with great success and profit 

 by many mining companies. Here the celebrated North Bloomficld Company (at an expenditure 

 said to have been, for some time past, $ 60,000 per month for labor and material alone) is now 

 opening this channel with a bed-rock tunnel one and a half miles long,* in order to work out the 

 lower rich strata of the company's extensive mining ground, located on the above-described grand 

 gravel-channel or dead river. This channel is, in Sierra County, about twenty-five miles in length, 

 and averages one mile in width. 



"The channel lying next west enters Sierra County near its northeast corner, on the dividing 

 ridge of the heads of Hopkins and Nelson creeks, in Plumas County, and Canon Creek, in Sierra 

 County ; runs a southerly course, and is covered to a great depth by heavy layers of lava and vol- 

 canic sand (conglomerate), or ' mountain cement,' as it is generally termed by the miners. The 

 main channel has been tested by partial working in the following rich places through which it 

 passes, namely : Canon Creek, Poker Elat, Deadwood, Sebastopol, Excelsior, Fir Cap, Monte Cristo, 

 City of Six, Book Creek, Forest City, West Ravine, Alleghany, Chip's Fiat, and Minnesota, all in 

 Sierra County ; and Orleans and Moore's Flat, &c, in Nevada County on the south. In all these 

 places, with the exception of the four last named, the deposit has been worked by means of shafts 

 or tunnels, by drilling, and in most instances the front of it only has been hydraulicked, where 

 water could be obtained, with a satisfactory result. The four last-named places are still worked 

 "with great success by hydraulic process. All these mining camps paid richly in early days, pro- 

 ducing many millions ; and tins channel has of late proved as rich as formerly wherever followed 

 and opened Ioav enough into the centre of the overlying hills. This has been demonstrated at the 

 mining ground of the Bald. Mountain Company, at Forest City, and the Highland and Masonic 

 Company, situated between West Ravine and Alleghany. 



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This channel has several, branches, which have proved equally rich in several places, as, for 

 instance, the celebrated ' blue lead ' or < blue banks ' near Downicville, situated on the left bank of 

 the North Fork of the North Yuba River, which is apparently a different gold-bearing channel 

 from that of the ancient-river beds before described. Without its branches the above-mentioned 

 channel is over twenty miles long in Sierra County, and more than one mile wide, containing an 





area of over twenty square miles, having a grade of seventy feet per mile in average. 



"Farther west comes the celebrated and more extensively developed so-called ' Slate Creek 

 Basin/ on each side of which is a well-proved and very rich auriferous gravel range or dead-river 

 channel. These run nearly parallel with each other in a southwesterly course from the northeast, 

 uniting, however, again near Bald Mountain, in the neighborhood of Scales Diggings and Poverty 

 Hill. The eastern of these two, lying between Canon Creek on the east and Slate Creek on the 

 west, apparently enter Sierra County in its northwest corner, under Pilot Peak. This isolated 

 mountain is over 7,000 feet high,t of volcanic origin, its northeastern slope heaved up and walled 

 with basaltic columns, while its lofty summit, commanding a sublime panoramic view of the Sierra 

 Nevada mountains for hundreds of miles distance, Sacramento Valley, and the Coast Range, is 

 capped with a bed of lava 600 to 700 feet thick. This channel lias an average fall from the base 

 of Pilot Peak (where it is worked by the North American Mining Company) down to Scales Dig- 

 gings, near the junction of the western channels, of eighty-four feet per mile, reckoning these two 

 points as twelve miles apart, as they are in an air-line." 



This channel on the eastern side of Slate Creek is most extensively worked 

 all along between Pilot Peak and Scales, passing through Howland Flat, Pine 

 Grove, Chandlerville, Saint Louis, to Portwine, where numerous companies 



* See ante, p. 203. 



+ The elevation of Pilot Peak is 7,605 feet ahove the sea, and 1,21(3 above Onion Valley at its base, 

 according to the Geological Survey measurements. See Geol. I. p. 306. 



