BETWEEN INDIANA HILL AND QUAKER HILL. 



425 







i 





The drift diggings at Indiana Hill 



Star amalgam from the washing of the deep gravel is said to be worth $ 190 per pound, whereas 

 with fine gold a pound would not be worth much more than one half that sum. 



On Chicken Point the gold is also line and floury. It is said to have a high value, its fineness 



reaching .975. 



The gold in the upper gravel at Quaker Hill has been compared to flattened pin-heads. On the 

 bed-rock the gold is coarser ; nuggets weighing as much as half an ounce were found, I was told, in 

 the deep drift. The western side of the channel is richer than the eastern, the same as it is at 

 Indiana 1 1 ill. 



Statistics of yield are very hard to collect with precision and accuracy. I made frequent in- 

 quiries upon this point, but have but little that is satisfactory to present, in addition to what has 



been already published. 



at the lower end of the hill — have always yielded a large 



amount of gold, the amount varying from one dollar up to eight or nine dollars per car-load. The 



average yield of this mine for the mining seasons from 1872 to 1874 is given in Raymond's report 



for the year 1874, page 100, as $5.28 per cubic yard. (My own computations from the data 



contained in the table make the yield $5.22 instead of $5.28.) From 19,997 car-loads, each car 



holding 19J cubic feet, the yield was $ 75,422.47. No account appears to have been taken of the 



difference in the volume occupied by the gravel in place and the gravel in the car. 



In order to get an approximate value for the Polar Star gravel,. I estimated the dimensions of 

 the funnel-shaped opening from which the gravel has been removed since the completion of the 

 new tunnel. About an acre of bed-rock has been cleaned at the bottom of the mine, and over a. 

 much larger area the gravel has been nearly all removed. My estimate was that a block of gravel 

 sufficient to fill a space 400 feet square by 150 feet deep, or 24,000,000 cubic feet, has been 

 removed. The yield From this gravel, as I was told by Mr. Colgrove, has been not far from 



100,000; which makes the yield per cubic yard about eleven cents. The best pay was found, 

 not on the bed-rook, but from six. or eight up to forty feet above it. 



At Quaker Hill, in conversation with Mr. Jacobs, I endeavored to get some rough idea, at least, 

 of the yield of the top gravel. Estimating the average expenditure of water at 800 inches per 

 lay, and that each inch would move five cubic yards of gravel, the amount of gravel moved per 

 day would be 4,000 cubic yards. The average yield per day has been $ 200, or at the rate of five 



( 



cents per cubic yard, — a value quite in harmony with the results of the calculations made in 1870 



for the top gravel at Gold Run. If we assume that the average amount of gravel moved per day 

 has been only 3,000 cubic yards, it will bring the yield per cubic yard up to 6 § cents. 



t\ 



ivs a 



225 as the average 



partial check upon this calculation, I made a computation of a different kind. Mr. .Jacobs pointed 

 out the boundaries of the opening from which the gravel had been washed during the past six 

 years, and estimated the volume of gravel removed to be equivalent to a block 1,000 feet long 

 700 feet wide, and 150 feet thick, or 105,000,000 cubic feet. Assuming 

 number of working days in a season, the daily average of gravel removed for the six years would 

 be 2,881 cubic yards. The estimate of 6§ cents as the yield per cubic yard cannot be far out of 



the wav. 



The bottom gravel is said to promise a much more abundant yield. A production of from ten 



to twelve dollars per ton is looked for. 



In the canons of Bear River, Steep- Hollow, and Greenhorn Creek the tailings from the several 

 mines are constantly accumulating to greater and greater depths. According to my barometric 

 measurements, the tailings in Bear River, at the road-crossing between Dutch Flat and Little York, 

 were 97 feet, and in Steep Hollow, at the crossing between Little York and You Bet, 136 feet 

 deeper in 1879 than they were in 1870. I have no data for similar comparisons in Greenhorn. 

 Where large quantities of tailings are brought down from lateral ravines, the effect is to build a, 

 dam across, or nearly across, the canon, in such a way as to hold back considerable quantities of 

 water and to form temporary lakelets. At the outlet of Dutch Flat Canon there is a dam nearly 

 completed across Bear River. At Wilcox Ravine, through which the tailings from Chicken Point 



