I EADVILLE AND VICINITY. 225 



ginning I favored the jetties, and have not changed. They do not need this dis- 

 ingenuous argument, nor, even if they did, are they sacred or of more importance 

 than the valley of the river. Let us look at this for a moment. It is shown that 

 the river is a hundred feet deeper than the outlet at the point of junction. As the 

 jetties are only twenty-four feet deep there is abundant water for them. We have 

 shown that 1,100,000 cubic feet of water per second pass the point of the pro 

 posed outlet. The same high engineering authority tells us that only 83,000 

 cubic feet per second enters the pass in which the jetties are. So that there is all 

 the jetty pass can carry and a million cubic feet to spare. No wonder this ob- 

 jection passes by a breath and is carefully kept from paper. It is not discourt- 

 eous to say the objection is not an honest one. !t either reflects upon the intelli- 

 gence of the person to whom it is made, or upon the candor of the one who 

 makes it. No friend of the jetties will put the objection on that ground, for it at 

 once raises the question of good faith and of their utility. 



To set this objection at rest, let us refer to the facts upon which the jetty 

 legislation was based and those alone upon which the annual drain for keep- 

 ing them open is made upon the Treasury. The jetties are based upon the 

 simple fact that water is incompressible; that if you confine a stream of flow- 

 ing water, of say half a mile wide, so as to make it pass between walls a 

 quarter of a mile apart, the water will find room for its volume by cutting down 

 its bed. That is all there is to the jetties. If the bed is of soft material, like 

 sand or mud, it will cut it cut. If it is hard clay or rock it won't, and then it 

 makes a dam. Now the best advice I can give those who urge this objection 

 against the oudet is to be very careful how they handle the subject, for if they 

 once let go the theory c n which they got the money to build the jetties, they turn 

 them into a dam, and Congress may discover that a dam raises the flood-line of 

 of the river, and vote money for the outlet to carry off the surplus waters. 



>ic :ii if: ^ * * 



LEADVILLE AND VICINITY. 



A recent trip to Lake and Pitkin Counties in Colorado, and a summary in- 

 spection of the wonderful mining regions included in them, especially in the vicin- 

 ity of Leadville, east of, and in the Independence District, west of the Sawatch 

 Range or Continental Divide, leads me to give your readers a brief description 

 of them, although the former, at least, has been the theme of hundreds of writers 

 within the past three or four years. 



Leadville is situated in Latitude 39° 15', Longitude 105° 17', on the eastern 

 side of the Arkansas Valley, between the Mosquito Range and the Continental 

 Divide, at an elevation of 10,025 f^s'^ above the sea at the court house door. 

 The first discovery of ore was made in i860 in California Gulch, and for several 

 years placer mining was carried on quite successfully, not less than $5,000,000 

 of gold having been taken out up to 1878. At the time of the Hayden Report 



