Notes on a Great Silver Camp. 411 
gained, in sinking the shaft an enormous body of very vich 
silver ore was struck at a depth of 180 feet andin six weeks 
alone $1,000,000 were won from part of this deposit. Thou- 
sands of tons of ore were afterwards mined out of the 
“blue” limestone, one superintendent thinking that he had 
exhausted this body, but his successor (changes are often in 
these mines) making further trials and assays in the appar- 
ently valueless solid rock, would find great wealth still re- 
maining until, in places, ore had been sloped out for 30 or 
40 feet away from the “contact,” on the other side of 
which the ‘‘brown” limestone, nearly perfectly free even 
of traces of silver, presented a smooth. in parts “ slicken- 
sided ” wall, with parallel, nearly vertical groves or striae, 
showing so clearly that this was a fault wall. This great 
body of ore proved to be nearly buticular in shape and 
rich in lead as well as silver, but on driving levels further 
along this fault wall for some distance without ore, one of the 
cross faults was cut along which its strata had been moved 
30 feet horizontally, so that the levels now ran through the 
“brown” limestone, which henceforth proved to be ore- 
bearing while the “blue”? was comparatively worthless. 
Levels were driven in this as well as in many other mines, 
along the real bedding contact but almost invariably 
fruitless. 
On Smuggler Mt., in some of the mines, the ore is found 
in bodies of wonderful richness and extent under somewhat 
different circumstances. There is one fault coincident in 
strike, and only a little more vertical in the dip, with the 
strata, and with such a vertical displacement that the 
shafts have been brought opposite the “ brown” limestone. 
In this dolomite is a band of very hard chert of irregular 
thickness and distance from the fault plane, and the oreis 
found sometimes in its shale, along its contact of shale 
and dolomite or even sixty feet in the dolomite, but never 
(unless recently developed) beyond this chert band which 
in places is separated from the shale only by ore. Another 
very important fault was met with, dipping only 30° from 
the horizontal but at right angles to the other fault, and 
