384 MINING INDUSTRY. 



twelve feet, or even more, but averaging about eight feet. This quartz car- 

 ries a pay-seam, or rich band, which seldom occupies the whole width of the 

 vein, but has a variable thickness, between one and four feet, averaging per- 

 haps two feet or Httle more. The seam sometimes follows the hanging, some- 

 times the foot-wall, or passes from one to the other, occupying in places the 

 middle portion of the vein between its walls. Within this pay-seam the sil- 

 ver-bearing mineral occurs distributed in irregular, bunchy form, intimately 

 mingled with the gangue of the hard, glassy quartz. It has but little, if any, 

 of the banded structure of the Lander Hill veins, near Austin, and does not 

 usually carry its valuable components densely concentrated in' a seam of solid 

 mineral, as those veins do. The silver-bearing portion of the ore consists 

 chiefly of a fahlerz, an antimonial sulphuret, with which is associated at times 

 some ruby silver, some fine-grained argentiferous galena, and considerable 

 quantities of zincblende, which, according to Mr. Bessler, the former metal- 

 lurgist of the works, carries silver to the extent sometimes of $600 to the ton. 

 Some native silver also occurs. Iron pyrites is a frequent associate of the 

 gangue ; a fine-grained variety, especially, accompanies good pay-ore and is 

 not an unwelcome feature in the vein. The length of the company's claim is 

 1,000 feet. Its southern boundary is at or just south of the bed of the creek 

 that flows in the canon. Extending thence to the northward, the surface 

 along the line of the vein rises rapidly, reaching an altitude of 420 feet above 

 the mouth of the shaft near the bed of the stream, in the distance of 1,000 

 feet, or at the northern boundary. The accompanying section, Fig. 4, on 

 Plate XXVII, shows the manner in which the mine has been opened. 



An incline shaft, .Z, having its mouth 60 feet north of the southern bound- 

 ary, and a few feet above the bed of the stream, has been sunk in the plane 

 of the ledge, but at such an angle with the direction of its dip that the hori- 

 zontal distance between the incline and south boundary is increased 20 feet by 

 every 60 feet sunk ; the whole depth of the incline (not vertical) being 240 I 



feet in June, 1868. At the mouth of the incline an adit. A, is driven into the 

 hill, following the course of the ledge to the distance of nearly 300 feet, 

 passing through irregular or scattered bodies of ore, of small importance, and 

 finally losing the vein in ground that is much disturbed, probably by the 

 fault that is clearly visible in the levels below. 



