igo 7 ~\ Recent Changes in Gold Mining 113 
Company, showed a remarkably continuous vein, averaging 
feet wide and carrying $7.50 in gold. 
Mr. Parker planned to develop the mine so that it might 
easily yield 50 tons per day, so the total cost of mining and 
treating the ore would be about $4.50 per ton, which includes 
depreciation, etc. 
The general custom of having no reserves of ore blocked 
out prevents conservative mining men from investing in them, 
since there is no way of determining the value of the vein 
unless it is opened up. It would be much better to spend the 
cost of a premature mill in developing ore so that there would 
be no difficulty in securing capital or selling the mine to 
advantage. 
It is also quite customary to extract all of the ore by under- 
hand stoping. This becomes very expensive when the vein 
is so narrow that some of the wall-rock must be broken to 
make room, or when the vein contains much barren rock. 
All of this waste material must then be hoisted to the surface 
and much of it becomes mixed with the ore in .the bins and 
chutes. If the stopes are mined upward or overhand, all the 
waste can be left in them supported on a single line of stulls 
over the drift. This often affords a scaffold for the men and 
so saves the great expense of putting in many stulls. In 
addition a large block of filling will serve as a pillar to hold 
the walls apart so no ore need be left in the mine. One 
excellent mine superintendent said that the reason for this 
was the fact that most of the miners are more properly farm- 
ers and cannot drill holes upwards. They do not work 
steadily enough to warrant an attempt to teach them how, 
even though skilled men prefer to drill “uppers.” This 
objection can be overcome in those mines having air drills 
for driving levels by installing a few of the blockholing or 
air hammer drills which may be held in one hand and, 
besides being much quicker, can be worked in stopes too nar- 
row for hammering by hand. So far there seems to be none 
of these machines in North Carolina, although they are be- 
coming standard in the west. 
