118 
Journal of the Mitchell Society [. November 
This will all pan gold at the surface and has been tested by 
bored holes 30 to 50 feet deep to water level and by one old 
shaft 115 feet deep. This zone is filled with small quartz 
seams from a line to occasionally several inches thick and 
having all possible strikes and dips and seldom more than two 
feet apart in every direction. The country rock varies from 
schist to gneiss and is generally heavily stained by iron oxide 
and thoroughly decomposed, except for a few, bold out- 
cropping hard masses. The quartz is usually thoroughly 
honey-combed and broken into soft, angular fragments. 
Except at the surface", most of the gold is in these quartz 
streaks, but the hard and solid portions of them seldom have 
much value. At the present time the entire mass is being 
mined by means of an irregular pit which was, in the summer 
of 1906, 90 feet deep and 250 to 300 feet across at the top. 
The material at the bottom is just as soft and decomposed as 
at the top and the ore is loosed by black powder and shov- 
elled by hand into cars containing a cubic yard. The cars 
are hoisted up a steep incline and automatically dumped over 
a grizzly of light steel rails. The fines are washed through 
the grizzly by jets of water, the soft large lumps being 
crushed and knocked through by means of a pick. In 18 
months operation only a few tons of large, hard lumps have 
thus far been thrown out. The material is then washed 
down a trough about 50 feet long, thus becoming pretty uni- 
formly mixed before being divided among the washers. At 
this mine the machines are run at only 150 revolutions per 
minute. They were tried at a lower speed, but there was 
trouble with the gold sticking to clay balls. The machine 
used about 150 gallons of water to the minute and the whole 
plant is run by a 35 horsepower engine which, when the three 
units are running, is probably overloaded. The tailings, 
when tested, usually pan nothing at all, but assay a few 
cents, due to gold included in the sand. While this loss 
could be reduced by speeding up the second washer to grind 
the sand finer and trusting to the riffles to save what little 
additional free gold would not then settle in the machine, it 
