The ore in all the veins is an exceedingly hard quartz, carrying gold, silver, and what is nominally gray copper, galena, and zinc blende. This ore has several interesting peculiarities. In the first place, it carries absolutely no iron pyrites-which are found in considerable quantities in every other gold-bearing vein in our section, outside of this particular belt of veins. Again, the gray copper-or what is nominally such-is shown by analysis to contain very little sulphur-which is largely, and, in some cases, almost entirely replaced by selenium. And besides copper, the mineral carries gold, silver, lead, zinc, bismuth, antimony, iron, and manganese.

Another peculiar feature of the main vein is this: In cross-cutting the vein in the tunnel TTT, the quartz for the first 150 feet carried free gold, and the sulphurets were nominally pure gray copper, no galena or zinc blende being found. The ore assayed ounce for ounce in silver and gold; and the loose gold in the clay seams was worth about $19 an ounce. For the last 50 feet the quartz carried little or no free gold. The sulphurets were galena and zinc blende, and the loose gold was very silvery-being worth only $14 an ounce. The sulphurets here assay from 6 to 8 ounces in silver to 1 of gold.

The same peculiarity is noticed in all the side veins; those on the south side of the main opening carrying free gold and gray copper, with no galena or zinc blende; while those on the north side carry little, and in some cases, no free gold, and no gray copper, but carry galena and zinc blende assaying high in silver.

In the main opening AA the vein-matter between the porphyry walls consists of strata of quartz and porphyry. For a depth of 300 feet, in some cases, from the surface, the vein is decomposed and disintegrated, so that it bears some resemblance to a gravel-bank, though the quartz is all sharp. This decomposition has broken up the quartz into pieces from many tons weight down to fine sand, and the porphyry in many places has been changed to clay.

Our method of working this vein is by an open cut from the surface, making a funnel-shaped hole, connected by a shoot with a tunnel below, through which all the material mined is run out. The sketch marked Fig. 2 shows the present appearance of the pit and of the arrangement of the tunnel.

The tunnel is run in from the surface, so as to partly cross-cut the formation. The grade of the tunnel is about 5 inches in 12 feet, and it is wide enough to allow a track, flume, water pipe, and air pipe to run all the way in. At the end of the tunnel, and under the pit, is a chamber 9 feet by 25, and 20 feet high in the clear. This chamber is connected with the workings above, by what is now a short shoot. At the bottom of this shoot is a large gate; below the gate is a grizzly and a platform and a small bin, for loading into a car. The flume which runs through the tunnel comes in under the grizzly, and the water pipe connects with a small tank at the head of the flume.

Our method of working, in detail, is as follows: In the open cut we run powder drifts, with TT, as in bank blasting. We run the drifts in about 15 feet from the face of the bank, and the TT from 15 to 20 feet on either side, usually taking a 15-foot face to the bank, on a stope up from the bottom. We load from 150 to 300 pounds of powder (low-grade powder) in each T, and fire by battery. One such shot will dislodge from 3,000 to 4,000 tons of material, which is thrown down to the bottom of the pit and into the shoot. It is then drawn from the shoot as fast as wanted, by means of the gate. As it comes through, it passes on to a grizzly, the

bars of which are set 5 inches apart. The coarser material passes over the grizzly and on to the platform and bin below, from which it is loaded into cars and run out. What goes through the grizzly drops into a hopper below, from which it is fed into the flume.

This flume is 14 inches wide and 18 inches deep. It has a grade of 5 inches in 12 feet, and we run about 130 inches of water in it. This water carries all the material that comes into the flume out of the tunnel, and dumps it into a dump-box.

The dump-box is a large double compartment box, each compartment being 35 feet by 12, and 9 feet in the clear. It is provided with a large movable "tom-iron," and two hydraulic nozzles working under 90 feet pressure. The mine is worked on the day shift only, the quartz and dirt being run into one compartment of the box. The dump-box is run on the night shift, when the material that comes in by day is thoroughly washed free from clay, and is then run into another set of sluices, which convey the quartz direct to the mills.

At the mills the quartz-sand and dirty water are passed over a long grizzly of perforated screens. The quartz drops from this directly into the ore bins, and the sand and dirty water passes through the screens and is dropped into another flume. As the quartz goes into the mills it is also separated automatically as to size-the finer part going to the stamp mill, and the coarser to the concentrating mill. The waste water and sand that goes through the grizzlies is taken by the flume below to what is called the plate house," where it is distributed over silvered plates.

We mine on week days only, running the mills every day. In every working day we mine about 300 tons of material. Of this about 10 per cent is run out in cars, and 90 per cent comes out in the flumes. This material is largely clay and sand, too fine to pay for further crushing. Three hundred tons of this dirt will produce 95 tons of milling quartz. This loose material-the sand and clay-all carries a considerable amount of fine loose gold, varying in size from the finer float gold up to particles the size of the head of a pin-we never find any coarser than this. This gold we save in the sluices and plate house. For this purpose we have the following arrangement of flumes, etc.: The flume from the chamber to the dump-box is 800 feet in length; grade, 5 inches in 12 feet; width, 14 inches, and is lined with block-riffles the entire way. The flume from the dump-box to mills is 300 feet long; grade, 6 inches in 12 feet; width, 24 inches, and is also lined with block-riffles. From the mills to the plate house the flume is 300 feet long; grade, 6 inches in 12 feet; width, 24 inches, and is lined with slat-riffles. These various flumes pick up about all the visible gold, so that the material that goes into the plate house is apparently nothing but sand and dirty water.

In the plate house this sand and water is divided into 6 equal parts, dropped into distributing boxes, and run over 6 aprons. These aprons are 20 feet long by 9 feet wide, with a grade of 5 inches in the 20 feet of length. Near the lower end each apron is covered with an apron of silvered plates, 9 feet square; below the silvered plates is a riffle filled with mercury, to catch loose amalgam, and below the aprons is a tank into which everything drops, to catch the loose mercury. All the water and sand is run over these aprons, each carrying about 20 inches of water. These aprons save the float gold that has escaped the sluices, and sometimes give astonishing results. We have cleaned up as high as 160 ounces of amalgam from them in a week. This gold is of the finest possible sort, and the amalgam has absolutely no grit, and is apparently almost a homogeneous

mass of hardened mercury. The water, after leaving these plates, goes to waste, the plate house being the last gold-saving apparatus we employ.

At present we are working only the main vein. A great amount of work, however, has been done on the side veins, and a number of promising bodies of high grade ore have been developed. These side-vein ore bodies vary in length from 70 to 500 feet or more; the veins average in thickness

from 2 feet to 8 feet, and the walls are hard and firm. A large amount of ore has been taken from them near the surface and worked, and we are now preparing to open and work them at a depth.

We are running two mills-a stamp mill and a concentrating mill. The stamp mill is an ordinary mill of that sort. It contains 15 stamps, in 3 batteries of 5 each, with self-feeders, ore bins, and plates. We work all the fine part of the quartz here, so no rock breaker is required; and as the fine quartz carries little or no mineral, we have no concentrators here.

The stamps weigh 750 pounds each, work under a 6-inch to 8-inch drop, and drop 96 times a minute. We crush through a No. 5 slot screen, and crush 2 tons to the stamp in 24 hours.

We amalgamate entirely outside. For this purpose we have silverplated aprons below the mortars, each apron being 4 feet 4 inches wide and 12 feet 6 inches long, with a grade of 18 inches to the foot. Below the aprons we have 12 feet of spout plates to each apron, 18 inches wide by 12 feet long, grade of an inch to the foot. The free gold in our rock, especially in the finer rock, is very fine flour gold. It is worth $18 50 an ounce, yet an ounce of dry, hard amalgam will only retort about one fifth gold. We have experimented with crushing through every size screen from No. 9 down to No. 4, and we find that although our gold is so very fine, yet we save the most per ton in crushing coarse through a No. 5 screen, and at the same time have a largely increased capacity over a fine screen.

The coarse rock and all the sulphur-bearing rock goes to the concentrating mill. This mill is constructed on a different principle from most. mills of the sort, as we use Tustin pulverizers instead of stamps for crushing the quartz. The ore first goes through a 12-inch Blake rock breaker and then drops into the ore bin, from which it is fed to the Tustin pulverizers. These pulverizers are provided with automatic self-feeders, the same as we use in the stamp mill, and they feed the same way. We crush wet and amalgamate on aprons, after which the pulp is concentrated on Frue

vanners.

We run four pulverizers. These run at 20 revolutions a minute, requiring 4-horse power each. We crush through a 20-mesh steel wire screen, the capacity of each machine being from 10 to 11 tons a day on the kind of rock that comes to it. The aprons are silvered plates, 4 feet wide by 10 feet long; grade, 13 inches to the foot. We use 8 Frue vanners, 2 to each pulverizer. Our coarse rock carries a very small per cent of sulphurets, fromto of 1 per cent. The sulphurets, however, are very high grade, some being worth, when pure, upwards of $5,000 a ton. We concentrate our rock up to from 82 to 88 per cent of the assay value, according to the kind and grade of the rock.

A comparison of the two methods of crushing shows a marked difference in results. In crushing through the battery a large amount of slimes are produced. With the pulverizer a very small quantity of slimes is made. As a consequence, with our ore, where the rock is very hard, the gold exceedingly fine, and the sulphurets soft and brittle, we find that on the same ore we amalgamate a much greater percentage of the fine gold after the pulverizers than after the stamps; and when we come to concentrate, we can save only 18 to 20 per cent of the assay value of the ore after stamps, and 85 per cent after the pulverizers. On the same ore and with same screen our pulverizer is about the equivalent of 6 to 8 stamps, according to the character of the ore.

Our sulphurets we work ourselves, by roasting and chlorination. Our roasting works consist of two "Willard" furnaces, with all necessary appurtenances. These furnaces are of a ton capacity each to the charge, and