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Show 466 WESTERN WILDS. power is wonderful. During my stay the workmen in the lower drift drilled one hole four feet deep, and put in a cartridge eighteen inches long, containing eight inches of the stuff; when " shot" it broke out 25 cubic feet of solid granite. It is entirely too powerful to fool with. So, when invited to go down and see it work, I respectfully declined. It is usually " planted " in a metal cartridge, and exploded with battery and cap, but in cases where the cartridge can not be in-serted the liquid is poured in. The common method is to bore four holes in the face of the drift, then fill and explode them all at once, tearing off a yard square and a foot in depth of the rock. This ex-plosive has been found cheaper than dualin, dynamite or giant powder, and now that the workmen are acquainted with it they consider it safe enough. But it would take high wages to keep me in its vicinity very long. Near the Sherman is the Poor Man's Lode, Avith vein from two to six feet in thickness, and ore- seam from five inches to two feet. The rest of the vein is filled with quartz and decomposed granite. The existence of narrow ore- seams in large veins, the rest of the vein mat-ter often entirely barren, though sometimes containing threads or pockets of silver ore, is a characteristic of nearly all the mines of Col-orado, and a never- failing source of speculation and theorizing. The advocates of the sublimation theory of lode- formation rely upon it very largely to prove their case; and it is the one phenomenon which advocates of the eruption theory can not explain in harmony with their views. For, manifestly, if the contents of the vein all gushed up in a mass from liquid reservoirs below, they could not have thus arranged themselves in neat layers of ore and vein- stone; while, if condensed from successive mineral vapors, we should naturally expect the existing order. The " Poor Man" and " Sherman " preserve their course quite regularly in the deep workings, as indeed do most of the lodes here. One great source of lawsuits is found in the fact that the veins under ground will not follow the course laid down for them on the surface in a United States patent. The patent generally locates the claim along the mountain side as straight as a yard- stick ; but at a hundred feet or more in depth the course of the vein resembles rather a crack in ice made by a heavy blow there are whims, drop-pers, feeders, cross- courses, dips, spurs, angles, variations and sinuosi-ties. Now, if you locate your patent on a cross- course, and I after-wards locate mine on the main vein, and we run together a hundred feet down, the question is whether the older location or the truer one should hold. In new mining camps " first blood " generally holds, |
