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Show 484 WESTERN WILDS. paratively; then the buyers had to spend $ 40,000 in development, since when they have paid for themselves a dozen times over. The Pelican Mine extends directly across Cherokee Gulch and on to Sherman Mountain. A little beyond are the Maine, . Coldstream, Phoenix, Scotia and Captain Wells, merely different claims along the same vein, all very rich, and supposed to be a continuation of the same ore- channel as the Pelican- Dives. Half a mile or more along the steep face of Sherman Mountain, barely passable by a foot trail, brings us to Brown Gulch, and beyond it Brown Mountain. Directly across the gulch are several valuable mines'. Near the top are the Hercules and Seven- thirty. After innumerable lawsuits and fights, the killing of one man and wounding of two others, the claimants of these two locations compromised interests, and sold both for $ 180,000. Now, under the name of East Row, it is paying handsomely. Down the hill- side, and also crossing the gulch, is the Brown Mine, which has paid for itself half a dozen times over. Still lower in fact, only three or four hundred feet above Clear Creek is the celebrated Ter-rible, probably the best managed mine in the district, though far from being the richest. It was bought of the locators by a company in Cornwall, England, for $ 500,000, and yielded $ 150,000 annually, varying but little from one year to another. Successful mining in Colorado is of necessity deep mining. Rare, indeed, are the cases in which good pay rock is reached at less than a hundred feet, and in many mines the best is not reached under four or five hundred feet. As a rule, the larger the vein is the farther it is down to where all the ore in it is concentrated into one rich seam ; for the force which made the seam of ore seems to have been weakened or dis-sipated as it drew near the surface, and a seam three feet thick at a depth of three hundred feet will often be scattered in twenty little ir-regular strings toward the surface. The Dives is by no means a large lode, but they sunk on it two hundred feet before they found the ore concentrated in one seam. The ore body may aptly be com-pared to a tree, which, as it rises, continually divides and subdivides, running out at last to twigs; so the ore- seam scatters until, at the sur- J face, the prospector finds a hundred little lines or stems of mineral scattered over a wide space. Hence it is that silver mining here re-quires both nerve and patience, for it takes time to get down to the ore in this hard rock, where " three shifts" make but six or seven feet a week. The curiosities of mining are almost endless. Here and there on the edge of rich ore- seams little accretions of almost pure silver have |