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Show CHAPTER XXXIV. PROSPECTING AND MINING. LET us " prospect," courteous reader, and find, locate, develop, prove up, and get a patent for a silver mine. We will start from Cincinnati ; the reader may do the hard work, and the author will contribute experience and a free talk for his share of the capital. Imprimis, then, we need not look for a silver mine in this part of the country; but we can hear of many. For silver and gold, once brought near the surface by cosmic upheaval, are subject to wash and removal the same as other minerals; and as " drift," the loose material of the earth's surface, is made up of the wear and tear of all kinds of rocks, it often contains enough gold or silver to mislead. Sometimes a rocky hollow furnishes a natural trough to concentrate this washed mineral, and then you have a wonderful story we will hear half a dozen of them in our trip across Southern Indiana. If you can find an Indian tradition to match it, your " hoodoo" is com-plete ; for nothing sets a thing of that sort off so beautifully as an Indian tradition. If you can add to it that some poor consumptive, years ago wandered into the wilderness, and was miraculously cured by an " Injun doctor," who lived in a wigwam back of a rock, and told him about the mine, you will then have the average legend about all the silver mines reported in Ohio and Indiana. Of course there can be no such thing as a real gold or silver mine in the comparatively level strata of these States; we must find a region where the strata have been heaved up and split across where the backbone of the continent is laid open. For illustration take a jelly- cake of many layers to represent any part of the earth where the rock strata are in place and undisturbed; then bend it to a sharp ridge and let the ragged edges wear away; the crevices between what were the bottom layers will be exposed on top. Precisely this has hap-pened in mining regions; and after these contact veins were formed, the mountain has often been split directly across its regular formation, thus forming true fissure veins. But uniformity is no part of nature's design, and for every perfect specimen of any kind she produces hun-dreds of abortions, imitations, and half- made specimens. We shall see ( 558) |
