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Show COLORADO. 465 the mountains. There is a singular air of newness in the whole dis-trict. In town I find the streets not yet cleared of native timber; of the thousand or more inhabitants most are living in unfinished frames, and the heavy groves of pine on all the surrounding knolls give the place the pleasing appearance of a camp- meeting ground. And here I put in a few days studying the silver mines. The main ridge, called by the enthusiastic the " Mountain of Sil-ver/' was for a mile or more ^ completely pock- marked with prospect holes, but no more than a dozen locations were developed sufficiently to be called mines. It is notable that in all new mining regions one will find hundreds of claims with shafts down fifty or seventy- five feet, and work suspended. In many instances it is because the original lo-cators are not able to push the development, but sometimes because they are afraid to. The vein, they reason, shows well at present; there are good indications of a true fissure, such indications as will impress buyers favorably that a big lode is below, but if they sink a hundred feet, it may not turn out a true fissure after all. So they will sell on present appearances. Buyers should look out for such cases, and, if the shaft is not down at least a hundred feet, be sure anyhow that it proves the existence of a regular fissure. Down in the Sherman Mine I found a score of men picking and blasting out the rich rock, of which the poorest grade yields a hun-dred and thirty ounces of silver per ton, the richest fourteen hundred ounces. This estimate is from the mill- runs the only honest test of a mine's capacity. Assays, of course, show more. The assayer who does not pay for any thing, but is paid for " sample assay," may not be entirely disinterested, but the mill- owner is not going to pay a dol-lar an ounce for a single ounce of silver more than he can get out of the rock. Most mill men do not claim to get more than eighty- five per cent, of the silver actually in the rock, but the owners at Neder-land, where this ore is worked, now claim to get over ninety per cent. This fact also makes the mill run a better test than the assay, for, ob-viously, investors in mines care more for what they can get out than what science shows to be there. And herein is seen one of the reasons why it pays to transport many kinds of ore from Colorado to Swan-sea, Wales, for there they save all the silver, gold, arsenic and other minerals. In the Sherman and some other mines here was used the new com-pound known as tri- nitro- glycerine. The workmen objected forcibly at first, but the inventor and manufacturer, Professor C. D. Chase, of St. Louis, maintains that it is safer than any other explosive in use. Its 30 |