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Show THE CENTENNIAL STATE. 483 some of them were, speak of its sublime scenery. Their narratives are full, however, of allusions to scenes of blood and danger, to frowning precipices, where one misstep was destruction, and to lonely gorges where ambushed savages might let fly upon the unwary traveler a shower of arrows. Only security and a touch of civilization enable us to appreciate wild beauty and grandeur. Small is the pleasure one can take in the brawling brook, when, stooping to taste its ice- cold waters, he is liable to get an arrow in his back ; in the wondrous cafion walls, where every turn may reveal an enemy; in the sweep of the bald eagle, where the next occupation of that eagle may be in picking the meat from his bones, or in the antics of the " noble red man " when that ( supposed) nobility is his only security for life. The richest mineral region is on the mountains west and south- west of Georgetown. First is the Silver Plume group. There the Pay Rock has an eighteen- inch vein of ore, zinc blende, very rich in silver. Down hill therefrom is the celebrated group including the Dives, Dun-kirk and Pelican. These locations are stuck in so thick that the pat-ents overlap each other in all directions, and a completed map of all the claims looks like a picture of a pile of boards thrown at random on the ground, and half covering each other. Out of a little plat, per-haps half a mile long and a quarter wide, has come $ 10,000,000 worth of ore. The Dives alone shipped $ 640,000 worth in forty days ; and, pending certain legal proceedings, $ 90,000 worth was shipped between midnight Saturday and midnight Sunday. [ An attachment can not be levied in Colorado on Sunday.] Besides paying enormous dividends, several of these mines keep two or three good lawyers in pay, and support expensive lawsuits. I am afraid to say how much actual cash has been paid out on the Dives- Pelican suit. The lowest guess here is $ 100,000, but it is probable a great deal has changed hands very quietly, and without knowledge of the public. Two hundred feet below is the Baxter, famous for its wire silver, of which I have seen specimens that looked like a " witch- ball," or mass of tangled hair turned to pure silver. Of course there is not much of that sort of stuff, and where it appears on the face of rich rock it looks as if it had stewed out of the stone and curled from intense heat. Most of it is found in bunches lining the inside of little pock-ets in the stone, and projecting from a streaked rock we used to call in Utah " polygamy lime rock." To discover a mine in that neigbor-hood was nothing; the great trouble was to sink a shaft down to" where the ore was concentrated, and then put up the machinery neces-sary to work it. Some of these mines originally sold for a trifle, com- |