OCR Text |
Show MINING FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES. 585 deep mining are a permanent blessing. For the placers attract a swarm of eager adventurers who hasten to exhaust the supply, often to demoralize the country, and then abandon it, while lodes require a vast outlay of capital and years of honest industry. The plant re-quires from $ 20,000 to $ 100,000 in capital and labor, and no good silver district is really developed in less than ten years, while for gen-erations thereafter work goes on with improved methods. Thus, per-manent towns and cities are built up, a good market is created, and the adjacent lands are brought under high " cultivation ; trade is very active, and local manufactures are brought into existence. A thousand miners buy three times as much as a thousand farmers, for they pro-duce nothing they can use. Thus the old placer- mining counties of California are bankrupt and almost deserted, while the mineral devel-opment of Utah has more than doubled the value of real estate, and the mines of Colorado have made that State rich in' farming and grazing. This distinction is worth considering if the reader thinks of making a settlement in some of the mining territories. |