SEARCHING FOR GOLD.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume XVIII, Issue 958, 5 April 1888, Page 3

SEARCHING FOR GOLD.

Gold, as a rule, is the . last thing you will see in gold-bearing soil. Tou may have it under your feet at the rate of £2O to the bucketful of dirt, and noc a grain will you see unless that soil happens to be farrowed by a recent rain. Then, if a stream of water has cut it away, washing it clean to the ledge, you may see lying thereon the dull yellow bits, and you may take them, for bits of brass or brass fli ings. Gold in its native state is not a showy metal, not nearly so showy as the glitUring yellowish pyrites of iron, which has so often by the inexperienced, been mistaken for the geaulne ore, A man, long out of luck, strolled one morning in an aimless moort of mind out of the town of Columbia, United States. He sat down under a tree and with his stick commenced poking and prying at a rusty - looking boulder in ite soil before him. As he continued to poke and pry a dull yellowish bir. of color appeared beneath the coating of reddish rust with which the lump was covered—rust accumulated during its long rest from the iron-permeated soil. He examined it more closely, nnd found himself in possession of a nugget nearly all gold and worth about £2OOO.

The big strikes which have come undor our observation were all the result of similar accidents—as at Chambers' Bar, on the Tuolumne, where the seeming misfortune of a breaking reservoir led to a rush of water over ground where no gold was supposed to be, and m the deep furrow cut by the water there, on the ledge, lay coarse gold ; as on the Mariposa trail, where one day a luckless man, packing grub and blankets, sat on a piece of white jagged rock to eat his dinner, and after eating, and while smoking, he id ly pried with hia Jack-knife bits from the rotten lodge, and found one of the richest quartz-veins in the state; and as at the Rawhide Eanch claim, in Tnolumne, where the loug-continued winter rains of 1861-2 (59 consecutive days of drizzle and hard showers, all the level country under water, landslips everywhere, communication cut off with Stockton, and flour at £29 per barrel)—well, this caused a cave of dirt in a bank claim supposed to be worked out, and revealed thousands and thousands of dollars in coarse, ragged lumps, Just as it had fallen out of the rotten quartz matrix. A famous professor came a few months afterward, made a survey of some ground adjoining, pronounced it rich, pocketed his £3OO fee, and on the strength of that survey ce-tain capitalists built expensive mining works, and when the ground was parsed by them years afterward the woodpeckers and squirrels held possession, for the professor could not see under the gronnd any better ,-han any oae else. It has often been noticed thatitis the unlearned, unscientific, ragged, often reckless prospector who finds the " end " first, and the professor comes along and tells ns why it shonld be found there afterward.