MURPHY'S LUCK.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6936, 27 October 1900, Page 2

MURPHY'S LUCK.

Thxeo Months' "Work Brought a Fortune. The luck that has come so suddenly to a young Irishman named Barney Murphy is the talk of all the mining camps in California at present. A despatch, from Los Angeles, tells how bub four months ago Murphy was a carter, and thought himself lucky with £9 a month and no extras. To-day he lias a bank deposit there of £7000, and has about £35,000 to come to him on Nov. 10. Meanwhile he is enjoying himself at the best seaside re- j sorts. It all 'happened like this : — Along with a jackass laden with a frying-pan, tin pail, coffee-pot and kettle, sacks of beans, salt pork and bacon, a roll of blankets, and a pickaxe and shovel, Murphy started out on May 2 for the bald, parched hilb on the Rio Colorado, sixty miles souHh of the southern boundary of Utah. He reached the hills on May 10. He set up camp, and began prospecting. While ihe had been among miners and prospectors from his earliest youth, he had never before gone prospecting for himself. With a pick in his 'hand he tramped and crawled and scrutinised the desolate, hot hills over for several days. He found the topography as he had expected it to be, but the character of t'be outcroppings was altogether different from what he had been led to believe. Only base copper ore was in sight, and the chance of finding rich ore there grew slimmer each day. LED BY A BIRD ! At a little after dawn on May 23, when Murphy was hunting quail, he * ran across a rock in the bottom of a gulch, about the size of a man's head. He knew at a glance that it was live rock, exactly like that he had seen in the Indian's hands at Chloride a year or two before. He ran back to his tent and got his hammer and magnifying glass. The rock was whacked* into pieces, and each piece revealed tiny specs of gold in the grey quartz. Murphy was wildly excited. He abandoned all els© and began a search for the ledge or outcropping from which the chunk in the gulch had been detached. He crawled up and down the barren, scorched hillside many times. He crept over wide areas on his hands and knees, looking, scrutinising and gazing all about him. He turned over hundreds of bits of oxidised rocks there. He chipped away pieces of outcroppings and he pulled up dried sage brush and; peered into tie hole* left by the roots. In his feverish restlessness he forgot all about hunger, and he paid little attention to the sun's burning heat which beat upon his back. When noon came he was no nearer finding the spot from which the float roqk had been displaced. He siid down the hillside and climbed up the opposite side of the gulch, all the time scrutinising everything about him with the nicety of a bee examining a flower. Not a thins; anywhere to indicate whence the float had come. But Murphy, with the proverbial patience of prospectors, stuck to the search; "l WAS FIXED FOR LIFE." He, went all over the hillside. and found nothing. Hei retraced his steps and went down into the gulch to re-survey the topography of the locality. He gazed up and down, before and back. Suddenly 'he saw, in the late afternoon's sunlight, a protruding mass of rocks a halfmile further up the gulch, that resembled

in colour the float that he had come across early dn the morning. He hastened up the gulch, and climbed over boulders and through sage brusli. He knew he was at last going to his golden find. Just at sunset he reached the outcropping, a sharp, rugged, reddish-brown boulder, jutting out from a steep area of yellow, sterile soil. He drew himself up to it, and excitedly knocked off a, chunk. It was identical with the float of early morning. The golden specks were everywhere abundant where oxidation had not dulled the precious metallic deposits. " I just sat and smoked all the first night of my find," says Barney Murphy, in telling how* "he came across the Prince mine. "I knew that I had the biggest thing in a gold mine out there, and that I was fixed for life." The next day Murphy went about searching out the dimensions of the ledge. When 'he had satisfied himself as to that, he set up his mining monuments, showsng the four corners of his claimed property. Then he sent for a grub-staking partner at Chloride, and together they began digging and blasting in the labour of exposing the ledge and demonstrating the quality of the ore. In several spots quartz was found that ran £8 to the tone, but the average- rock ran £5 to the ton. And there seemed to be thousands of tons of it. It was no trick at all to sell such a property, although such luck is rare nowadays in the Rio Colorado. In fact, thousands of prospectors have searched for years over mountains', through canons, across deserts, and along foothills, enduring privations and living like savages, and have never found altogether ore worth £500 !