A NOVEL MINING PLANT.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXXV, Issue 4924, 11 January 1902, Page 3

A NOVEL MINING PLANT.

• (Millers Flat Correspondent.)

. On being out over the Lammerlaws last week I came across some amateur prospectors, and their prospeoting plant, which was as novel as it was ingenious, and deserves some notice. They wheeled it all the way from Sutton to the Upper Taicri, 'a distance, I should say, of nearly 30 miles. The whole affair consisted of a complete hydraulic elevatlog plant and prospecting spoon. The elevator consisted of 30ft or 40ft of canvas hose, to which was attached a nozzle and 6ft of 6in pipe.. With a good supply of water it worked with wonderful perfection and capacity. The prospecting spoon was made out of an ordinary oil drum attached to a pole 20ft long. To the mouth of the oil drum or spoon was a spring trapdoor. The spring commuoioated with a line to the end of the handle or pole. It was let down to the bottom of the river and worked on the bottom by means of the handle until the spoon was supposed to be full; then the spriDg was Blipped,the trap closed with a snap and made prisoner of the contents, and the I whole was hauled to the surface and emptied ! into a dish. And I may add that colors of gold were brought up on the three different occasions I saw the experiment tried— in a depth of 6ft or Bft. of water. Perhaps not the leßßt iogenious part of the contrivance was that the whole affair could be put together and fixed up so as to form a wheelbarrow. In this way the whole plant can be shifted from one place to another, ready with a little fixing and race-cut'ing to start work again. The designers of this novel prospecting contrivance are employed in tbe Government workshops at Hillside, Dunedin, and will thus have a good opportunity of still further improving a design already so well begun. I have time after time brought under the notice of the mining public tbe vast extent of auriferous country lying dormant in the Lammarlaw Ranges and Upper Taieri districts. There are hundreds of acres of proved payable ground which would give permanent employment to hundreds of men if only capital were invested to oonserve and bring in water, of which there is an abundant supply. And there are thousands of acres that have never been prospected. So that over the large tract from the Waipori watershed to that of the Manorbura, and from the Clutha to the Taieri River— 4o miles square of country or 1,600 square miles — the mineral resources are pr&cically inexhaustible, and if only the capital that was thrown away on some three or four of our wortbl ss dredging sohemfis had been spent in developing the resources of this Jarge tract of country the beo< fit that would be derived by the mining community would be as far reaching in Us ( Sects as it would be permanent in results. In proof of the above I may mention what came under my notioe last wefk. B. ing invited by an old friend of mine to inspect some ground that he has lately com* ncros?, we set out for the gully, accompanied by our wheelbarrow friends from Dunedio. Ho rrquested ma to try the ground myself. I sauk a hole, hap-hazard, in about 3ft of stripping and the result was about ldwt of gold taken out in about the space of an hour. Our Dunedin friends sank another hole a little distance away with better results than mine. Not bad work : 4s worth of gold in an hour ; and the best of it was, there were two old holes between ours that may have been sunk years ago and apparently looked upon at the time aa duffers. My friend says tbat there are patches three or four miles along the banks of this creek with equally good prospeots to be obtained as where we were, and when results of this kind oan be obtained with the tin dish what could be obtained with proper appliances and a systematic method of working. The great drawback to this district is that there is no firewood and its almost inaccessible location to bring stores and mining appliances, while it is subject in winter to heavy snow etorms. But I believe that in time these difficulties will be surmounted.