STRIKING IT RICH.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVII, Issue 7920, 18 August 1917, Page 1 (Supplement)

STRIKING IT RICH.

FORTUNES MADE IN A SINGLE DAY. ,')i»t of the commonest scenes of tng picture palace is a sudden and delirious strike of gold. We .see the poor prospector leave his log hut with pick and shovel, dejected and harassed and almost hopeless, leaving his wife perhaps' with a sick child. Then we see him hacking away at the rock. There is a fall. He pounces eagerly upon a fallen fragment and we See his lips frame the word —die magic word—“ Gold !”

It is a scene quite, true to life, it has happened many a time. The distance between poverty and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice is but a step. In fact, most big goldfields have been discovered bv accident. One day In tho summer of 1896 four persons were going up the bed: of a creek in the tar North-West of Canada. Tlie party oonsii'ted of a white man, half trapper, naif prospector, his Indian squaw, and her two brothers. Every now and then they stopped to prospect, tho woman washing the “dirt.’’ At last came tho time when, afer a thousand blinks, the prize came. Among the gravel left at the bottom of t!u* pan Wail several i»oiiiidiv/’ worth of gold. They all pegged out claims, and there wa ; soon a mining earn]) of Severn 1 hundred men, who worked until the following spring. It was then known to all die world that this was the biggest find of all alluvial gold since the days of California and Australia. Then the trek to the Klondike took place. Aristocratic, democratic, saint and sinner, “cook’s son, duke’s son," all <set their face, up the long trail, and the Chileoot Pass was strewn with the martyrs of gold. But since that Indian squaw’s rich strike the region has yielded £50,000,000 worth of theiyellow metal for which men and women sell their .*>uls.

Nuggets wire tin* delight of the miner's heart. The famous Hill End nugget. found in 1872 in New South Wales, was 4ft. 9in. in length, 3ft. 3in. in width, and aixmt 3in. in thickness. It weighed over 60011). and was woi-vu £30,000.

It is a fact that the man who found it had not his lodging money at tnw time. He was absolutely penniless. A prospecting miner, disgusted with a bad season, set off homeward. On the w iy he stumbled over a boulder half buried in the sand. He chipped on •■ fragment which showed gold underneath. That boulder weighed 20.0(A) tons. U yielded 81b. to 121 b. a ton. ana the big stone panned out eventually at £270,000. That was striking it ve. j