Читать книгу Trails and Tales in Cobalt - W. H. P. Jarvis - Страница 7

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Our camp was on the fringe of the prospected area rather than outside of it, and it was not far to Kerr Lake and the mines which made that section famous. These mines Pard and I visited the day after we established permanent camp, to gain what further knowledge we could of the Cobalt ore deposits.

Crossing Cross Lake, we landed at the foot of the road that led to Kerr and Giroux lakes, up which we began to travel. Prospectors were coming and going; silent when loaded or with packs on their backs, but talking loudly otherwise. Words of mining camp parlance ever caught the ear, and actions and words alike betokened a general nervous tension and excitement. A good find was reported at Kirk Lake, while a great big vein of cobalt had been found south of Haileybury in Bucke Township, and the finder wanted $100,000 for his find. One man had trenched seven miles and never made a find, while another man had made a discovery he considered good enough to work on, but the Inspector had thrown out his claim, and others had begun prospecting on it.

Silver, cobalt, claims, discoveries, and the recording of claims and discoveries filled men’s minds and inspired their speech. It was a rush and grab for wealth; the workingman of to-day might be a millionaire of to-morrow. We came on one claim and saw several parties working.

“Well, friends,” remarked Pard to one of these groups, “trying to make discovery?”

“Yes,” replied one of the men spoken to, “but not gettin’ there very fast.”

And then another of the group spoke up: “There are fifty-three people in eleven separate parties working on this claim, all trying to get discovery.”

We strolled over the ground and took a look at the different points being worked. I remarked to Pard the utter impossibility of ever finding anything at most of the points being worked, to which he replied:

“Yes, but advice is no good; a wise man don’t need it, and a fool won’t take it.”

While we were on the claim we heard several cries of “Fire!” and stood behind trees while the explosion was made and the resulting fragments had ceased to pepper the earth.

“Poor way to prospect,” was my companion’s comment, “putting a shot in here and there and setting it off to see the rooks fly. That’s what I call prospecting with powder, and it comes mighty expensive.”

We continued to a real mine, and certainly a mine it was. An open cut was being carried into the hill, and out of this was being hoisted ore such as has won the fame of Cobalt. The cut was about twenty feet wide, and in this width embraced two or three veins. The veins were two to five inches wide and the vein matter was of cobalt ore,—smaltite and silver. The silver was distinguished from the smaltite by its sharp metallic projections. Pard looked at the ore, scraped it with his knife and “hefted” it in his hands. As the vein was broken off the hanging wall of the cut, large slabs of ore were being removed from it, occurring between the vein matter proper and the wall. This the foreman told us was argentite, which we knew to be a very high ore of silver.

When the ordinary man comes upon a mining claim and finds great wealth in the possession of another man which might have been his had he been on the ground a short time before his present advent, he is visited by a development of the primitive instinct which prompts possession by might. As the law does not permit its execution he is limited to moralizing how very blind fate is, and summing up the many reasons why the world’s destiny would have been better assured had he been the finder and possessor of the gift of nature.

“Well,” said Pard, as we passed along the road, “I have known mines and prospects out West being named the ‘Ready Bullion,’ but that proposition we just left comes nearer earning it than any I have seen. Of course, these veins are narrow, and they would cost no more to mine if they were ten times wider. That ore runs between two and three thousand dollars to the ton, and one-tenth of that, two or three hundred dollars per ton, for twenty to fifty inches wide, would be considered mighty big pay.”

The next property we visited was one of which great things were said by the public. Here we found an open cut run into the hill, and on the hanging cut of the wall there appeared about half an inch of vein matter much decomposed and mixed with cobalt bloom. To the eye there was but little silver. For the half inch of questionable ore being taken out a cut eight feet wide was being carried into the hill. We remarked to the foreman the amount of ground that had to be removed for a small amount of ore, and were told such a big cut was necessary, as the ground shook loose with the blasting and had to be taken down for safety. We were told the vein had been much wider where it had already been mined, and were shown places on other parts of the property where the veins showed wide, also some samples of ore with native silver sticking out of the cobalt in irregular manner. This Pard did not like as well—called it spectacular, said that it was a specimen ore. “I don’t like this proposition at all,” said he. “You’ll find people will be greatly deceived in it. This silver has come into the cobalt after the cobalt was deposited in the veins, as you see the little veins of metallic silver running through the cobalt ore, showing that fissures have occurred in the cobalt as fissures have occurred in the rock before the cobalt was deposited. What I like to see is values evenly distributed through the mass of the ore, as I like to see values distributed well up into the gravel off of bed-rock in placer. In the Klondike country there were a whole lot of claims on which you could get a dollar to the pan of bed-rock, but the pay would not run up in the gravel. A couple of inches off of bed-rock you would not get a cent to the pan, and the people used to wonder why it would not pay to work; but to make money you want pay regular and lots of it. You will find the same with this proposition. They can get samples that will assay all kinds of values, but when they come to get smelter returns there will be something lacking.”

That evening as we lay before our camp-fire we naturally took to further discussion of what we had seen, and the conversation drifting to the local methods of prospecting, I stated that I thought the general tendency was to begin sinking operations on surface indications not at all warranting the expenditure.

“In the general run of things you’re right, Billy,” said Pard (he had taken to using my pet appellation); “only about one prospect in a thousand turns out any good, and yet it is always the biggest fools that make the finds. I mind I was one of the outfit that stood on Eldorado Creek laughing at the fellows staking French Hill in the Dawson country back in ’98—Chechackoes we called them—yet three men took out twenty-seven hundred dollars a day off of rim-rock on one of these claims, and some of the biggest nuggets found in the whole Klondike were found on French Hill.

“Perhaps, however, it was Charlie Andersen, the lucky Swede, who played in the biggest fool luck of any man in the whole Klondike country, and his case will show you that there is no telling what a little digging will do in mining. Late in ’96, a few months after Cormack had discovered rich pay on Bonanza Creek, and the boys had all come up from Forty Mile and staked everything in sight, one night two fellows, who had staked 29 Eldorado Creek, got Charlie drunk and sold him a claim for eight hundred dollars. Charlie next day found himself with no money, and realized he was up against six months’ winter with flour a dollar a pound and other things in proportion. Most everything sold at a dollar a pound all round—sugar, beans, rice and so on; it didn’t matter much what the first cost outside was. Charlie went to these fellows with tears in his eyes and asked for his money back, and they laughed at him. Then he did another crazy thing, for he started to prospect his claim, that is, it appeared crazy to the fellows round. ‘I tank I put a hole down on her,’ he said in his fool way. Well, he got to bed-rock and he discovered the biggest kind of pay. Take a shovelful of dirt off bed-rock, put the dirt in a pan and wash it a bit, and from twenty to a hundred dollars would shine up. The creek bottom cleaned up from one to three thousand dollars per running foot, and the whole claim turned out something like a million dollars.

“It was the discovery of Eldorado Creek pay that put the crowd crazy, and Charlie was the craziest of them all. Well, Charlie then began to blow himself properly in the dance halls, and, of course, fell in love. He married one of the girls, or at least she married him.

“All this shows that gold—and silver is much the same—is where you find it, as the saying is, though I wouldn’t hardly advise Charlie’s trail a good one to follow as a sure thing proposition.

“What became of Charlie? Well, Charlie was trotted off to ’Frisco, where he domiciled with his loving wife in a thirty thousand dollar house which he built for her, until she sued him for divorce on the grounds of cruelty. Of course, the girl won, and Charlie is working in a sawmill in British Columbia at two dollars per day. The girl got all his money left over by the lawyers.”