Page:Atlantis Arisen.djvu/223



tend that each particle is coated with a film of iron sulphide which prevents amalgamation, but the microscope reveals nothing to confirm this theory. It is easy to see that, with the sand so heavy and the gold so light, it must be difficult to capture a fortune from beach mining, the sand of the ancient beaches yielding an average of three dollars per ton. There are more than a hundred of these auriferous beaches, extending from Gray’s Harbor on the north to Gold Bluff in California. Twenty- seven of them have been worked. The most important of these are at Yaquina, Alseya, Cape Lookout, Umpqua, Coquille, Ellens- burg, and Chetco. The production varies. The estimate for 1883 in Curry County was twenty thousand dollars. On the other hand, one mine in Coos County yielded eighteen thousand dollars in twelve months.

Quartz and gravel mining are now on a better basis in Southern Oregon than formerly. There are more mills, more mining ditches, and altogether better facilities for extracting the gold of the country, handled undoubtedly with a better knowledge. What the farmer gets out of the earth in one shape the miner extracts in another, and the exchange of products results in a benefit to the agriculturist; hence it is desirable to have a mining population for consumers, a happy combination which exists in Southern Oregon.

The mines of Lane County lie high up on the Middle Fork and McKenzie Fork of the Wallamet Eiver in the foot-hills of the Cascade Eange. The Bohemia mining district, on the Middle Fork, is about thirty-five miles southeast from Cottage Grove, on the Southern Pacific. The rock of this district is slate and granite, the veins cropping strongly and carding free gold at the surface. In general the quartz is rose-colored, containing gold and silver, with galena, pyrites, zinc blende, and occasionally antimony. A small stamp-mill is at work in this district, and some rich gold discoveries have been made within the present year.

The Blue Eiver mining district on McKenzie Fork is in a rough and almost inaccessible region, abounding in the magnificent scenery of this range, well wooded and well watered. The quartz veins in this district are in an amygdaloidal trap rock, or gray wacke, an altered and decomposed form o