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Non-coking.

CHAPTER XV.

A GLIMPSE OF THE MINES OF EAST OREGON.

Wherever in East Oregon the irregular range of the Blue Mountains has lifted itself above the high table-lands and the sedimentary rocks, there are seen the metamorphic or mineralbearing rocks in which mines may be looked for. These eruptive heights are divided by local nomenclature into Owyhee, Powder Biver, Pine Creek, John Day, Malheur, Cedar, and Steen Mountains. The mining districts, so far as discovered, are situated on the John Day, Powder, Malheur, and Burnt Bivers and their branches, as they come out of these mountains.

The John Day placer mines were discovered in 1862 by a party of Californians en route to Salmon Biver, in Idaho. These placers were on Granite, Elk, Dixie, and Canon Creeks, and very productive, as many as five thousand miners being at work there for several seasons. These placers are now given over to a few miners, most of whom are Chinese; but there are others on the numerous creeks upon the head-waters of John Day which are yielding good wages to white men.

The second discovery of any note was in 1863, at Humboldt or Mormon Basin, which lies on the flat top of a ridge between Burnt Biver and Willow Creek, a fork of the Malheur. Along the sides of this ridge and at its feet were the camps of Bye Valley, Malheur City, Amelia, El Dorado, and Clarksville. Mormon Basin was destitute of water, except that furnished by two small streams, and the melting of the winter snows, which give from twenty to eighty days of a mining stage, according to the season. The first year one hundred miners made an ounce a day to the hand as long as there was water. Later their claims were abandoned, and eventually fell into the hands of companies who worked the deep gravel mines by hydraulic machinery, of which there are several plants in operation. One firm employs twenty six men, and uses two sets of sixteen-inch sluices, emptying into a thirty-inch flume two thousand feet long. Their hydraulic apparatus consists of seven-inch pipe,