Page:Atlantis Arisen.djvu/450



of fbrty-five degrees to the south. The casing of the ore matter is a lime shale, the whole extending across the country formation at right angles, and lying bet ween a contact of granite and slate.

The veins carry ores known to mining men as copper-glance, antimonial silver, gray-copper, "black metal," or brittle silver, peacock-copper, and hard brown, gold-bearing quartz. It is claimed that no such conglomeration of ores was ever before found outside of Mexico, where similar deposits exist. The discovery was made by a party looking for placer claims at the head of the Little Salmon, which comes into the Columbia from the east a few miles north of the boundary-line of British Columbia. The whole summer was spent in cutting a one-hundred-mile pack-trail through the heavy timber of a country extremely rough in its configuration. The canon of the Salmon River has stretches of twenty or more miles where the high bluffs are perpendicular and faced with rock. The Bonanza Ridge lies between the head-waters of a branch of the Salmon and the Kootenai Lake outlet.

When the Colville party were, at the end of summer, making prospect holes on this ridge, they stumbled on their bonanza; but it being near the season of snow in the mountains, they were forced to relinquish the hope of securing any returns for their labors at that time, and concealing their treasure retraced their steps to wait for another summer. But the secret was not so well kept but that it was guessed, and, when they started in the following May for the land of promise, they were watched and pursued so closely as hardly to get to their destination before others were also on the ground. This is a part of the romance and excitement of mining. Many a lonely prospector while looking for his bonanza has laid his bones where other equally evasive fortune-hunters could not find them. But the bonanza found, then comes the struggle for possession, and the race is to the swift. The discoverers of this one, named Winslow Hall and William Oakes, with eleven others, organized the Kootenai Bonanza Mining Company, and made three locations, the Kootenai Bonanza, Silver King, and American Flag. The G-rizzly, Silver Queen, and Cariboo are extensions of the above named.

The richness of the Kootenai Bonanza district is extraordi