Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/331

Rh and gash veins, and in part of interstratified beds containing this material. I found much of it at several "horizons" of the slope back of French Hill, and also as a cap overlying the badly cleaved and fragmented schists of the summit (three thousand feet?) of the prominent knob which dominates this region. The same type of "kidney" quartz appears at repeated intervals on the slope leading up to the Dome, almost immediately after leaving the junction of Carmack's Fork with the Bonanza, and also on the saddle ridge which might properly be considered to be a part of the summit of Dome Mountain. Prospectors have in nearly all cases staked these assumed outcrops of quartz, recognizing them as ledges, and in a number of them have claimed the discovery of the "mother lode." So far as visible gold is concerned, I have in nearly all cases found them to be absolutely barren, and I do not think at this time that there is much chance of finding anything materially valuable in them, although events might prove the reverse. Most of the quartz that has so far been discovered in direct association with the gold—that is to say, wrapped up with or within itself, as in the case of the quartz-gold nuggets of French Hill—is of a gray-blue or pinkish tint and of a granular and nonspathic type, therefore differing materially in aspect and structure from the quartz of the hillsides and from the greater number of the quartz bowlders that are contained in the dumps or have been removed from bed rock. Some of the bowlders or rolled pebbles containing coarse gold are of the same character of quartz as the quartz of the hillsides. Notably one such was shown to me as coming from a high-bench claim (Millett's) on Adams Hill (left "limit" [bank] of Bonanza, between Little Skookum and Adams Creek), and other similar fragments taken from the rock in situ were observed on Gay Gulch and the ridge which separates the head waters of this stream from those of Eldorado. In a dump at the mouth of Gay Gulch (a right-hand tributary of Eldorado abreast of Claim 37) I found fragments of rotted quartz which were well sprinkled with fine gold.

It does not by any means appear so conclusive to me as seemingly it does to Professor Spurr that because in some gulches the gold heads up in increasing quantities the nearer we approach the beginnings (heads) of these gulches, and that with this approach the coarseness of the grains and nuggets likewise increases, we are necessarily forced to assume that the travel of the gold at large has been confined within the boundaries of the gulches in which it is at present contained, or that its source is to be sought near by. A number of the most "solid" streams of the Klondike region, such as the Bonanza and Eldorado, if we are permitted to judge from the evidence of outputs and of prospects up to the present time, hardly