Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume IV.djvu/759

Rh surface are only about one foot thick. The dip of this coal field is toward the northwest, and on its western border Permian fossils are found, this being the only locality where that formation has been found on this continent.—According to the United States census, the statistics of coal production for the year ending June 1, 1870, are as follows: Number of collieries, 1,566; hands employed under ground, 65,000; above ground, 29,854; total, 94,754; capital employed, $110,008,029; wages paid, $44,316,491. Bituminous coal mined, 17,199,415 tons; value, $35,029,247. Anthracite coal mined, 15,664,275 tons; value, $38,495,745. Total coal mined, 32,863,690 tons; value, $73,524,992. The distribution of the production of coal in the United States in the chief coal-producing states is shown in the following statement from the census of 1870. Except in the case of Pennsylvania, the production is bituminous coal:

The total production of coal in the United States in 1873 was as follows:

The area of the New Brunswick coal field is very large, but there is only one thin coal bed, too small to work. Nova Scotia produced 411,541 tons of coal in 1873, and Cape Breton island 639,926. The coal is all bituminous and of a

fair quality for gas and steam purposes. There is also an unproductive anthracite coal field in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.—The foregoing fields comprise all the carboniferous coal in North America, and it is not probable that any other districts of any extent containing true coal will hereafter be discovered. Near Richmond, Va., is a very deep coal basin of the triassic age, which was the first worked in the eastern states, and after a long suspension work has lately been resumed. There are two other similar small basins in North Carolina, on Deep and Dan rivers, but neither of them is wrought.—Besides the foregoing carboniferous and triassic coal fields, there is in the N. W. part of this continent a very large area of coal fields which should be described with some detail. The coal or the combustible matter of these western basins is of the kind generally called lignite, of an inferior quality and of a more recent age, the tertiary. It has however the same appearance, and is by its chemical composition true coal; and its distribution in extensive basins along the eastern base of the Rocky mountains, bordering immense treeless plains where no other combustible of any kind can be found, gives to these coal fields an immense value. Indeed, in regard to the population of the gold-mining countries of the Rocky mountains, and to the building of railroads across the plains from the Missouri to the Pacific, the lignitic basin of the west is for the future as important as are for the present the Appalachian coal beds or the coal fields east of the Mississippi river. Along the Missouri river and west of it, the true carboniferous formations sink and disappear under the Permian. The line of the 96th parallel of longitude, from the point where it enters the state of Iowa to the southern limits of Kansas, shows nearly exactly the limits of the old coal fields. Further west the Permian, following a gradual westward dip, is overlaid by the cretaceous formations, which reach a thickness of 2,500 ft. or more; and over these, nearer to the mountains, the tertiary measures appear with their numerous and as yet scarcely explored beds of lignitic coal. By the upheaval of the Rocky mountains, the lower tertiary has been thrown up, sometimes to the perpendicular all along the base of the mountains, and there the capacity of some of its beds of coal has been exposed and is already utilized by workings on a comparatively large scale. The whole lignitic basin may be, like the coal fields of the east, subdivided into different basins, not by any positively marked difference in the nature and composition of the lignitic coal or by any difference whatever in the formation of their coal beds, but merely by geographical limitation, as follows: 1. The New Mexico lignitic basin. It is especially of great extent and rich in coal beds along the Rio Grande, on both sides of it, S. of Santa Fé and Albuquerque as far down as Fort Craig, the supply of fuel for the fort being obtained from