The Mine, Vol. 2 (Classic Reprint)

Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Mine, Vol. 2 There is a very strong reason in the nature of mines and miners for many of the delays in properly defin ing a claim. Every part of a ledge is not equally rich. Ore occurs in seams, chimneys, or chutes, and as soon as a man struck it rich his first thought was usually to explore it until he could select and stake out the best three hundred feet. Nearly all of the early locators on the Comstock were trying to get the richest slice in the lode, and they kept away from the recorder's office; or if they entered a claim, they took care to leave it in such shape that it could be altered, like some of the Spanish land grants of California that were floated ten or fifteen miles, much to the subsequent profit of attorneys. Even when the metes and bounds were well defined the guileless miners could not always be de pended upon to leave them so. One of the pioneers mentions a mining suit in which the matter hinged upon the location of a stump that marked the corner. Judge and jury adjourned and went to look at the stump. It had been dug up bodily during the night and carried off, and the ground was so levelled that not the slightest clew remained. Each side accused the other, and the case was never decided. All the American mining camps have maintained in the case of quartz ledges the right to an inclined location - that is, the right to take a claim of definite size and follow it downward at any angle or angles, taking all the ore in the vein and in its legitimate branches. A miner, according to this idea, takes up a piece of ground simply for the lode, and goes wherever it goes. Spanish mining law, on the contrary, recog nises only the square location. According to the Span ish plan, as soon as a ledge passes beyond the boundary of a square piece of ground of given size it belongs to the man in whose tract it lies. One can easily see that the Spanish system must prevent much trouble and render the single-vein problem immaterial. In fact, it rules out of court nine tenths of all the cases that lead to lawsuits. Matters rapidly went from bad to worse on the Comstock until the most casual oh server would have seen a wild Walpurgis-night revel of conflicting claims of every Size, shape, and age tum bling over each other three and four deep. It is hardly surprising, for the Comstock was not the only vein on the side of Mount Davidson, nor even the most prominent one. The Virginia lode was nearly parallel, and other veins, too' many to name and hardly worth while digging up from the dust of forgotten records. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.