Arizona silver belt., 1888-03-31
MINING BUSINESS, NOT 4 SPECULATION.

It is undoubtedly true that more than one-half of the failures of min ing enterprises of the West have been due to the miscOnceptiSn and igno- rance ot mining as a business upon the part of owners or stockholders controlling and directing the compa- ny's operations. It seems a hopeless task to attempt to eradicate from the minds of Eastern people the false i'm pression which a majority of them have of mining for the precious met als. Gold and silver mines to them are very Ike Monte Cristo's cave, where untold wealth IS to be revealed by little preliminary work, the pay ment of dividends is to begin almost immediately, and the-price of stock is to take a skyrocket shoot that will, in brief space of time, make the fortu- nate possessor of few hundred shares, whS went in on the ground floor, a millionaire. They imagine that the gold or silver, as the case may be, is deposited in compact body, free from extraneous matter in the vein, and that it IS only necessary to remove the mother rock Tn which it is imbeddsd, and the metal can then be taken out in chunks of a size most convenient.
 This belief has been encouraged, we are sorry to say, to the injury of min Ing, by unprincipled men, possessing knowledge of the difficulties and un- -certainties of mlnIng, to subserve their ewn sordid ends. Newspapers, in the mining regions, have also been in- strumsntal, not little, in promoting this deception by lmmoderate praise of mines and prospects, with the laudae!s intention of beneftting thelr district, but it is mistaken policy, for a sale of claim made upon such exaggera- ted reports, almost invariably results in injury to the district. The expscta- tions of the purchasers are not real lzed and they become unreasonably prejudiced against the district and in- iuence other who might, otherwlse, engage in mining to their own profit and the benefit of the locality.
 The history of many of the great producing mines in this country re- veals the fact that great deal of work and money was expended upon them before they became producing and dividend paying mines. There is much truth in the adage that minesare made, not found" MT. John Scudder, a prominent Colorado miner, in speak zng of St. Louis inning interests, drew attention to the fact that the Mary Murphy Company was five years, at an expense of over $2OO,0OO, in reach. ing a dividend-paying basis. The Hope had also long and costly jour ney to the winning post. The Gran ite Mountain had similar experience, and the Meath, after fifteen months hard work, was only beginning to show signs of real business. St. Louis, he said, had many such mines, all they needed being honest management and a fair amount of business intelligence. By reference to the list of dividend paying mines published in the Engi- neering and Mining Journal, we find twenty-four companies there enumer- ated which levied assessments aggre- gating from $10,OO0 to $1,2OO,OOO, subsequently, pad dividends ts their stockholders. These are only small proportion of the mines which became productive after the expenditure of large sums of money in their develop ment. The same methods necessary to success in mercantile pursuits, must be applied to mining to make success reasonably sure, and where intelligent and honest management has been faithfully adhered to the proportion of failures in mining has been no great CT than in other kinds of business.
 We reiterate what we said tive weeks ago, in these columns, namely, that, with perhaps two exceptions, the development work on claims in this district has been wholly inadequate to determine their true value. There is no district, perhaps, in the Territory that can show more promising pros poets, both silver and copper, than Globe, and what we greatly need is te have parties with capital and enter prise take hold of cur mines and, by intelligent and persevering work, de, termine their worth. We have conf. dence enough in the mineral wealth of the district to believe that the re, suit would be highly satisfactory.