The St. Johns herald., 1894-04-26
STEAMBOAT MINING.
Rich Returns of Gold from the
 Bed Of Snake River.
A Novel Means of Working the Bars of IdahC's Great VFaterway-The Gold Caught on Copper Plates with
 Quicksilver.

Extravagant stories are told about the wealth of gold sprinlled through out the Snake river country in Idaho. As a general thing, says the Helena Independent, the gold is very fine, the particles being of so light weight as to be elusive. Save when worked on a large scale it is difficult to make good wages in recovering the gold. Numer- oas bars along the river would prove profitable could water be commanded for sluicing or hydraulicing. An ade- quate supply is hard to obtain, on ac- count of the slight and gradual fall of the stream and the level character of the outlying lands. To overcome this lack of water as well as insure sufi- cient dumping ground, a big floating gold-saving dredge has been con structed and is now at work on the Idaho bank of the Snake river about ten miles above Payctte.
 It IS a stern-wheel fatboat propelled by steam. substantially constructed, sixty-five feet long and twenty-two feet wide, it is equipped with a thirty five horse power marine engine and boiler and adapted in every way for navigating Idaho's great waterway. With a slight alteration it could be transformed into steam dredge and used to scoop up sand and gravel from the bottom of the stream. That has never been attempted. As in the past, operations are now confined to work ing bars out of the bed or channel of the river. The method pursued is to anchor alongside one of these gravel deposits and by the use of scrapers bring the material to be handled with in the reach of the gold-washing ma chinery with which the craft is rigged. The gravel is scoOped up by buckets attached to an endless chain. There are forty-eight of these receptacles on a belt sixty feet in length, and each has capacity of about twenty pounds of dirt, which is delivered into'a hop per. This is also an agitator, and the process employed may be described as a steam rocker. with the exception that it has an end motion instead of one sidewise. The gold is caught on cop ger plates with quicksilver. The tail ings are carried off in sluice boxes by the force of a stream of water of one hundred and fifty mineral inches, sup piled by China pump, run by the en- zine which drives all the other ma chinery. The gravel is worked so thoroughly that no gold escapes in the tailings that are dumped into the riv- CT. An average of one hundred tons of gravel are daily handled, and for this work three men are employed-an en- gineer, one to work the scraper, and another one who shovels the dirt intoa pile so that the buckets can scoop up a full load.
 The bar now being worked covers an area of ten to fifteen acres.-The gold is on top or close to the surface and will not pay to handle to greater depth than one foot to eighteen inches. This shows a value of one and one-half to three cents a pan. A cleanup is made every night, and the average of the runs for the first three days was very satisfactory to the owner of the craft. He says he expects to take out upward of one hundred dollars day as long as he works, which will be un- til cold weather sets in. When he has gone over the bar which now engages his attention he will tackle another.