The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-03-24
STORIES OF MINE-SALTING
MANY TRICKS ADOPTED BY SWIND-
 LERS TO DECEIVE INVESTORS.
Canada Tin-Mine FrRud-"Coloner Morgan's Operations.

Firing Golddust from n Shot-gun-The
 Canada Tin-Mine Fraud-"Colonel'
 Morgan's Operations.
 | What is known as the "salting" of mines is much more common thanmost people imagine. It is practised in eve- ry mining district in the world with more or less success, and it is hardly too much to say that fully ten per cent. of the foreign and colonial mines sold to London companies are purchased on salted workings or samples.
 The methods of salting adopted are l almost as various as the mines doc- tored. The simplest and probably one of the earliest means of salting in the case of gold-mines Is what is known as the mail trick" In this the prospect or, who is washing a dish of alluvial or | crushed quartz, has concealed in his finger-nails some fine particles of gold. Soon after starting to wash it he finds it necessary to puddle the dirt with
 
 clayey substances, and of course while he is pudding the gold Is freed and goes into the prospect, eventually mak- ing that pretty "corner'' which the speculator so likes to see. Perhaps, however, the nefarious prospector has l his nails too short for this trick, and he will then resort to the expedient of shooting fine gold. into the dish from his mouth whenever he gets an oppor- served. Or he will raise a hand to put his hat straight, and at the same time shake into the dish some golddust from his hair. But sometimes the specula- tor or expert present, whose good opinion of the property Is wanted, re- solves to wash a dish or two himself, and then the prospector has to resort to other tactics. He will, however, probably have provided for the contin- gency. and will be pretty sure to find some means of salting the new sample or the dish before the water touches it. Supposing that circumstances are against him in this, then he will have recourse to pipe or cigar properly prepared for the occasion. The chances are that the washer will not notice the apparently accidental fall ing of tobacco-ash into his dish, and the trick will have succeeded.
 | nyt.z 1to xxyht vd process of dishing is, however, fast dy- ing out, prospectors preferring the more solid business of salting the earth or rock as it lies in situ, or of bringing stone from other mines and : preparing an ingenious pack. Former ly the most common method of salting n barren reef was to fire gold-dust into it from shotgun; and many mine has been sold for a good figure on the strength of Q reef faked in this way. But the shooting process is unsat1sfac- tory for many reasons. In the frst place, it only answers at all for certain classes of rock; then the reef into which gold has been fired has a patchy . appearance, which is not a favorable sign; and again much of the gold fired is lost, while the explosion of the gun in a narrow drive or cross-cut is liable to bring down a lot of the ground. All these are serious objections; but what chiefly brought the shooting practice into disrepute among salters was the fact that the prospective buyers of the mines, or their representatives, gradu- ally became suspicious of fair faces, and often insisted upon taking their samples a foot or so back from the face. The biggest coup on record ef- fected by the shooting trick was brought off in Tasmania, where nearly half an acre of sandstone was fusila- ded, and great deal of money made by the salters, the purchasers believ- ing that they had really acquired the biggest gold-mine in the world
 | The art of salting is carried to its highest pitch of perfection in the pro- cess known as stacking" This is per- formed by building up portion of a |, reef at the end of a drive which had been run underground along the line of the reef Of course the built-up DOT tion must be made to look like un- broken ground; but this is sometimes most difficult task to accomplish. Luckily, however for the salters, few 
 numerous fractures, and indeed they not infrequently look like bands of mullock held together by clayey sub stance impregnated with iron oxide. Such reefs, which are not uncommon in western Australia, are much easier to initiate than the hard white reefs of Ballarat or the wide gold bands of , South Africa, Usually the stacking has depth of from four to five feet though in exceptional cases it is con- siderably greater. A well-known Lon- don mining engineer discovered a depth of no less than ten feet in a stack prepared for him in Colorado It need hardly be said that when only the end of drive is stacked, it is found necessary to timber the roof and keen a judicious supply of water and loose blanks on the floor, while of course the original reef is taken out for it's entire width. Past masters in the art of stacking hail usually from the States but Australia has produced two or three prime examples.
 Stacking is usually performed in iso- lated mines, where the operations of the salters are not likely to be watched or interrupted. In cases where there