The Butte inter mountain. [volume] (Butte, Mont.) 1901-1912, 1901-12-31
WILL GRAB CLAIMS
THIS Is THE NIGHT TO MAKE
MINING LOCATIONS.
CLAIM JUMPERS WILL BE OUT
Claims Which Have Lapsed Will Be
Relocated-Three or Four Hundred
Have Been Protected by As
sessment Work.

This will be New Years eve. and on
New Years eve the jumpers of mining
claims are always busy. Tonight, at
the Silly hour of midnight, many par
ties of enterprising citizens will sally
forth quietly and secretly and take up
mining claims on the surrounding ridges
and flats about Butte. In this they may
be laying the foundation for a fortune Or
planting the seeds of pneumonia in their
frames.
In the mining regions of the west the
claim Jumper always ushers the new
year in by grabbing somebody else's old
mining location. This is a me-honored
custom. and it will not be departed from
at Butte this year.
How It Is Done.
Many a foxy individual has had his
eye fastened upon likely piece of
placer or quartz ground for some time,
and tonight he will prance out to where
it lies in cold gulch or on an icy slope,
and stick up his notice of location upon
a stake at the discovery point, and call
it the Golden Star or the Marie Louise
Alice, as seems best to his heart and &C
cords with his taste for poetical names
or does honor to some fair woman.
But there will be a good many claims
around Butte that it will do no good to
jump, and which are not in the jumpable
category, their owners having done the
annual assessment work upon them and
made affidavit of the fact and recorded
it with the county clerks office.
Business for the Clerks Office.
One hundred such affidavits were al
ready filed this month in County Clerk
WestOn's office by last evening, and
many more of them were being rushed
into the Office today. Last month IS
were recorded and the month previous
81 were placed on file, making 100 in all
UP to yesterday This figure was greatly
swelled by the affidavits filed today, this
being the last day upon which they could
be turned in. In the months that pre-.
coded the last three a small number OF
affidavits We're made in each, and the
claims now protected from jumpers in
this district will probably reach three
or four hundred. But there are many
more upon which the assessment work
has not been done, and these have re.
verified to the government and are again
open to location. Upon these the claim.
jumper will swoop down like a pirate
galley upon Venitian picnickers' cara
vel.
ne VIII luIrOuuce the infant new
Year to taste of American enterprise
in the wild and woolly mining west just
as the latter pushes his pink toes ovel
the doorstep of the world to take up the
business of the Old Year, long familiar
with all the shrewd business of the min
ing industry as it is practiced in Butte
from claim jumping to injunctions.
Riches and Rheumatism.
world the aim-jumper will invade the
county clerks office with copies of his
location for record. That will be a new
start and it will be enthusiastic and
full of promise. But the chances are
that instead Of getting rich he will be
laid up with rheumatism, and the en-
thusiasm will die away, and some of the
claims will be developed and some OF
them won't, and most Of them will lapse
to the government again for lack Of i'm
provement work, and next year there
will be another claim-jumping fiesta
that will exactly match all its predeces-
sors and have the same results.