Yorkville enquirer. [volume] (Yorkville, S.C.) 1855-2006, 1910-09-27

large jesting we advance in finesse.
The old way of sailing a placer or a
quartz vein with a shotgun is now an
tiquated.
A little while ago party of capital
lists bought a Nevada placer on what
they thought to be strictly a 'cinch"
basis. With their own hands they col
lected the specimen dirt from all over
the claim, and they watched a Mexican
miner pan the dirt at the creek. The
pans showed up beautifully. They
bought the claim. Later. it proved
worthless. Afterward they remember
ed that the Mexican smoked cigarettes
all the time he was panning and that
he was careless in eXpectorating. as
well as in knocking the ashes off his
cigarettes. The truth was that the
cigarette trick in sailing the pan.
There was much fine gold i" his cigar
ette and under his lip
All sorts of methods Of selling mines,
even to the injection, with hypoder-
mic needle, of strong solutions of min
eral salts into a mining engineers
carefully sealed sample bags, have been
worked. The most honest, careful and
expert mining engineers have been de-
ceived time and again and salted under
their own eyes. Even bland Chinese
may be fooled. Take the instance OF
the Mulatos mine. The bunch of Chi
namen who proposed to buy it insisted
on a mll-run test on fresh mined ore,
taken out by themselves, for five
days run They were not taking any
chances in their own belief.
The owners of the mine, however-s'
runs the story-had a platform of
plank arranged above the timbers at
the top of the drift where th' China
men brought out their ore cars. ON
this plankng a man lay face down
ward, where he could see each ore car
that passed. He had a rather hard life
for five days on the sandwiches ana
water which he took up there with him,
but he managed to drop pinch or 50
of nice gold dust into every car of ore
that came trundling under him. The
mill run was an entire success from the
viewpoint of the sellers, although not
from that of the buyers.
Any mine, no matter how rich or
how large, begins to he exhausted from
the time the first pick is stuck into the
oil
figured on the basis of diminishing de-
posts. When your deposit is draWn
out, your bank does not honor your
check. 4 mine is the reverse of mort
gage or a bond. The security does not
remain stable nor Increase IN Nalue'
but. on the contrary, continually de-
creases i'm value. In Il mortgage per
cent is wisdom: in mining return IL
is folly. a mine, instead of being hg-
urrd on the basis of a mortgage, ought
to he figured on the basis OF team
annuity. That is tn say, on the basis
of wiping out date. When the mlhe
is done paying dividends there is no
return of the face of the principal m
vested Yet the great and gulllhle
public forgets this all important fact
which differentiates mining from every
other form of business.
There is every probability that IN"
average investor never heard ol al
proper "amortiZatinn charge" in the
management of Il mine. Until he shall
have heard of it, until he shall have
learned something of the terms of lie
annuities, he ought never To invest a
cent i'm any mining stock. After he ac-
tually has learned the theory of amor
tiZatinn he will observe that almost "N-
cry mining stock listed in public prints
is selling at an inflated value. That IS
to say. even the best and most stable
of mines are ovcrrated. not to mention
the purely wildcat ventures.
Some mines may naturally be long
lived, others short lived; yet. II "lthor
PAYS good. stiff dividend tn" public
makes no distinction between the Nv"
and will buy the stock uf either In
this investing the public has no prnt"'-
tiun on the part Of the government, on
the part of the honest publicity. or oh
the part of it's own careful education.
In the majority of cases mlhc