The Wallace miner. [volume] (Wallace, Idaho) 1907-current, 1920-05-13


ed 10 ounces of gold per ton! That
was on July 3, 1891 He returned next
day and located two claims, the
Fourth of July and the Independence
The Independence was the only vein
in the Cripple Creek district that had
an outcrop and it was one to which
any intelligent prospector would have
been attracted at once The feldspaI
and mica had been decomposed and
in their place were iron oxide, sericite
and gold. STATIONS only experience
had been with the white quartz veins
around Silverton: 50 he spurned what
he called the rotten granite" simply
because he knew no better. When the
Independence became famous his
friends fabricated a yarn in which his
knowledge of chemistry and mineral
Iogy supplemented his energy as "a
carpenter as to give him the pose of
| a scientific explorer one correct in
ference, however. must be allowed
when float or shode, AS a Cornishman
would say. PANIED poorly. he recog-
nlzed that he had passed the source of
the gold. he looked up. as it were. and
saw the granite outcrop. surmised its
possible agency in enriching the brec-
cia on the hillslope, and broke a sam
pie. Let us give him credit for that.
The Independence yielded $22,O0O,OO0.
of which 100000 was profit, divided
between owners. tributers promoters,
and ore thieves.
The Camp Bird mine is in Imogen
basin, near Ouray, a lovely summer
resort in southwestern Colorado. The
discOverer, Thomas f. Walsh, also had
been a carpenter when he obtained his
first experience of mining at Leadville.
Later he had done we'll at Cripple
Creek In 1896 he was running a
little smelter at Silverton and needed
quartz to mix with the pywitic copper
ores of Red mountain. He was look
ing for slicious ore. For several
months he had been opening up a sill
ver-lead mine. called the Hidden
Treasure, in ImOgen basin, and on
one of his periodic visits in July 1896,
he happened to notice some pink spar
in the dump at the mouth of an aban-
doned tunnel He thought this pink
spar was fluorite with which he had
become familiar at Cripple Creek,
where he leased the Summit and Deer
horn mines from Stratton. Walsh
told Andy Richardson, a prospector in
his employ. to take a look at the old
tunnel from which the pink spar had
come, but nothing appears to have
happened In September he eXamin-
ed these old workings himself and
took some samples, which he sent to
Ouray to be assayed. They showed
several ounces of gold per ton. More
samples were taken and sent to Lead
VILE for assay with confirmatory re-
suits. Walsh kept this information to
himself and set to work to secure title
to the Gertrude claim, on which was
the tunnel, as well as the adjacent
ground, most of which he acquired by
paying delinquent taxes. He located
a claim next to the Gertrude and call
ed it the Camp Bird. Within four
years he owned 1O3 mining claims and
y mill sites covering 941 acres in all.
BY that time he had taken $2,5OO,OOO
gross out of the mine and made a pro-
fit of 81 $4,000. He sold the mine in
1901 for Sc, 5OO,0OO During its life the
Camp Bird yielded $2S,OOO,OOO of
which $11, 5OO,O 900 was profit
on May %, 1908, Tom Walsh gave
an address before the Colorado School
of Mines and recounted the story of
his discovery in order to emphasize
the value of technical science, espe-
cially mineralogy, to the miner He
told the students how he noticed a
slide of red pyritiferous porphyry,"
because it had "a very strong indica-
tion of gold in or near it," Samples |
Of this rock assayed 81 in gold This |
his suspicion" that there |
were gold veins in the vicinity. Among |
the claims acquired by him in the hope |
Of obtaining silicious ore for his smell
ter at Siverton was one near the |
"porphyry Slide" he suspected that |
the vein on which this claim was To-
Gated must pass, as he said through |
or near the porphyry dixie and that it
carried gold" SO he went to get
some samples and found "a dump of
very SNOWY ore. having zinc, lead and
some copper pyrites." He concluded
his story thus ct went inside and ex-
amined the vein. There I found an
Isl inch streak of the same kind Of ore
that was on the dump Between it
and the hanging wall there was about
three feet Of modest looking quartz. As
examined IL closely I saw little I
specks and thread-like circles of glist-
aning black mineral all through it.
which experience told me was gold in +.
a telluride form" Samples of this