This is practically a very simple, crude, stamp mill. On the end of a solid log, firmly fixed in the ground and standing four feet or so above the surface, a square 6-inch hole is cut in which are fitted wrought iron bars 3 inches deep by ½ inch wide, and separated by equal intervals. These bars taper below so as to permit free passage of the pounded mineral. A wooden box surrounding the grating keeps the ore in place. A block of wood, shod with iron, forms the stamper. The miner hauls on the handles at every blow. The gold is saved on the lower table.
No one of experience in mining would look for brown hematite in a granite range, nor for black band, though such might be a likely region for red hematite or magnatite.
The explorer should be familiar in theory at least with the locality where he may expect to find valuable minerals. For instance, should he be searching for some heavy, detached substance that is usually found in placer deposits he will keep to the low ground and examine carefully the beds of the streams. On the other hand, should his quest be for some ore that is more properly a component of a lode or vein he will examine the side hills and summits where denudation will certainly have exposed such deposits. Then he must know the appearance of each ore, and with the methods of making rough and ready tests he must be perfectly familiar.
Gold is always more or less intimately associated with quartz. Oxide of tin is said never to have been found more than two miles from some granite rock, one of the components of which was muscovite or white mica. The junction of slates and schists with igneous or metamorphic rocks often proves a valuable find of mineral.
Rocks for the purposes of the explorer may be grouped under three heads: Igneous; metamorphic; stratified. The first includes lavas; trachytes, grayish with rough fracture and mainly glassy; dark basalts: and traps, such as greenstone. Obsidian is a volcanic glass. Metamorphic rocks are thought to have once been stratified, but to have been altered by heat. They comprise granite, of quartz feldspar and mica; syenite, containing hornblende instead of mica; gneiss, like granite, but showing lines of stratification; mica schist, made up of mica and quartz and separating easily into layers; slates.
Stratified rocks are those deposits from water, such as sandstone, limestone, clay, etc.
A prospecting shaft need not be of large dimensions. One 4 feet square is amply large for any depth down to 30 feet, but it must be kept plumb.
Sometimes shafts are sunk through the pay streak in alluvial gravel, without it being detected. Frequent panning will guard against this mistake.
In the Klondike region it is said early prospectors missed very rich deposits, that have since been discovered, by stopping short of true bed rock, being misled by a bed of harder gravel that they thought was bottom.
Silver almost invariably carries some gold. The dark ironstone hat already referred to is a good indication of silver ore beneath; it is generally composed of conglomerates cemented by oxides of iron and manganese.