Still another class of mines in the same mineral belt remains to be mentioned. Those are what Professor Newberry has called the “mechanically filled” veins, and they include the “Bassick” and the “Bull-Domingo.” The former is supposed to be a true fissure vein in the trachyte rock, the cavity of which, after the rocks were rent asunder, was filled with well rounded pebbles and bowlders, generally similar in constitution to the country rock. The interstices in this mass have been filled with tellurides of gold and silver, free gold, zinc blende, galena, and the pyrites of iron and copper carrying silver. These materials surround the stones in thin shells, the pebbles and bowlders forming nuclei about which the metallic substances crystallized. In the “Bull-Domingo,” situated in the granite tongue, the stones are generally granite or syenite, and the cementing substance is argentiferous galena, which not only surrounds the stones, but in many cases entirely fills up the irregular spaces between them. In both of these cases it is supposed that the metallic matter came up from below in the form of a hot solution.
Silver Cliff has been a trifle disappointed, however. Not only were her streets laid out broad and straight, upon a splendid town site, over a considerably larger area than has yet been occupied, but two other towns, Westcliffe, where the railway station is, and Clifton, between the two towns, invite persons to buy town lots and build houses in rivalry. At present, however, Clifton’s population consists chiefly of its town-agent, and there is one of the best opportunities to take your choice of building sites there that I know of in the Centennial state. Westcliffe has a big smelter, a hay-press, the water-works, and various other reasons for being a future village of importance.
Yet Silver Cliff is a fine town, and its streets are busy with miners and merchants and professional men, who know where their money is coming from and going to. The immense interests of the Silver Cliff Mining company, with its open, quarry-like mine, and its great mill, which has the reputation of being the finest in Colorado, employ a large number of men. Another mill, further down the creek, is running on the product of its mines, and a great deal of development-work along the whole belt is in progress, while prospects of rich strikes elsewhere keep things in a bright, hopeful condition.
As for Rosita, it was a thriving mining camp, half a dozen years before Silver Cliff and its chlorides were heard of. True fissure veins were disclosed, and a permanent town resulted, which is yet mining quietly but successfully, and making its people wealthy.
XIX
THE ROYAL GORGE.
High overarched, and echoing walls between.
—Milton.
