BOTTOM OF THE SHAFT.
There are mines in the mountains back of Twin Lakes, and gradually a permanent settlement is growing up there, which is reached all the year round by stage from Leadville. This stage passes over Hunter’s pass, and carries the mail to some important camps on the other side of the range,—Independence, Highland, et cetera. The main point of interest, I hear, is at Independence, which is said to be much such a camp as Kokomo, and standing at a greater altitude than even Leadville. The veins are true fissures filled with quartz containing free gold, iron and copper pyrites. The Farwell Mining company are the chief operators, and have recently erected what has been pronounced the finest stamp-mill in Colorado. It consists of thirty stamps, and cost $2.87½ cents a hundred pounds for carriage from the railway to its site. This feat required the building and repair of roads to an extent that has been of immense benefit to the public. Besides this mill there is an old one of twenty stamps, and additions are to be made. A few miles further on, is the flourishing camp of Aspen, standing in a beautiful valley 7,500 feet above the sea. This is the locality of the Smuggler mine owned by Mackay and other Eastern capitalists. It is described as “a large lead of fine-grained galena, carrying native silver in wire form.” Aspen is a good type of the “magic” town, where lots increase a thousand per cent. in value in six months.
ATHWART AN INCLINE.
This brings us to Malta, a station in the midst of a wide waste of denuded gravel, where we turn up California gulch to Leadville, bidding good-bye, for a little, to the white crests of the Saguache range,—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Antlers and others that have been our constant companions. Turn where we will in this region, we can not long escape the sight of snow-smothered peaks. It is impossible to get away from them. This river-valley is a great basin surrounded on all sides by mountains that hasten to bid winter welcome before summer has thought of saying farewell to the valleys. As in that wonderful story, wherein we are constantly reminded that “the villain still pursued her,” so here the mountains unceasingly confront us, and every changing mood can be studied by our eager eyes.
Malta seems to be a great place for charcoal, many groups of the white conical ovens being visible on the blackened and denuded side-hills.
Charcoal is an extremely important element in smelting operations, and enormous quantities are made, to the destruction of all the forests, so that the burners have to go farther and farther with their ovens, or else, as most of them are doing, have wood brought from increasing distances. A favorite method is to build a flume and float the timber, in short pieces, down from the higher woods; or else, simply to make a trough, laying it partly on the ground and partly on trestles, so as to secure proper levelness. It is great fun to watch them shuteing wood or ties (for the “tie-punchers” adopt the same expedient) down the slope of the high, steep hills. Little choice is made in the kind of wood burned.