“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“You did prospecting?”
“Yep.”
“How did you prospect? I shouldn’t think it would be possible, since the values were all under water.”
“In those days,” he said, “we had a Keystone Drill. It’s simple to prospect. You punch down a casing right through to bedrock. You lift the stuff out with a sand pump. Every thing that comes out of the sand pump goes into a tub, and you pan that out and save the colors of gold.”
“Colours?” I asked.
“Yep. It’s gold that’s been ground down by the action of rivers and glaciers until it’s in little fine flakes about as big around as a pin head and thin as a piece of paper. Sometimes it’ll take a lot of ’em to make even a cent’s worth of gold.”
“Then you must get pretty much out of each hole you drill.”
“Nope. You don’t. Those big dredgers could work ground at a profit when there was a value of only ten cents a cubic yard. That’s more than a man could have handled in a day by old methods.”
“But how could they get an accurate idea of values from that sort of prospecting?”