By and large, it was Larry’s summing-up of their job that morning that set the pace for the next three weeks. During that interval they crossed the inter-mountain region by easy stages, prospecting in the hills as they went, and learning, by actual contact with it, something of the wonderful geological structure of the country they were traversing. In no part of the United States does the earth’s crust exhibit more marvelous wrinklings and upheavals and apparent contradictions than in the mountain regions of western Colorado and eastern Utah, and each day brought new discoveries and fresh problems to attack.
“How in the world anybody with no schooling could hope to find anything valuable in these rocks and clays is beyond me,” said little Purdick, one evening when, by the light of the camp-fire, they had been poring over the “System of Mineralogy,” and trying by blowpipe and acid tests to identify what seemed to be a specimen of wolframite, the base which furnishes the metal tungsten.
“That’s easy,” Dick returned. “The average prospector is like old Daddy Longbeard. He is looking for gold or silver, and he is able to identify a few of the commoner ores by sight. But a good many of his discoveries have been by sheer accident, like that of the lead carbonates at Leadville.”
“How was that?” Purdick wanted to know.
“The way I’ve heard it was that the man who made the discovery was looking for gold-bearing quartz. One way to find a ‘mother’ vein is to take a stream that shows gold ‘colors’ when you pan out the sand in it, following this trail of ‘colors’ up-stream until you come to a place where the ‘colors’ don’t show any more, and then you prospect in the hills roundabout.
“This prospector was working up one of the streams east of Mount Massive, and he noticed that when he washed for gold ‘colors’ there were leavings in his pan; a black sand that was too heavy to wash over with the common sand when he shook the pan. Just out of curiosity, he saved some of this sand and threw it into his specimen sack along with some quartz samples he had; did that and then forgot it. Afterward, when he took his samples to an assayer to have them tested, he dumped the sack on the bench in the laboratory, black sand and all, and the assayer was thorough enough to test the sand as well as the quartz. And that’s what made the city of Leadville.”
“But good land!” said Purdick, “there are more gold-and-silver-bearing ‘ites’ in this book than anybody could ever learn to know by sight unless he crammed for them!”
“Sure,” Dick replied. “There was old Daddy Longbeard, digging for goodness only knows how long in rich gold ore without ever so much as suspecting it.”
Larry Donovan grinned. “All of which is interesting, but unimportant,” he put in. “The fact remains that we’ve been out three weeks and haven’t yet found anything worth staking a claim on.”
Dick stretched his arms over his head and yawned luxuriously.