The quartz mines of California must now be reviewed, for, in connection with the probable future yield of gold, they occupy a prominent position.
In that column of the “Times� which is expressly devoted to a review of the Share Markets, some half-dozen Californian quartz mine operations will be found daily recorded; these, for the most part, are in a very sickly state. Why they are so is no business of mine; but the fact is no criterion of the value of the quartz lodes of California.
The quartz formation stretches in one great vein across the country for nearly three hundred miles in a north-westerly direction, and this main lode is throughout more or less impregnated with gold, excepting where it has been disturbed by volcanic eruption. From the main vein tributaries branch out on either side, throughout its length, and many of these possess undoubtedly sufficient wealth to repay labour, if this is properly applied. I say this cautiously, for I know something now of the traps and pit-falls that beset the path of the quartz miner. These are among them: you have rich and partially decomposed lodes that enrich you with a nest of gold on the onset, but lead you a wild-goose chase into the bowels of the earth before you find another; you have broad lodes white as alabaster, speckled in parts with gold, but from which you must quarry more valueless quartz than the “paying seam� will compensate for; and you have lodes that are liberally and evenly diffused with gold, but contain so many properties antagonistic to amalgamation by quicksilver that the metal you seek can only be secured by a most expensive process. These are the lodes that do not pay; and by this time probably the mining community here know as much of them as I do.
But a great number of veins, worked unostentatiously by American companies, are giving very satisfactory results; a larger number are paying their expenses only, but with good prospects of improvement. But I must direct attention to this fact; the amount of profit derived from quartz-mine speculations is not of so much importance to my argument as the number of quartz mines being worked. If many of the lodes now open in California are bringing at present a smaller percentage to their owners than was anticipated, fault perhaps of imperfect machinery and false economy, they are none the less of importance as affecting the question of the yield of gold. For although the hundred ounces per day that pass through the stamping-mill may scarcely leave a profit on the expenses, the hundred ounces are none the less added to the gross daily yield of the country. Palpably plain as this is, I mention it because we are apt, when speaking of gold quartz mining as comparatively profitless to speculators, to forget that the gold is for all that compressed from the rock; and it is with this alone I have to do.
But as it may be observed that operations that combine so much risk of failure will shortly be abandoned, particularly in a country where money commands so high a rate of interest, I must mention these facts.
In the first place, many American mining companies are already paying handsome dividends, and those which are least successful have, in most instances, their machinery to blame more than the vein, on which it is erected; but everything is in favour even of those who are thus situated, for improvements in machinery start up on every side, labour and the expense of living is diminishing rapidly, whilst fresh developments bring new aspirants continually into the field. For there is something about quartz mining that is seductive; fail as you will, as long as some are successful around you there is a “never-say-die� feeling which ever prompts to fresh exertion in the same field.
I shall not attempt to draw conclusions from an estimate of the number of veins that are now being profitably worked, or the amount of gold that may be derived from them in California, as that country is still in a state of transition, and not yet ripe for figured calculations. I can only fall back again upon my belief, that where gold exists ready to man’s hand, as it does in the great veins of California, the people of that region are not likely to allow it to remain slumbering.
Having now shown that the material, the capital, and the energy exist to warrant a belief amounting almost to a certainty, that an amount of gold will yet be produced from California that will throw into the shade the millions that have already been acquired, I leave it to others to argue how far the same facts apply to Australia, Oregon, and other gold-fields as yet less perfectly developed. I scarcely dare guess at the sum that the next ten years will see produced from California, but call attention to this fact, that seven years have elapsed since the discovery of gold, and as yet no apparent sign of exhaustion is manifest, although all predicted, from the first, that the auriferous soil was but superficial. Had this prophecy been borne out to any degree by experience we might have made a calculation; as matters stand, all tends to the belief that the best is yet to come. Nor should it be overlooked that the price of labour in California is still slightly higher than in Australia, one country being four years older (in gold discovery) than the other, and both necessarily regulating wages by the profits of the gold-field.
When I have stated that twenty millions sterling are annually produced from California, and that as yet no probability is apparent of a less yield for some years, I have said as much as comes within the province of my narrative.
How far gold may be eventually permanently depreciated by the addition of five hundred millions, to the specie currency of the world, is a question for financiers, and those who have gold enough to care about the value of it; but ten years of successful work in the gold-fields already discovered, may produce that sum, and in all probability will.