The Handbook to Arizona

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iron and zinc, averaging $200 per ton in silver. The Lone Star has horn, ruby, and native silver, yielding $200 to $600 per ton. The Metallic Accident is a large lode of low-grade ore, with a number of high-grade feeders. On the southern side of Sherum Peak, the highest point of the Cerbat range, is another very large vein of low-grade ore. The Index is a twenty-inch vein a mile north-east of Mineral Park, that has ore yielding $236 per ton. The Laporte, in the same vicinity, assays $534. To the west and south-west of Mineral Park and near Sherum Peak are numerous large lodes of smelting ore, giving twenty to sixty per cent. lead and thirty to one hundred dollars silver.

Chloride Flat is six miles north of Mineral Park; its ores are mostly chlorides and large veins of argentiferous galena; two of the mines have gold, and in three the owners claim to have a good prospect for cinnabar. Chlorides and carbonates frequently change to rich sulphurets at the water line, forty to fifty feet from the surface.

Twenty-five miles east of Mineral Park is the Peacock range of mountains, and at the north end of the range, north-eastern slope, 1,400 feet above the valley, is located the Hackberry mine, (discovered October, 1874) with a vein of silver ore ten to eighteen inches thick in six or eight feet of brown quartz forming its foot-wall. The hanging wall is soft porphyry, with a thick stratum of white clay separating it from the vein. At fifty feet (water level) a baser ore is found, below which it must be roasted. Above it is free milling, which will work up to eighty per cent. At sixty-two feet the vein is solid, fourteen inches thick, and the ore averages $340 per ton in the fivestamp mill at the mine. Water and wood are abundant. East of the range is a country well supplied with wood, water, grass and game, explorations in which have but recently been commenced.

To the southward, in the district of Cedar valley, the Arnold lode has a large per centage of gold, and the silver ores from the Hibernia and other mines in that district contain a per centage of copper. The Wauba-Yuma district, close by the Maynard, appears to be among the "things that were, but are not," though not many years ago a granite mountain in which one of its mines was found was considered to possess characteristics common to the auriferous lodes of the Sierra Nevada, having the same north-east and south-west direction. Grass and water abound, and there is some timber. The Moss mine, in the San Francisco district, near Hardyville, was sold

for a large sum to a Philadelphia company, who began at the wrong end, by building a mill and a village at heavy expense before prospecting the mine, and continued to do business on the same principle, so that the mine is now abandoned for want not of ore, but of skill and judgment, and the district is pretty much non est. There is near Hardyville a deposit of purple and white fluor spar.

The Burro mine and its extensions are on Burro creek, seven miles from the Big Sandy and eight miles from Greenwood. One of the extensions (1st south) has been bonded for $33,000. The vein crops out boldly for 600 feet; the vein matter is forty feet in width, is embedded in a formation of spar, and located for 6,000 feet, crosses the cañon of Burro creek, climbs the hill, and crops out at a boiling spring in another cañon. On Boulder creek, a tributary of Burro creek, twenty-eight miles from the mouth of the latter, is the Richmond mine, Mountain Spring Belt, with twenty-two inches of ore, six to eight of which assays from $200 to $1,700 per ton, but the mine is almost inaccessible. Somewhere in this region is Vinegar creek, a two-inch stream which is said to answer for vinegar. Perhaps somebody will find a molasses deposit up there before long!

And now comes, bringing up the rear of this description, but leading the van of the Mojave county mines, the McCracken, discovered by Jackson McCracken on August 17th, 1874. It is six miles north of Bill Williams creek, (a little to the south of which is the Planet copper mine, Yuma county) twelve miles from Greenwood on the Big Sandy, and thirty-five miles from the Colorado. The lode runs nearly due north and south near the top of a hill, the elevation of which is about two thousand feet above the adjacent valleys. For about two miles it is continuously traceable, and occasionally, by out-crops southwardly for fully ten miles. Its outcrop on the summit of the hill is visible for a considerable distance. The formation of the mine is a spar gangue, in a formation of granite, and, as an exception to a supposed uniform rule in regard to the matrix of gold and silver, it is worthy of attention from both a practical and scientific standpoint. The spar forming the out-croppings on the hill has a dark, burned appearance, resembling at a distance a black volcanic dyke; and having been so regarded by prospectors was passed by unnoticed. The McCracken company own two mining claims of fifteen hundred feet in length, named the Senator and the Alta. A great amount of work has been done

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on the mine, one of several shafts reaching a depth of nearly four hundred feet; over a thousand feet of the tunnels are in vein matter all the way. The best of the milling ore assays $96 per ton; the bullion produced is 985 fine. The second class assays $65. There are small stratas of carbonate ore containing $237 per ton silver, and twenty per cent. lead. The vein at the surface is in places over eighty feet in width. Adjacent to the discovery mines above mentioned are the Sig nal, (originally San Francisco) and the Palmetto. The product of all these mines is enormous, and may at present be roughly estimated at about $150,000 or $200,000 a month, though apparently limited only by their milling facilities. The ores of the McCracken have been crushed by a ten-stamp mill at Greenwood, but a twenty-stamp mill has just been completed at Virginia city, five miles below, and about nine miles from the mine, and in the same locality another mill is working on ores from the Signal.

Of course there was a rush after the discovery, and hundreds of locations were made in the vicinity, but quite a number off the lode proved to be of small account.

The vein out-crops again six miles south of the McCracken, and from mineralogical reports, made some years ago, it is not improbable that the region immediately north, as well as south of the Bill Williams river, will prove valuable for copper. The country in the vicinity, however, is dreary in the extreme; water for the use of the McCracken mine is brought from a distance of eight miles.

The discovery mines were worked at first by the "Alta Consolidated Company," and the "Senator Consolidated Company," both composed of the same persons; and the two consolidations consolidated some more into the McCracken Consolidated Company, which consolidation of consolidations will no doubt make solid work on a basis of solidarity, in dealing with the solidities of the mine, in which there are no fluidities, even at a depth of five hundred feet. And in view of the unqualified solidity and dryness of the subject, it is best to bring this chapter to a close by subjoining a tabulated statement of the mines in Mojave county, so far as obtainable. Up to October 1st, 1876, exclusive of old and abandoned locations, 2,000 mines had been located and recorded in Mojave county: