enjoyed some notoriety. They are just over the line in Josephine County, the Queen being a few miles only from Grant’s Pass. The company expended twenty-five thousand dollars on it, but abandoned it in 1879, since which it has been re-located. The Esther was also abandoned and its machinery sold, the company having expended as much as the mine produced.
The mines of the southern part of Josephine County yield annually about seventy thousand dollars. The pocket mines of Jackson County have furnished a total of about seven hundred thousand dollars, nearly all of which was yielded in the years from 1860 to 1865. The failure of quartz mining in Southern Oregon seems to be owing to a lack of skill and persistence quite as much as to the quality of the rock, which yields assays that should warrant the necessary expenditure to work them.
Coos and Curry Counties, being of the same geological formation as those immediately east of them, have mines of the same character, quartz, gravel, and placer, but not to so great an extent as Josephine. They have besides the black sand of gold beaches, which has been mined quite steadily ever since its discovery in 1852 by some half-breed Indians, at a place a few miles north of the Coquille River. In 1853 they sold their claim to McNamara Brothers for twenty thousand dollars. Pans of black sand taken from their claim yielded from eight to ten dollars. Over one hundred thousand dollars were taken from this claim, which led, as might be expected, to a rush from the valleys to the sea-shore. But few locations paid like the first one, and, although the sand continues to be worked, no one makes more than fair wages.
An ancient sea-beach, three miles inland, was discovered by Mr. Hinch, who took up a claim there which he sold for ten thousand dollars to John Pershbaker & Co., who sold it again for thirty thousand dollars. Like the first location on the lower beach, it was better than any afterwards taken.
The beach sands are black in color because they are composed chiefly of magnetic iron, or oxide of iron, called magnetite. It is hard, strongly magnetic, and infusible. The particles of gold accompanying the sand are extremely small, and so flaky that often they will float upon water, nor can they be brought to unite with quicksilver. This latter quality has caused miners to con-
