supplying two grants with two-inch nozzles, working under one hundred to two hundred feet head. Their pay-dirt is from five to twenty feet deep, and contains a great proportion of quartz boulders, some weighing a ton or more, and many showing free gold. Several thousand dollars’ worth of fine gold quartz specimens have been found in the sluices, which leads to the belief that a valuable quartz mine will yet be discovered. The claim yields from eight thousand to twenty thousand dollars, according to the season. The other firms in Mormon Basin clear up in a season about fourteen thousand four hundred and fifty-six dollars. The total product in 1883 was thirty-five thousand dollars, and at the present rate of working the mines are likely to last for twenty years longer.
El Dorado district, west of Mormon Basin, is furnished with water by the great ninety-mile ditch of Burnt Biver, and is one of the most important in the State. The Weatherby placers, on Burnt Biver, produce ten thousand dollars a year by hydraulic process; and the Clarkeville mines, owned in Chicago, with forty miles of ditches and extensive water-rights, carry on a large mining business.
The product of the Granite Creek district, in the John Day Valley, is about twenty thousand dollars per annum—a part of this being from the silver-mines Cabell and Beagle. The Cabell is named after a Nevada miner of that name, who, in searching for smelting ores on the South Fork of Powder Biver, discovered a number carrying lead, gold, and silver in paying amount. The Cabell ships its ore to Omaha to be smelted, at a cost of fifty-eight dollars per ton, and still makes a profit.
Dixie Creek district, always a productive one, still pays about forty thousand dollars a year from placer mining. There are a good many quartz locations, a dozen or more of which have been worked, in this district, with unknown results. But the annual output of the placers of East Oregon has been estimated to be about three hundred thousand dollars, but, possibly, not over two hundred and seventy-one thousand dollars.
The Nelson Mine, seven miles west of Baker City, is a deep gravel property producing forty thousand dollars per season. It consists of seventy acres of patented land with a deposit of gravel one hundred and seventeen feet in depth, and lies high
