150 GOLD MINING IN THE SOUTHERN APPALACHIANS.
for disintegration with the giant, a limit to this method of mining must ultimately be reached here. The ore-bodies continue in depth and should open up a probably more productive field in deep mining, with less loss of gold and more economical output.
Although the Southern gold field has been known and worked since the beginning of the century, it has not had the benefit of such thorough and systematic vein-prospecting as most of the later discovered fields. It was already a well-settled farming country, generally owned in large plantation-tracts, when gold was first sought after; and such lands as were unoccupied were the property of the State governments, which did not offer special privileges and inducements to the development of the mining industry. Hence the Western system of mineral lands and mining claims did not exist, and the field was not opened to the individual professional prospector. The same condition practically exists to-day. It is difficult to make satisfactory arrangements with the property holders for prospecting; and propositions for such work from outsiders are as a rule regarded with suspicion. Even the larger tracts owned at present by mining companies have not been prospected to any extent. A notable exception to this is the development work carried on by the Yonah Land and Mining Company in Georgia. If this example were followed by other mining corporations whose acreage runs into the thousands while their operations are limited to a few square rods, it would greatly help to develop the possible gold resources of the South in the direction of new discoveries. "We do not, however, wish to give the impression that larger and more valuable ore-deposits than those already exploited are still to be found; the more easily recognizable and richer outcrops have been worked over, and in any case such finds as may be made will probably present no new features.
In general, the abandoned mines present the same features as those that are working. Judging from some of the older reports (Silliman, Eogers, Emmons, etc.), the surface ores of these mines were very rich, due partially to local concentration near the surface from the eroded portions of the vein, and in other cases perhaps to pockets and shoots of limited extent and depth. In the earlier days, few of the veins were worked below the water-level; the abandonment of these older mines, cannot, however, always be laid to the appearance of refractory sulphurets. In the sulphuretted ores worked to-day from 20 to 60 per cent, of the gold is free, and in many of the earlier mines, where rich ores occurred in continuous shoots, these were followed down far below the water-level and the free gold which they contained was obtained by simple amalgamation, as for instance at the Gold Hill mine in Xorth Carolina, where the workings extended to 740 feet in depth. The more plausible reasons for the abandonment of the so-called rich Southern gold
