"Placer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 'You're just in time—big strike in the Bob-cat district. Poor man's mining. Placer, and durned good placer, right on the top of the ground. The mining gentleman I spoke about is having his breakfast now. Suppose you go in and have a talk with him? Nice man, drunk or sober, although excitable when he's had a little too much, or not quite ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... Aldous. "They found so much of it, Ladygray, that some of them went mad—mad as beasts. It was placer gold—loose gold, and MacDonald says that one day he and Jane filled their pockets with nuggets. Then something happened. A great storm came; a storm that filled the mountains with snow through which no living creature ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... person wrapped in silver tinsel. Not the least interesting of the sights is that of men and boys here and there engaged in dipping up mud from the bottom and washing it in pans similar to the gold-pans of placer-miners; they make their livelihood by finding occasional coins and ornaments, accidentally lost by bathers. A very unique and beautifully carved edifice is the Nepaulese temple; but the carvings are unfit ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... more, and at the end of all their wandering they found, not the Lost Cabin, but a shallow placer in a broad valley where the gold showed like yellow butter across the bottom of the washing-pan. They sought no farther. Each day they worked earned them thousands of dollars in clean dust and nuggets, and they worked every day. The gold was sacked in moose-hide ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... office, and the saloon, the stores and road-houses, migrated to the new spot, and Coldfoot was abandoned. Now the chief producing creek is the Hammond River, still farther up the Koyukuk, and if its placer deposits prove as rich as they promise it is likely that a town will spring up at the mouth of the Hammond which ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... qui, dites vous, existe encore entre les sujets de sa majest au Canada, ne devrait jamais s'teindre surtout quand cette mulation a pour origine le dsir d'obir aux lois dans leur libre et juste application, et les nobles efforts d'un chacun pour placer chaque province au premier rang dans la reprsentation de notre pays et faire ainsi progresser le Canada dans la voie de l'ordre et ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... a corner of the bed among the spruce boughs, and pulled out a leather sack. She untied the mouth and ran out into my hand as pretty a stream of gold as I have ever seen—coarse gold, placer gold, some large dust, but mostly nuggets, and it was so fresh and rough that it scarcely showed ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... difficultez, qu'il faut coucher sur la terre nue, ou sur quelque dure roche, faute de trouuer dix ou douze pieds de terre en quarr pour placer vne chetiue cabane; qu'il faut sentir incessamment la puanteur des Sauuages recreus, marcher dans les eaux, dans les fanges, dans l'obscurit et l'embarras des forest, o les piqueures d'vne multitude infinie de mousquilles et cousins vous ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... here made to the Big Blue Lead, the largest dead river known in California, which has been traced for a distance of sixty-five miles, from Little Grizzly, in Sierra County, to Forest Hill, in Placer County. The original river, however, is thought to have run for many hundreds of miles. Eventually traces of its existence may be ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... there with the irrigation ditches which kept it so. And in the center of the meadow, a small inclosure marked grimly the spot where lay the bones of old John Imsen. All around the man-made oasis of orchards and meadows, the sage and the sand, pushed from the river by the jumble of placer pits, emphasized by sharp contrast what man may do with the most unpromising parts of the earth's surface, once he sets himself heart and muscle to ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... his age and good humor cause the Creole to take him as valuable, simply because one and one make two. He is a good-humored raw lad. Together in the broiling sun, half buried under bank or in the river-beds, they go through the rough evolution of the placer ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... originated in the mind of Loper, in a mine in Cripple Creek, in 1899. Six years later, Loper had been attracted to the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado in Southeastern Utah, by the excitement created by the discovery of placer mining there. He confided to Russell his belief that the Colorado River offered much greater chances ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... the quartz veins have been broken and weathered by natural forces. In such cases the gold is usually carried off by swiftly running water and deposited in the channel lower down. In this way "placer" deposits of gold occur. Placer deposits are sometimes very rich, but they are quickly exhausted. The first gold discovered in California ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... the tragedy of the "Mother Lode Mine" on the upper Missouri, which became the property of the Moon Valley Company, and which paid enormously until it worked out, for it was only a pocket, thus putting an end to the placer mining on the islands farther ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... specimens of quartz and placer gold, silver, lead, copper, and magnetic iron, of which there is practically an inexhaustible supply. The work of the natives was shown in hats, baskets, hammocks, etc., being of a high order of perfection. Many of the finest panama hats are made by the Indians in Honduras. The different kinds ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... lure o' placer gold Brings North the best ye breed, As long as tales of camps and trails Are planted with your seed, As long as red blood courses thru And warms adventure's sons, They'll sally forth, bound for the North, Misfortune's ...
— Rhymes of a Roughneck • Pat O'Cotter
... trading. With the union of the two rival companies in 1821, the Hudson's Bay Company became the sole authority on the Pacific coast. Settlers straggled in slowly until, in the late fifties, the discovery of rich placer gold on the Fraser and later in the Cariboo brought tens of thousands of miners from Australia and California, only to drift away again almost as quickly when the sands began ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... to grow less in the California gravel, the miners looked for it in the rocks on the mountain-side. The placer miners laughed at them and called their shafts "coyote holes"; but in time the placers failed, while nearly all of our gold to-day comes from veins of white quartz in the rocks. A vein of gold is the most capricious thing in the world. It may be so tiny that it can hardly be seen, then widen ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan
... an old man named Summerfield, who, our readers will probably remember, met so tragical an end on the line of the Central Pacific Railroad, in the month of October last. We have now to record another bold outrage on public justice, in connection with the same affair. The grand jury of Placer County has just adjourned, without finding any bill against the person named above. Not only did they refuse to find a true bill, or to make any presentment, but they went one step further toward the exoneration of the offender; ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... it. There's another thing—I wouldn't whisper it even to you if you weren't my partner as well as my wife. I have reason to believe the creek bed above the dike is a rich placer. I've planned to take Knowles and Ashton in on that discovery—Gowan, ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... that he knew, always carried him back to the time when he was a car-boy at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County, ten years before. He remembered the years he had spent there trundling the heavy cars of ore in and out of the tunnel under the direction of his father. For thirteen days of each fortnight his father was a steady, hard-working ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... crookedness. He himself may be deceived by those who sell him the mine. Some of the most thrilling stories in literature might be written about salted mines. The sale of the Bear's Nest Mine, and the special train expedition to the salted Bear River placer field; the sale of the Mulatos Mine to a set of Chinamen, and scores of other instances in American mining history, have been regarded rather as big jokes than as great lessons. And as to such large jesting we advance in finesse. The old way of salting a placer or a quartz vein ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... most of the placer mines and the advent of quartz-crushing with elaborate machinery have changed gold-mining from speculation to regular business, to the great advantage of the state. In the same manner the development of irrigation is changing the character of farming in many parts of California. In the early days ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... fingers take A kiss from him that sends it from his soul. [Exit ABIGAIL above.] Now, Phoebus, ope the eye-lids of the day. And, for the raven, wake the morning lark, That I may hover with her in the air, Singing o'er these, as she does o'er her young. Hermoso placer de los ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe
... three flakes of placer or surface gold, weighing in all about a quarter of an ounce. They could easily have slipped into the interstices of the broken pan and not have been observed by him. If this was the result of the washing of ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... chains—which have hastened the distillation, and out of known earlier groups have produced the last. For example, trap outbursts have converted Tertiary lignites in Alaska into good bituminous coals; on Queen Charlotte's Island, on Anthracite Creek, in southwestern Colorado, and at the Placer Mountains, near Santa Fe, New Mexico, Cretaceous lignites into anthracite; those from Queen Charlotte's Island and southwestern Colorado are as bright, hard, and valuable as any from Pennsylvania. At a little distance from the focus of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... this is the Frenchman's notion of the presence of guns in the canons' seats: "L'Archevque de Cantorbery avait fait placer des canons dans les stalles de la cathdrale.'' He quite overlooked the word chanoines, which he should have used. This use of a word similarly spelt is a constant source of trouble to the translator: for instance, a French translator ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... Francisco and practise law. His wife stayed behind until he should get a start. The gold fever was n't dead yet in those days, and Moulton had a bad attack of it. When I came to the Coast he was working in some played-out placer mines, and feeling perfectly sure that he was going to strike a fortune almost any day. When a man has once dug gold out of the ground with his own hands, he seems to be unfitted for doing anything else. It's as bad as the gambler's mania. Well, the fever ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... hill-slope echoed to pick, and shovel, and pan, and to voices of legions of men. Truly, his narration relates to a lost, an almost unremembered era in the history of the famous mining counties, Placer and Nevada. In speaking of the first ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... one terrible winter night the whole town was destroyed by fire, and now that the miners were drifting to other camps, few of the shacks were rebuilt. Of the six thousand that had been, scarcely threescore remained. A few trappers ran their lines out from the town, a few men had placer claims in the old diggings, two or three woodsmen made precarious livings as guides for such wealthy men as came to hunt moose and caribou, and Bradleyburg's course was run. The winter cold had triumphed at last, and its curse was over the city from October till June. ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... des instructions viennent d'etre donnees aux Armees en vue de coordonner leurs mouvements, et qu'il pourrait etre desavantageux de modifier ces instructions. Elles tendent a placer nos troupes dans un dispositif leur permettant de prendre l'offensive dans un delai assez rapproche. Le date de leur mouvement en avant sera communique au Marechal French afin de permettre a l'Armee Anglaise ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... like going down into a placer mine," the geologist afterward said; and in view of what next met his eyes, he was justified in ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... if in a vast cup, the three main sources of the great river. Much of that valley country is in fertile farms today. Lewis and Clark passed within twelve miles of Alder Gulch, which wrote roaring history in the early sixties—the wild placer days ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... feconds, c'est que la ressemblance etait plus grande; s'ils sont fecond habituellement et indefiniment, c'est que la ressemblance interieure et exterieure etait tres grande. Ainsi le degre de ressemblance est le fond; la reproduction en est seulement la manifestation et la mesure, et il est logique de placer la cause ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... feller mostly likes to make things hum when he's got a good wad." Gagnon's tone was purely conversational. But his object must have been plain to any one else. He was bitterly resentful at the working out of the placer mine, and his anger always sent his thoughts into crooked channels. His nature was a curious one; he was honest enough, although avaricious, while his own ends were served. It was different ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... jade, you've never been the same to me since Rattlesnake Dick came prowling back from Shasta county to his old haunts in Placer." Rosa's ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... gravel aggregates, placer deposits, polymetallic nodules, oil and gas fields, fish, marine mammals (seals ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... was found in what is now San Diego County in 1828, Alexander Forbes, the historian of California, wrote in 1835 that no minerals of particular importance had been discovered in Upper California, nor any ores of metals. About 1838 a gold placer was discovered in the ca-on of San Francisquito, forty-five miles northwest of Los Angeles, and this was the first California mine that produced any considerable amount of metal. It was worked for ten years and then ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... leading the last unsuccessful assault, and who turned round to his aide-de-camp and said, "Allez dire an Premier Consul, que je meurs avec regret de ne pas avoir assez fait pour la France!" which gave Lady Kicklebury an opportunity to placer her story of the Duke of York, and the bombardment of Valenciennes; and caused young Hicks to look at me in a puzzled and appealing manner and hint that I ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... history of California when the treasures of the centuries were to be had for the asking or the taking, John Cardigan chose that which others elected to cast away. For him the fertile wheat and fruit-lands of California's smiling valleys, the dull placer gold in her foot-hill streams, and the free grass, knee deep, on her cattle and sheep-ranges held no lure; for he had been first among the Humboldt redwoods and had come under the spell of the vastness and antiquity, the majesty and promise of these epics of a planet. He was a big man with a great ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... distinguishing traits of his official conduct has been his impartiality, his exemption from favoritism and partizanship, when in conflict with the public interests, and especially his well-known hostility to "cliques" and "rings," such as resort to a city government as a rich placer, where they may work to enrich themselves at the expense of the people. The rigid discharge of duty which he has required of the police under his charge, and the avoidance, at the same time, of everything like oppression, or the exercise of undue severity ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... at Pinos Altos, near the southern boundary, but the Apaches did not encourage prospecting to any extent. During the period of the discovery of gold in California, in the days of "forty-nine," the people of New Mexico had become quite wealthy through supplying the California placer miners with mutton sheep at the price of an ounce of gold dust per head, when muttons cost half a dollar on the Rio Grande. At that rate of profit they could afford the time and expense of driving their herds of sheep to market at Los Angeles, even though the Apaches of Arizona took their ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... Prince was a gold placer owned by two middle-aged Englishmen. They had a small stamp-mill, run by mule power; and a large number of sluice-boxes. They always worked alone, and said they were developing the mine. No one had any idea that they were taking out much dust, until the mill and sluice-boxes ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... contributed for it by the Federal Government; for the statement is made upon good authority that a few of the leading promoters of the road built the first western section of twenty miles with their own capital, of less than $200,000, and a loan from the city of Sacramento and Placer County, amounting to $550,000, and then drew $848,000 Government subsidy, or more than enough to build the second section and draw another installment of the subsidy; and that they repeated the operation ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... nous donner la Certitude. Cette pretention est, suivant, nous absurde et funeste. N'est ce pas par notre raison individuelle que la verite-arrive a nous et devient notre bien? Quel moyen plus immediat pourrons-nous avoir de saisir la verite? Quel principe de connaisance ou de Certitude pourrait-on placer entre nous et notre raison? Et comment pourrions-nous l'employer, si ce ne'est avec notre raison? N'est ce pas une contradiction flagrante de vouloir persuader quelque chose a des hommes que l'on a declares incapables ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... occurs in the form of small grains or larger nuggets in the sands of old rivers, or imbedded in quartz veins in rocks. In the first case it is obtained in crude form by placer mining. The sand containing the gold is shaken or stirred in troughs of running waters called sluices. This sweeps away the sand but allows the heavier gold to sink to the bottom of the sluice. Sometimes the sand ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... 1860 at a point on the Clear Water River in northern Idaho was followed by a vast immigration to that section; this led to the discovery of gold in other parts of the territory, and soon the placer mines in the vicinity of Boise and other places ...
— Our Government: Local, State, and National: Idaho Edition • J.A. James
... Town, not on the charts, but famed for owning a fine gold placer north of the town-lagoon. After my departure from the coast it was inspected by Mr. Grant, who sent home specimens of bitumen taken from the wells. Then came the two Assinis, eastern and western, both places of small present importance. The 'Assini Hills' of the chart ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... become very fine—fine beyond all need of ordinary placer-mining. He worked the black sand, a small portion at a time, up the shallow rim of the pan. Each small portion he examined sharply, so that his eyes saw every grain of it before he allowed it to slide over the edge and ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... that I should go along with him and he would make my fortune. "What at?" said I. "Quartz mining?" "Not this time," was his answer; "it's placer" (alluvial). I was not in the least particular then what I did if I could only get good wages, so I wanted to know what he proposed giving me. "Bed-rock wages," said he. Now that means good money if a strike is made, and nothing if it is not. So I shook my head, and he turned away, ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... it is clear that we should have one staple occupation and should depend upon the rest of the world for almost every sort of portable commodity. We should be stopped from manufacturing by the great productivity of labor in placer mining. So long as men could make ten dollars a day by washing out gold from the sands, there would be no use in setting them at work making two dollars a day as weavers or shoemakers or what not. By buying our cloth with gold dust we ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... assembled for the evening in the shed-room. The women were silent, for the talk was confined to masculine topics, such as the quality of the placer claims up the river, the timber, the hunting, the progress and prospects of the new railroad. Tommy, keeping himself forcibly awake, was seeing two Kirkwoods where there was but one. The terrier had taken shelter between Kirkwood's knees, after trying conclusions with the mother of the kittens,—a ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... summer of 1862, a party of Colorado miners, lost on their way to Gold Creek in the Deer Lodge Valley, discovered the first rich placer diggings of Montana. A mining town grew up straightway; and ere winter a nondescript crowd of two thousand people—miners from the exhausted gulches of Colorado, desperadoes banished from Idaho, bankrupt speculators from Nevada, guerilla refugees from Missouri, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... "panned out" from a gulch near by. He was a miner. Four years before he had come with his family from the East, and pushing on in advance of the main movement of emigration in the territory, had discovered a rich gold placer in this lonely gorge. While he had been working in this placer, his wife had with her own hands turned up the soil in the valley below and raised all the corn and potatoes required for the support of the family; she had done the housework, and had made all the clothes for ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... Once it was collecting sealskins off other people's beaches, and there was zest enough in that, in view of the probability of the dory turning over, or a gunboat dropping on to you. Then there was a good deal of very genuine excitement to be got out of placer-mining in British Columbia, especially when there was frost in the ranges, and you had to thaw out your giant-powder. Shallow alluvial workings have a way of caving in when you least expect it of them. After all, however, I think I like ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... quantities and practicable for mining. Though he has every reason to feel confident of the richness of a particular field, he may nevertheless be so unfortunate as not to discover the gold lode or profitable placer deposit. He is helpless to control the existence of the indications of success. They are predetermined by nature. By no effort of his own is he able to increase or decrease the fixed quantity ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... power of dignity—he wouldn't let the Gov'ner of Californy be familiar with him. He never ketched a rat in his life—'peared to be above it. He never cared for nothing but mining. He knowed more about mining, that cat did, than any man I ever, ever see. You couldn't tell him noth'n' 'bout placer-diggin's—'n' as for pocket-mining, why he was just born for it. He would dig out after me an' Jim when we went over the hills prospect'n', and he would trot along behind us for as much as five mile, if we went so fur. An' he had the best judgment about mining-ground—why you never ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... opposite it changed the channel, leaving bed rock and bowlders, which eventually were covered by sand and gravel deposited by the spring floods. In this deposit there was enough flour-gold to enable any good placer miner to make days' wages by rocking the rich streaks along the bars ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... la maldicion de Alah y con la mia! iY partate un rayo! iY quiera Dios que cada una de mis monedas se vuelva en tus manos un escorpion, y cada perla un alacran! iY que mueran de lepra tus hijos, con los dedos podridos y deshechos, para que no tengan ni tan siquiera [93-3] 10 el placer de rascarse! iY que tu hija la mayor se escape de tu casa con un judio! iY que a ti te metan un palo por el cuerpo, y te saquen asi a la vergueenza, teniendote en alto hasta que, con el peso de tu cuerpo, el palo salga por encima de la coronilla y quedes patiabierto ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... the case; nearly all in one mine, too. It's a great placer mine up north. I don't suppose you know much ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... them a double handful of shining scales of metal, Clarence felt the first feverish and overmastering thrill of the gold-seekers. Breathlessly he followed the breathless questions and careless replies. The gold had been dug out of a placer only thirty miles away. It might be worth, say, a hundred and fifty dollars; it was only HIS share of a week's work with two partners. It was not much; "the country was getting played out with fresh arrivals and greenhorns." All this falling carelessly from the unshaven ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... said threads they obtained a kind of brass-colored and less dirty earth, in order to wash it in another large placer, that they had at one side of the said elevation, with a small stream that rises on top of the elevation, where they had a small settlement. They could, to all appearances, obtain but little profit, and with great difficulty, even with the community so near by. According to the signs, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various
... malo, falso, enganador, 15 que ni poso en ramo verde, ni en prado que tenga flor; que si el agua hallo clara, turbia la bebia yo; que no quiero haber marido, 20 porque hijos no haya, no: no quiero placer con ellos, ni menos consolacion. iDejame, triste enemigo, malo, falso, mal traidor, que no quiero ser tu amiga, 25 ni casar ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... to exist in several localities. A few placer mines have been opened on the Stikeen river, but no one knows the extent of the auriferous beds, in the absence of all 'prospecting' data. I do not believe gold mining will ever be found profitable in Russian America. The winters are long and cold, and the snows are deep. The working ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... rest here throughout the twenty-four hours. People wander aimlessly about the streets, eternally discussing quartz and placer-claims, and recent strikes, which here form the sole topic of conversation, like a run on zero or the cards at Monaco. Port Said is suggested by the dusty, flashy streets and cosmopolitan crowd, also by the fact that gambling saloons and even shops ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... y sus velos de mil colores, que destacaban sobre el fondo, suspendidas de los arboles o arrojadas con descuido sobre la alfombra del cesped, las muchachas discurrian a su placer por el soto, formando grupos pintorescos, y entraban y salian en el agua, haciendola saltar en chispas luminosas sobre las flores de la margen como una menuda ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... about that, Cap," spoke up one of the miners. "This is goin' ter be one of ther best minin' camps in ther middle part of Nevada, an' there ain't no mistake on that. It's most placer minin' that we've been doin' here, 'cause we ain't got no machinery ter go down deep in ther ground. But that there's big deposits down under us there ain't no doubt. I've cleaned up a cool, thousand so fur this week, an' I've got two more days ter make ...
— Young Wild West at "Forbidden Pass" - and, How Arietta Paid the Toll • An Old Scout
... finest green jasper, which he filled with pieces of antique gold, also that within a pavilion he builded a second palace and set therein eight images of precious stones, each one of a single gem, and all seated upon royal seats of placer-gold.[FN27] He also wrote upon a silken hanging a writ which I read and which bade me repair to thee and thou wouldst inform me concerning the Ninth Statue whereabouts it may be, assuring me that it is worth all the eight." Now when Mubarak heard these words, he fell at the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... fruit, seventy-five thousand bushels of wheat. Dr. Glenn, of Colusa County, raised and sent to market from his own estate, two hundred thousand bushels. Mr. Warner, of Solano County, produced nine thousand gallons of cider from his own orchards. A sheep-grazer in Placer County loaded ten railroad cars with wool, the clip of his own sheep. For many weeks after harvest you may see sacks of wheat stacked along the railroad and the river for miles, awaiting shipment; for the farmers have no ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... the river. Henry Francis, evidently, gave Brown full credence, but others present regarded "Bed-bug Brown" as a joke. True, he was an intelligent little man. He had taught school at Graniteville several winters, and had succeeded better at this business than at placer mining on the bars of the Middle Yuba. But "Bed-bug Brown," perennial picnicker, was not ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... les tenebres l'aube et dans le jour nuit, On vit, dans le brouillard ou rien n'a plus de forme, Vaguement apparaitre une balance enorme; Cette balance vint d'elle-meme, a travers Tous les enfers beants, tous les cieux entr'ouverts, Se placer sous la foule immense des victimes; Au-dessus du silence horrible des abimes, Sous l'oeil du seul vivant, du seul vrai, du seul grand, Terrible, elle oscillait, et portait, s'eclairant D'un jour mysterieux plus profond que le notre, Dans un plateau ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... of his financial embarrassment. It was the ruin also of many other prominent men in New Mexico, who expended their entire fortune in the construction of an immense ditch, forty miles in length—from the Little Canadian or Red River—to supply the placer diggings in the Moreno valley with water, when the melted snow of Old Baldy range had exhausted itself in the late summer. The scheme was a stupendous failure; its ruins may be seen to-day in the deserted valleys, ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... great world he was about to confront. He had rather expected to deal with it with hammer and pick,—to wrest the gold of experience from the hardest and flintiest bedrock; and all at once he felt as if he had struck a great "placer" with nuggets of the most agreeable description lying about, ready ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... the inexhaustible placer would be found; or, on a mountainside where the porphyry was stained, he would carelessly chip off a fragment of rock, turn it up to the sun, and behold it rich in ruby silver; or, some day, the vein instead ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... remotest idea who Bret Harte might be; "John Brown" would have answered the purpose equally as well. In fact, all through the seven counties I traversed—Tuolumne, Calaveras, Amador, El Dorado, Placer, Nevada and Yuba—I found Bret Harte had left but a hazy and nebulous impression. Mark Twain, Prentice Mulford, Horace Greeley, Bayard Taylor, even "Dan de ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... already fully described, but the story would hardly be complete without a reference to similar work in gold extraction, dating back to the Menlo Park days: "I got up a method," says Edison, "of separating placer gold by a dry process, in which I could work economically ore as lean as five cents of gold to the cubic yard. I had several car-loads of different placer sands sent to me and proved I could do it. Some parties ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... arretames chez eux. Ils vinrent placer devant nous une de ces nappes a coulisses dont j'ai parle, et dans laquelle il y avoit encore des miettes de pain, des fragmens de fromage et des grains de raisin. Apres quoi ils nous apporterent une douzaine de pains plats avec un grand quartier de lait caille, qu'ils appellent yogort. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... stars. As he crept along to a point of better vantage he came to a tree with something tacked on it—something that shone in the dark like a match. In its own light he read, "Notice! I, Thomas Bowers, claim this ground for placer mining." Raising his hand to tear off the paper, he was amazed to feel a thrill pass through it, and his arm fell palsied at his side. But the notice ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... furthermore, he was still riding the hunch, and with no diminution of daring. The wise ones shook their heads and prophesied that he would lose every ounce he had won. He was speculating, they contended, as if the whole country was made of gold, and no man could win who played a placer strike in ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... how the Company can make anything out of placer gold diggings in such a country. The miners must be encouraged, and mining licences cannot be expected to do more than pay the cost of collection, magistracy, police, &c. The surrender of all this territory ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... of fellers that's been workin' some placer ground off back here somewheres"—and he waved a tanned hand indefinitely in a wide arc—"and some man got the double hitch on 'em with the law, provin' that the ground was his'n, and the sheriff run 'em off! Now they're sore. But it seems they ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... carried the scheme nearly through; the next season would pay my money back and more; the Aurora would pan out the richest strike he had ever made. But that did not trouble me. I knew if Weatherbee had spent two years on that placer, the gravels had something to show. The point that weighed was that he was willing to go home at last to the States. I had urged him before I put up the grub-stake, but he had answered: 'Not until I have made good.' It was hardly probable that, failing to hear from me, he had sold out to any one ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... prevails there. The inhabitants weave fine straw hats from the fibre of the leaf of the buri palm-tree (corypha sp.), manufacture pandanus mats, and carry on a profitable trade at Mauban with the placer miners of North Camarines. The entire breadth of the road is covered with cement, and along its center flows, in an open ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... was a lively place. Gold, or placer digging as it was called, was at its height. Steamers plied daily between San Francisco and both Stockton and Sacramento. Passengers and gold from the southern mines came by the Stockton boat; from the northern mines by Sacramento. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... vous remercie de l'envoi de ces publications interessantes dans lesquelles mon administration pourra trouver des renseignements utiles. J'ai fait placer ces volumes conformement a vos intentions, dans la ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... true," Miss Catherwaight would say. "But how about this? Look at this gold medal with the diamonds: 'Presented to Colonel James F. Placer by the men of his regiment, in camp before Richmond.' Every soldier in the regiment gave something toward that, and yet the brave gentleman put it up at a game of poker one night, and the officer who won ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... and comes to this valley to find it. If some one told him that Adam and Eve were still alive, and running a stock ranch up in the Big Horn basin, he would believe it, and if it came to him as a secret that Solomon in all his glory was placer mining in a distant valley over the mountains, he would rush off to engage Solomon to drive a chariot next year in his show. Such an ability to absorb things that are not so, in a world where all men are suspicious ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... by Muleje and Gallinas, the inhabitants of those places collect the sands, from which they obtain small quantities of gold in dust. In another placer, which embraces an extension of seven leagues, they also extract some gold in dust in quantities as insignificant as those which result from the sands ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... first, last, and always, he was privately on the constant lookout for pockets, which occupation did not interfere in the least with the duty he owed his employer. And as the days went by he stored his mind with miscellaneous data concerning the nature of the various placer deposits and the lay of the land, against the summer when the thawed surface and the running water would permit him to follow a trace from creek-bed to ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... there had been a great battle of the giants, and the victorious and successful had gone away with all the fruits of victory, and left the wounded, the helpless, the half-hearted behind. The mining camp at the mouth of the great canyon had been worked out, so far as the placer mines went, and these few broken men who remained, as a rule, were turning their attention to other things. Here one had planted a little garden on the hillside, on a spot that had once been a graveyard. There, an old lawyer had grown grape-vines all over and about the door ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... he had seen enough of it to recognize that prospecting is an art. Men certainly strike a vein or alluvial placer by the merest chance now and then, but the trained man works from indication to indication until, though he is sometimes mistaken, he feels reasonably sure as to what waits to be uncovered by the blasting charge or shovel. Grenfell's previous account of the discovery had, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... huge accumulation of land, the Captain was the least greedy of men. He had been content to improve slowly. His incalculable riches, as he had early confided to Bedient, were in the river-beds. Only a few of these placer possibilities were operated. There was a big leak in the washings. Still, the natives were not greedy, either. They were home-keepers, and had no way ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort |
