Getting Gold | Page 6

disappointment--thanks to British pluck and skill--producing splendidly. The yield for 1896 was 2,281,874 ounces--a yield never before equalled by lode-mining from one field.
In the year 1847 gold was discovered in California, at Sutor's sawmill, Sacramento Valley, where, on the water being cut off, yellow specks and small nuggets were found in the tail race. The enormous "rush" which followed is a matter of history and the subject of many romances, though the truth has, in this instance, been stranger than fiction.
The yield of the precious metal in California since that date up to 1888 amounts to 256,000,000 pounds.
Following close on the American discovery came that of Australia, the credit of which has usually been accorded to Hargraves, a returned Californian digger, who washed out payable gold at Lewis Ponds Creek, near Bathurst, in 1851. But there is now no reason to doubt that gold had previously been discovered in several parts of that great island continent. It may be news to many that the first gold mine worked in Australia was opened about twelve miles from Adelaide city, S.A., in the year 1848. This mine was called the Victoria; several of the Company's scrip are preserved in the Public Library; but some two years previous to this a man named Edward Proven had found gold in the same neighbourhood.
Most Governments nowadays encourage in every possible way the discovery of gold-fields, and rewards ranging from hundreds to thousands of pounds are given to successful prospectors of new auriferous districts. The reward the New South Wales authorities meted out to a wretched convict, who early in this century had dared to find gold, was a hundred lashes vigorously laid on to his already excoriated back. The man then very naturally admitted that the alleged discovery was a fraud, and that the nugget produced was a melted down brass candlestick. One would have imagined that even in those unenlightened days it would not have been difficult to have found a scientist sufficiently well informed to put a little nitric acid on the supposed nugget, and so determine whether it was the genuine article, without skinning a live man first to ascertain. My belief is that the unfortunate fellow really found gold, but, as Mr. Deas Thompson, the then Colonial Secretary, afterwards told Hargraves in discouraging his reported discovery, "You must remember that as soon as Australia becomes known as a gold-producing country it is utterly spoiled as a receptacle for convicts."
This, then, was the secret of the unwillingness of the authorities to encourage the search for gold, and it is after all due to the fact that the search was ultimately successful beyond all precedent, that Australia has been for so many years relieved of the curse of convictism, and has ceased once and for all to be a depot for the scoundrelism of Britain--"Hurrah for the bright red gold!"
Since the year 1851 to date the value of the gold raised in the Australasian colonies has realised the enormous amount of nearly 550,000,000 pounds. One cannot help wondering where it all goes.
Mulhall gives the existing money of the world at 2437 million pounds, of which 846 millions are paper, 801 millions silver, and 790 millions gold. From 1830 to 1880 the world consumed by melting down plate, etc., 4230 tons of silver more than it mined. From 1800 to 1870 the value of gold was about 15 1/2 times that of silver. From 1870 to 1880 it was 167 times the value of silver and now exceeds it over twenty times. In 1700 the world had 301 million pounds of money; in 1800, 568 million pounds; and in 1860, 1180 million pounds sterling.
The gold first worked for in Australia, as in other places, was of course alluvial, by which is usually understood loose gold in nuggets, specks, and dust, lying in drifts which were once the beds of long extinct streams and rivers, or possibly the moraines of glaciers, as in New Zealand.
Further on the differences will be mentioned between "alluvial" and "reef" or lode gold, for that there is a difference in origin in many occurrences, is, I think, provable. I hold, and hold strongly, that true alluvial gold is not always derived from the disintegration of lodes or reefs. For instance, the "Welcome Nugget" certainly never came from a reef. No such mass of gold, or anything approaching it, has ever yet been taken from a quartz matrix. It was found at Bakery Hill, Ballarat, in 1858, weight 2195 ozs., and sold for 10,500 pounds. This was above its actual value.
The "Welcome Stranger," a still larger mass of gold, was found amongst the roots of a tree at Dunolly, Victoria, in 1869, by two starved out "fossickers" named Deeson and Oates. The weight of this, the largest authenticated nugget ever found