A MOUNTAIN OF GOLD.

Kumara Times, Issue 2820, 5 October 1885, Page 2

A MOUNTAIN OF GOLD.

The history of the discovery and successive transfers of the famous Mount Morgan mine in Queensland, and the sudden changes of fortune involved, read like a romance. The land was first taken up for squatting purposes by a young Scotchman named Donald Gordon. His enterprises was unfortunate, and he lost everything. He took a scientific professor to the hill, wheie there were boulders of stone, which he thought contained copper, but the professor said it was "a mountain of ironstone," and valueless. Some yeai's afterwards, we are told in a narrat've compiled at Rockhampton by "W. G. C.", that "Donald Gordon's hopes and spirits had been broken, and he was at work for his daily bread at Galawa mine, Mount Wheeler. The cattle were over the hills away. One day he offered to show the owners of the mine the mountain of ironstone. They got there. The next scene that surprises Donald is the act of receiving £1 an acre for his selection—-£64)0 in all. " The persons who found this remarkable mountain were the brothers Morgan, who having made the purchase, formed a co-partnership, consisting of the following :—Frederick Morgan, his two brothers—F. G. Morgan and T. S. Morgan—and one of the brother's sons, they possessing one-half of the mine, and Messrs T. S. Hall, W. Hall (Sydney), W. K. D'Arcy and W. Pattison possessing the remaining half. The Morgans subsequently subdivided their half into five shares, and Mr T. S. Hall became possessor of onefifth of their half. Mr Edward Morgan sold his share to his brother, Mr Frederick Morgan, for the sum of £IO,OOO. Thus Mr Frederick Morgan, with his own original share, that of his son, and that purchased from his brother Ned, possessed three-tenths of the whole mine. This interest he eventually sold to the original shareholders of the second half for the sum of £62,000. On the same day as this sale the purchasers sold one-tenth interest in the mine for £56,000 to Mr John Ferguson, the senior M.L.A. for the district, and he has since split up portion of that interest—one-half, I am informed —among a number of Rockhampton people, who have invested various sums, from £SOO to £IOOO and upwards. Finally, the original shareholders of the second half bought out Thomas Morgan's one-tenth for £31,000. It is about two years since the Morgans purchased the land, and the claim had, when I visited it, been worked about 11 months. In addition to the freehold, the shareholder have an adjoining leasehold of 47 acres, and further in addition, 30 men's ground. For a considerable time the affairs of the mine were kept in great secrecy, and, in order to avoid suspicion, the cold obtained was shipped to Brisbane, for export, lest by the publication of a greatly increased export of gold from Rockhampton, public curiosity would be aroused, and the mystery solved. This state of affairs could not, of course, be long maintained; but still, even to the present, the doings of the company are kept very quiet, and the actual results of the mine are knowD only to the shareholders. However, Messieurs the Shareholders are not all bachelors, and somehow or other—who can say how?—sufficient information has leaked out to convince people that Monte Christo's cave of gold bids fair to be eclipsed in the splendour of its bounty by the Queensland golden mount." The Sydney Morning Herald, in an article on the mine, observed:—"What is also curious is that it is not a locality which a scientific geologist would have pointed out as likely to contain gold. The theory put forward to account for the presence of gold there is that it is a secondary formation. The gold is not in the original matrix. Nature has already mined it, chemically treated it, sublimated it, and redeposited it. The fact that such things have happened in past days widens the area within which profitable gold mines may be looked for. The Mount Morgan mine i.s estimated to contain gold enough to yield a profit, after working, of nine millions sterling?"