THE LAND WE LIVE IN.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VI, Issue 224, 21 September 1871, Page 4

THE LAND WE LIVE IN.

o No. 3.— The Ltell. The river Lyell is one of the many golden streams tributary to the Bailer. It is chiefly noted, as a diggings, for the number and size of the nuggets that have been found in the numerous rich claims that have been worked on its banks. These banks are for the most part very steep and rugged, consisting of mosscovered stones and rocks, from which spring the birch forests that (with the exception of the plain known as Manuka Fiat) so uniformly characterises the scenery in this district. At the junction of the Lyell with the Buller is the township, which takes its name from the river Lyell. It is situated at the foot of a spur leading up to the ranges, and is hemmed in by the precipitous banks of the Buller and Lyell on two sides, and the ranges at the back. The town is built on this triangularshaped sloping bit of uneven ground, an acre or two in extent, the streets inclining from side to side, and from top to bottom, in the most romantic rough-and-tumble style imaginable, a huge birch root in the middle of one of the streets being quite in character. The buildings, consisting of stores, a boarding-house, several public-houses, two butchers' shops, and a bakehouse, a shoemaking establishment, and a smithy, are very good samples ■of one-story weatherboarded buildings, several of them being roofed with galvanised iron, but most of them with native shingles. There is a West Coast touch about the manners and meals of the people of the Lyell, not observable higher up the Buller, attributable, no doubt, to the proximity of Westport, and the ready and constant communication which the cargo boats maintain between the two places. Anyhow, ham and eggs, steaks and chops, with tea, coffee, or chocolate, and the inevitable bottle of Worcestershire sauce, are served in a manner and style that would do credit to far larger places than the Lyell. The butchering establishment of Mr. Louis Pensini is notable for the beautiful green paddocks of English grass he has at great cost and labor cultivated, and for the seat, clean, look of. these paddocks, slaughterhouse, outbuildings, and patch of vegetable garden. The Port is reached by a narrow track cut in the bank leading to the beach, where the boats are unloaded, and their contents packed up to the town. Although the chief trace now left of the gold that used to line the banks of the river is the biles of old Water-races, and acres of piled boulders which mark the old workings ; still nuggets are not altogether extinct, several, of an ounce and upwards haying been found, quite lately, and the children belonging to the families living on the Lyell can amuse themselves with fossicking out bits of gold from the crevices in the rocks, and from among the stones. But these nuggets are now scarce, and the alluvial gold is nearly done, and the pßople of the Lyell are all merely "banging on " awaiting the result of the first crushing tow in '■ progress at tK© Prospector's Claim on the auriferous quarter reef discovered two years ago and situated a^uft|r|e rniles'iifc theXyell. Thrown itself la in consequence aa doll us anything

can "be, for even the wages men employed on the reef have no money to spend as they have to wait for the " first crushing," to get their wages. My own experience of the reef is as follows : — I spent a day in walking from the Lyell to the machine site, in climbing up the half-mile of steep track to the works on the top and returning to the town. I had about three hours at my disposal for viewing the claim. — I walked through many hundred feet of tunnels and drives on various levels, about 1700 feet in all. I saw veins of quartz on the sides of all these tunnels and. drives, and saw the gold distinctly in many different parts of these veins as they lay in the mountain, and by peeking these and carrying the pieces to daylight and washing them I quickly got a number of specimens. The dirt washed from these pieces of quartz when panned off gave a good prospect of fine gold. I then went to the paddock in which several hundred tons ojF quartz was awaiting to be passed through the shoot for cruehing. A shower of rain had just washed the different fragments of stone clean, and I quickly got a lot of specimens here also. In fact it seemed an easy matter to collect specimens by the cart-load in this paddock. These specimens are not so much noted for their richness, as their frequency. I N Eaw no metallic veins nor wedges ot gold, hut numberless bits from the jiize of a pins-head to as large as a.ps-p'percQrn, diffused apparently through all the veins of quartz. I naturally concluded in my own mind that where the gold was so easily discernable and so generally scattered through the stone, that the yield must be good. After leaving the mine, I crushed and saw crushed about a dozen small pieces of stone in which gold was not perceptible, but on waahing the powder a prospect was obtained in every case, consisting of coarse specs and more or less fine gold dust as well. The stone is conveyed from the mine to the battery by means of a shoot 2706 feet (a little more than half-a-mile) in length. It rises in this distance to an elevation of 1100 feet above the level of the machine house. It is supported on pole scaffoldings, nearly 200 in number, with props and stays in between. These scaffoldings are, for a large proportion of the distance from 40 to 60 feet in height, and, on climbing some distance up the hill, you see the shoot running through the tree-tops, the one end lost in the maze above, the other end lost in the abyss below. Seen in mass, the thousands of poles composing these scaffoldings have a remote resemblance to the masts in the London docks, while the shoot itself looks like some huge gymnastic apparatus stretched up aloft for some giant acrobat to perform perilous feats upon, and puzzling one to think how the 30,000 feet of 3in. birch planks of which it is constructed could have been got into place and fixed so well and truly in their position. The water-wheel is a masterpiece of work, and a most graceful and beautiful ' structure. It is forty feet in diameter and ' is capable of driving several batteries, besides the one of eight 4oolb stampers, which is now pounding away at the rate of sixty strokes per minute. ' To get everything in working order as it now stands on this claim has been the work of two years' unremitting toil and unswerving perseverance and industry on -the part of the prospectors, who have also invested the whole of their savings from former mining operations, amounting to three or four thousand pounds, in this undertaking. But the works, carried on las they have been under every disadvantage of bad roads and no roads at all, have been exceedingly costly, and a considerable amount of debt is incurred in addition to the ready money that has been paid away. The whole of the machinery bad to be hauled by main force up the bed of the [creek. All hands on the Lyell turned out 'and gave a ready and willing assistance in jthie work. (The Government aoon after but a track, which is all ups and downs when it might have been made nearly level, and was- an expensive piece of work into the bargain.) Two tons of candles have been burnt in making the excavations; a ton and a half of nails have been used in constructing the shoot. These and all ihe tucker, — the flour, beef, sugar, and other stores, a pair of blacksmith's bellows, hoop iron, for the tramway, picks, shovels, and other tools, estimated -in all to be^ bver twentj tons in weight, have bad to jbe packed up from the Lyell and then up the steep hill to the reef on men's backs. It. has i cost the prospectors, : moreover, > &200 ready cash in leasing fees, water- , rights, registrations, survey!, &c. And yet I was informed by the manager r that phe Government would not grant them protection for cutting a better and shorter rack at their own cost, in order to lessen ;tie i 'labor "of conveying stores' to the claim." [t will be about a month before a washing pp will take place, as it it tfieiiiiention of,he prospectors to crush enough stone to pay off the whole of Uiei* «xifl'tibg

liabilities. Should the claim tarn out as well as the prospectors anticipate, the people of the Lyell will have cause to rejoice greatly. The busy days of the past will once more return, streets, still more hilly and slopy , will have to be added to the town, and the precious metal will circulate freely again. It will also give an impetus, one would think, to the construction of a cart road, or a tramway, or some better means of communication between the Lyell" and Nelson, than the present miserable bridle tracks.