SEARCHING FOR GOLD. It is Elusive, and Almost All Great Finds are the Result of Accidents.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 248, 21 March 1888, Page 4

SEARCHING FOR GOLD. It is Elusive, and Almost All Great Finds are the Result of Accidents.

Goi.o, as aiule, iMhe last thing you will see in gold-bearing soil. You may have it under your feet at the rate of l'2O to the b.ieketful of dht, and not a grain will you see unless that soil happens, to be furrowed by a recent rain. Ihen, if a stream of water has cut it away, washing it clean to the ledge, you may fc.ee lying thereon the dull yellow bits, and you may cake them for bits of brass or braes filings. Gold in its native state is not a showy metal, not nearly as showy as. the glittering Yellowish pyrites of iron, which so often, by the inexperienced, have been mistaken for the genuine ore. A man, long out of luck, strolled one morning in an uimle-b mood of mind out of the town of Columbia, Tuolumno country, lie ?afc down under a tiee and with his stick commenced poking and prying at a rustylooking boulder in the toil oefoie him. us ho continued to poke and piy a dull yellowish bit of colour appealed beneath the coating of reddiVh m&r- with which the lump was covered — rust accumulated during its long retit fiom the iron-permeated soil. He examined more closely, and found himself in possession of a nugget ncaily all gold and worth about £2,000. The big sttikes which have come under my observation were all the icsult of similar accidents— as at Chambers Bar on the Tuolumne, where the seeming misfortune of a breaking leservoli led to a rush of water over gtound wheie no gold wis supposed to be, and in the deep f ui row cut 1 by the water, theie on the ledge lay coarse gold ; fib on the Maiipc^a trail, where one day a luckless man, packing grub and blankets, sat on a bit of white, jagged lock to eat his dinner, and after eating and while .smoking, he idly piied with his jack-knife bits fiom the rotten ledge, and found one of the richest quartz veins in (he State ; as at the Rawhido Ranch claim, in Tuolumne, where the lonjr-con-tinucd winter rains of 1861-2 consecutive days of drizzle and hard showers, all the level country under water, landslips every wheie, communication cut off with Stockton, and flour at £20 per barrel)— well, this caused a cave of dht in a bank claim supposed to be worked out, and revealed thousands and thousands of dollais in course, ragged lumps, just as it had fallen out of the lotten quartz matrix. A famous professor came a few months afterwards, made a survey of some ground adjoining, pronounced it rich, pocketed his £300 lee, and on that ground and on the strength of that survey certain capitalists builtexpensivemining works, and whon the ground was passed by them years afterwards the squirrels and woodpeckers only held possession, for the professor could nobseeunder the ground any better than any one else, and it has often been noticed that it is the unlearned, unscientific, ragged, often reckless " pros-pector " who finds the "end" first, and the "professor" comes along and tells why it should be found there afterwards.