Stawell Gold Field

Page of 39

Text size:



	7

	value was met with at any of the points opened. Perhaps the usual infatuation for deep ground led those in command to confine their efforts to the actual gutters, instead of testing for values on the " high ground " of the banks of the gutters. Experience teaches that the gold of wash-dirt deposits of this description has not been removed far from the line of the worn-down lode formation in which it was at one time stored, and that most of the gold obtained by the diggers of the " fifties " really came from the high ground rather than from the actual beds of main gutters. While examining the Allendale part of the Creswick Gold-field recently, Mr. W. Thomas, late manager of the Berry Consols Company, informed me that he believed, had he stuck to the deposits of the main channel in his area, instead of following the deposits on the quartz-lode formations which permeated the bed-rock, he would have been making calls instead of dividends. This, from the manager of a mine that turned out 150,000 ounces of gold, and paid a quarter of a million in dividends. The history of wash-dirt mining in Ballarat favours the same conclusion. Twenty-two years since, some miners in search of a quartz lode on the plateau in Ballarat, went through "the rock" (basalt) on to what was, at one time, a hill, away from a gutter. This hill contained part of a quartz-lode line, and the wash-dirt capping to the latter is said to have yielded nearly 1 ton of gold. Many other instances could be given of rich deposits having been met with on high ground, not only in the Ballarat and Creswick fields, but elsewhere, all of which tend to prove that the gold of our wash-dirt was at one time associated with lodes. As far as can be seen, then, it appears that the wash-dirt deposits of the Landsborough valley have been sampled properly only around the fringe of the valley, and that there remains to be sampled the wash-dirt deposits of about 10 miles in length of valley by a width of about a mile, in ground having a depth, to bottom, varying from 40 feet to about 140 feet. As usual, the values of the wash-dirt deposits away at the head of the valley, and in the hundred and one gullies of its sides, proved to be in accordance with the associations, or otherwise, with outcropping quartz formations ; and the richest wash-dirt has in all instances been found in positions on or near these lode lines. The whole valley of Lands-borough appears to be occupied by a broad crumpled arch in the corrugations of slate and sandstone, for the beds underlie to the east on its eastern side and to the west on its western side. There has been intrusion of much dyke material throughout the area of the valley, and, generally speaking, its crack systems have not admitted of such a plethora of lode lines as were noticed on the eastern slopes of the Pyrenees mountains north from Percy dale, through Moonambel, ltedbank, Stuartmill, on to St. Arnaud. There is much of the so-called " indicator " feature present, however, and I noticed that the gold occurrences in these channels of circulation for the waters of the crisp part of the earth's crust have had their positions arranged by the nature of the general fracturing of the rock-beds, of which these channels are a part. We must not forget that these " indicators " are simply main cracks, in which the fluids of the earth's crust circulated more freely than they did, and do, in the solid parts of the rocks, and that the mineral contents of the water were deposited in the lines of crack at parts presenting partial obstruction to circulation. Thus, where a crack having but an eighth of an inch in width of mundic, or an inch or so of quartz with mundic, or 5, 10, or 20 feet of quartz and mundic, keeping its walls apart, has had its circulation obstructed, there the fluids will throw down their contents, as alum causes the mud in water to be precipitated when the muddy water has been retained long enough in its presence. Whether or not these crack channels are wide or narrow, they are lodes all the same, but it has become the

Page of 39