"Placer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... burning, and in another spot is the corpse of some wealthier person wrapped in silver tinsel. Not the least interesting of the sights is that of men and boys here and there engaged in dipping up mud from the bottom and washing it in pans similar to the gold-pans of placer-miners; they make their livelihood by finding occasional coins and ornaments, accidentally lost by bathers. A very unique and beautifully carved edifice is the Nepaulese temple; but the carvings are unfit for ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... With the union of the two rival companies in 1821, the Hudson's Bay Company became the sole authority on the Pacific coast. Settlers straggled in slowly until, in the late fifties, the discovery of rich placer gold on the Fraser and later in the Cariboo brought tens of thousands of miners from Australia and California, only to drift away again almost as quickly when the ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... sand and gravel aggregates, placer deposits, polymetallic nodules, oil and gas fields, fish, marine mammals ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... down and a three-room cabin constructed. To keep this cabin was Edith Nelson's task. The task of the men was to search for gold, which they did; and to find gold, which they likewise did. It was not a startling find, merely a low-pay placer where long hours of severe toil earned each man between fifteen and twenty dollars a day. The brief Alaskan summer protracted itself beyond its usual length, and they took advantage of the opportunity, delaying their return ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... had now become very fine—fine beyond all need of ordinary placer-mining. He worked the black sand, a small portion at a time, up the shallow rim of the pan. Each small portion he examined sharply, so that his eyes saw every grain of it before he allowed it to slide over the edge and away. Jealously, ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... it's a bunch of fellers that's been workin' some placer ground off back here somewheres"—and he waved a tanned hand indefinitely in a wide arc—"and some man got the double hitch on 'em with the law, provin' that the ground was his'n, and the sheriff run 'em off! Now they're sore. But it seems they cain't help 'emselves, so they're ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... was shot off as he was leading the last unsuccessful assault, and who turned round to his aide-de-camp and said, "Allez dire an Premier Consul, que je meurs avec regret de ne pas avoir assez fait pour la France!" which gave Lady Kicklebury an opportunity to placer her story of the Duke of York, and the bombardment of Valenciennes; and caused young Hicks to look at me in a puzzled and appealing manner and hint ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... West, intending to settle in San Francisco and practise law. His wife stayed behind until he should get a start. The gold fever was n't dead yet in those days, and Moulton had a bad attack of it. When I came to the Coast he was working in some played-out placer mines, and feeling perfectly sure that he was going to strike a fortune almost any day. When a man has once dug gold out of the ground with his own hands, he seems to be unfitted for doing anything else. ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... be absolutely sure there is gold in the region he explores, in paying quantities and practicable for mining. Though he has every reason to feel confident of the richness of a particular field, he may nevertheless be so unfortunate as not to discover the gold lode or profitable placer deposit. He is helpless to control the existence of the indications of success. They are predetermined by nature. By no effort of his own is he able to increase or decrease the fixed quantity and quality of the golden chances about him. He can only increase his likelihood of discovering ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... terres possedees par les Malais, sont en general de tres bonne qualite. La nature semble avoir pris plaisir d'y placer ses plus excellentes productions. On y voit tous les fruits delicieux que j'ai dit se trouver sur le territoire de Siam, et une multitude d'autres fruits agreables qui sont particuliers a ces isles. On y respire un air embaume par une multitude ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... in their wake with a limited supply of the bare necessaries of life, risking the dangers of Indian attack by the way to obtain large profits as a rightful reward for their temerity. Flour was worth 75 cents per pound in greenbacks, and prices of other commodities were in like proportion, and the placer unpromising; and many of the unemployed started out, some on foot, and some bestride their worn-out animals, into the bleak mountain wilderness, in search of gold. With the certainty of death in ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... chloride, yellow and ruby glass colored with gold. 287. Gold is rarely found combined, and has small affinity for other elements, though forming alloys with Cu, Ag, and Hg. Its source is usually either quartz rock, called auriferous quartz, or sand in placer mines. The element is widely distributed, occurring in minute quantities in most soils, sea water, etc. California and Australia are the two greatest gold- producing countries. That from California has a light ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... geologist, but he had seen enough of it to recognize that prospecting is an art. Men certainly strike a vein or alluvial placer by the merest chance now and then, but the trained man works from indication to indication until, though he is sometimes mistaken, he feels reasonably sure as to what waits to be uncovered by the blasting charge or shovel. Grenfell's previous account of the discovery had, however, not made ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... colors, but all but two or three were very fine. They had lured thousands to the Basin, but the yellow metal could not be found in anything like paying quantities. Mr. McKensey told the Captain that I was quite an expert in placer mining and had been in the Black Hills, Virginia City, and Old Alder Gulch. This was enough and I had to agree to stay over a day and see a wonderful clean-up, which would be tomorrow. I wanted to see more of the wonderful Basin and so decided ...
— The Sheep Eaters • William Alonzo Allen
... 1896 and 1897, when the whole civilized world was turned almost topsy-turvy by the bewildering reports. During the first three months of the latter year more than four million dollars were taken from a space of forty square miles, where a few placer claims were worked. What harvest will be during the next few years no man dare attempt to guess. How suggestive the fact that on one stream so much of the metal has been found that it was given the name "Too Much ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... to grow less in the California gravel, the miners looked for it in the rocks on the mountain-side. The placer miners laughed at them and called their shafts "coyote holes"; but in time the placers failed, while nearly all of our gold to-day comes from veins of white quartz in the rocks. A vein of gold is the most capricious thing in the world. It may ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan
... not see how the Company can make anything out of placer gold diggings in such a country. The miners must be encouraged, and mining licences cannot be expected to do more than pay the cost of collection, magistracy, police, &c. The surrender of all this territory to the Crown, however, is a question to be dealt with by the Board. My aim is ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... a tree into boards without the aid of a saw-mill is a thing many placer-miners have to learn; for, even if they are disposed to sleep on the floor, and to do without shelves, they can't do sluicing without sluice-boxes, and they can't make those long, narrow ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... shanty, but anticipating no trouble on account of it he neglected to lease his cabin from the Forest Reserve officials. The news leaked out that gold had been discovered in Cookstove Gulch, and in a few days the entire stream was staked from one end of the canyon to the other as placer claims. Of course the cabin site became the property of another man, and with it the cabin, as it could not be moved. The new owner was a little, short, pudgy man with an ever-ready eye for business, so father and ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... Once it was collecting sealskins off other people's beaches, and there was zest enough in that, in view of the probability of the dory turning over, or a gunboat dropping on to you. Then there was a good deal of very genuine excitement to be got out of placer-mining in British Columbia, especially when there was frost in the ranges, and you had to thaw out your giant-powder. Shallow alluvial workings have a way of caving in when you least expect it of them. After all, however, I think I like the prairie ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... whole lot like going down into a placer mine," the geologist afterward said; and in view of what next met his eyes, he was justified ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... the one hand, ordinary caterpillars occasionally spin their cocoons after only three moults, and, on the other hand, "presque toutes les races a trois mues, que nous avons experimentees, ont fait quatre mues a la seconde ou a la troisieme annee, ce qui semble prouver qu'il a suffi de les placer dans des conditions favorables pour leur rendre une faculte qu'elles avaient perdue sous ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... centuries were to be had for the asking or the taking, John Cardigan chose that which others elected to cast away. For him the fertile wheat and fruit-lands of California's smiling valleys, the dull placer gold in her foot-hill streams, and the free grass, knee deep, on her cattle and sheep-ranges held no lure; for he had been first among the Humboldt redwoods and had come under the spell of the vastness and antiquity, the majesty and promise of these epics of a planet. He was ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... que des instructions viennent d'etre donnees aux Armees en vue de coordonner leurs mouvements, et qu'il pourrait etre desavantageux de modifier ces instructions. Elles tendent a placer nos troupes dans un dispositif leur permettant de prendre l'offensive dans un delai assez rapproche. Le date de leur mouvement en avant sera communique au Marechal French afin de permettre a l'Armee Anglaise de participer a ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... a little on our placer—just enough to keep interested. Then the supervisors decided to fix our road, and what's more, they done it! That's the only part in this yarn that's hard to believe, but, boys, you'll have to take it on faith. They plowed her, and crowned her, and scraped her, and ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... metalliferous mines, 6437 in coal mines, and 2000 in other mines. Gold is found in nearly all the provinces from Antofagasta to Concepcion, and in Llanquihue, Chiloe and Magallanes territory, but the output is not large. There are a great many placer washings, among which are some extensive deposits near the Straits of Magellan. Silver is found principally on the elevated slopes and plateaus of the Andes in the desert provinces of the north. The second most important mining industry in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... again been excited with the rumored discovery of a gold placer, far surpassing any previous account. The steamer Chesapeake, it appears, sailed from San Francisco for the Klamath River with a company of adventurers, and after an absence of two weeks, returned with news of the discovery of a beach of golden ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... their way to California and the placer fields. In Salt Lake City they had learned that the season was too far advanced to permit their crossing the Sierras by the northern passes and they had organized into what they called the Sand Walking ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... Ils vinrent placer devant nous une de ces nappes a coulisses dont j'ai parle, et dans laquelle il y avoit encore des miettes de pain, des fragmens de fromage et des grains de raisin. Apres quoi ils nous apporterent une douzaine de pains plats avec un grand quartier de lait caille, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... the south, after walling in, as if in a vast cup, the three main sources of the great river. Much of that valley country is in fertile farms today. Lewis and Clark passed within twelve miles of Alder Gulch, which wrote roaring history in the early sixties—the wild placer ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... in a later story, "The Californian's Tale," Mark Twain has made us acquainted with the verdant solitude of the Tuolumne hills, that dreamy, delicious paradise where once a vast population had gathered when placer-mining had been in its bloom, a dozen years before. The human swarm had scattered when the washings failed to pay, leaving only a quiet emptiness and the few pocket-miners along the Stanislaus and among the hills. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the statement is made upon good authority that a few of the leading promoters of the road built the first western section of twenty miles with their own capital, of less than $200,000, and a loan from the city of Sacramento and Placer County, amounting to $550,000, and then drew $848,000 Government subsidy, or more than enough to build the second section and draw another installment of the subsidy; and that they repeated the operation until the whole line ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... sa caverne, lui donne manger et boire, et lui fait ensuite signe de se coucher et de dormir. (Placer le rcit dans ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet |
