"Placer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... New Town, not on the charts, but famed for owning a fine gold placer north of the town-lagoon. After my departure from the coast it was inspected by Mr. Grant, who sent home specimens of bitumen taken from the wells. Then came the two Assinis, eastern and western, both places of small present importance. The 'Assini ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... were parts of one majestic swindle. There had never come any silver out of any portion of the mine; there was no silver to come. At midnight trains of packhorses might have been observed winding by devious tracks about the shoulder of the mountain. They came from far away, from Amador or Placer, laden with silver in "old cigar-boxes." They discharged their load at Silverado, in the hour of sleep; and before the morning they were gone again with their mysterious drivers to their unknown source. In this way, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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. ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... gold was carried on at Pinos Altos, near the southern boundary, but the Apaches did not encourage prospecting to any extent. During the period of the discovery of gold in California, in the days of "forty-nine," the people of New Mexico had become quite wealthy through supplying the California placer miners with mutton sheep at the price of an ounce of gold dust per head, when muttons cost half a dollar on the Rio Grande. At that rate of profit they could afford the time and expense of driving their herds of sheep to market at Los Angeles, even though the Apaches of Arizona ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... there, and mining camps. That is Leadville, a mile or so yonder to the north; and the children who have come down to the station have valuable specimens of ore in their little baskets, to sell to you for a trifle. Off to the left hand, a little farther on, was a "placer mine," with water pouring out of a conduit, muddy and yellow with "washings." This emptied itself into the Arkansas River, which, from this point down to the foot of the mountains, was as if its bed had been stirred up with all its clay and other deposit. Above this ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... mineralogist guessing to say how it got here, because it's a different proposition from the wash gold in the creek bed. I've got all that's here, I'm pretty sure. And you might prospect this creek from end to end and never find another nugget bigger than a pea. It's rich placer ground, at that—but this pocket's almost unbelievable. Must be forty pounds of gold there. And you found it. You're the original ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in last night. They've been prospecting over in the White River and report rich quartz. They've got samples with 'em and say there are placer indications everywhere. They were on their way to Omar to tell their friends, and telephoned in from here. Somebody overheard and—it leaked. The whole camp is up in the air. That's what brought out that gang from town ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... to ebb. A dry season caused a cessation of mining in many parts of the mountains. Of course it can be well understood that the immense prosperity of the city, the prosperity that allowed it to recover from severe financial disease, had its spring in the placer mines. A constant stream of fresh gold was needed to shore up the tottering commercial structure. With the miners out of the diggings, matters changed. The red-shirted digger of gold had little idea of the value of money. Many of them knew only the difference between having money and having none. ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... rough place. No mining hamlet in the placer gulches of California, nor any backwoods village I ever saw, approached it in picturesque, devil-may-care abandon. It was a lawless draggle of wooden huts and houses, built in crooked lines, wrangling around the ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... notre raison individuelle que la verite-arrive a nous et devient notre bien? Quel moyen plus immediat pourrons-nous avoir de saisir la verite? Quel principe de connaisance ou de Certitude pourrait-on placer entre nous et notre raison? Et comment pourrions-nous l'employer, si ce ne'est avec notre raison? N'est ce pas une contradiction flagrante de vouloir persuader quelque chose a des hommes que l'on a declares incapables de connaitre certainement quoi que ce soit? A quoi bon une methode, une autorite ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... that creek. The post-office, the commissioner's office, and the saloon, the stores and road-houses, migrated to the new spot, and Coldfoot was abandoned. Now the chief producing creek is the Hammond River, still farther up the Koyukuk, and if its placer deposits prove as rich as they promise it is likely that a town will spring up at the mouth of the ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... enemigo, malo, falso, enganador, 15 que ni poso en ramo verde, ni en prado que tenga flor; que si el agua hallo clara, turbia la bebia yo; que no quiero haber marido, 20 porque hijos no haya, no: no quiero placer con ellos, ni menos consolacion. iDejame, triste enemigo, malo, falso, mal traidor, que no quiero ser tu amiga, 25 ni ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... chains—which have hastened the distillation, and out of known earlier groups have produced the last. For example, trap outbursts have converted Tertiary lignites in Alaska into good bituminous coals; on Queen Charlotte's Island, on Anthracite Creek, in southwestern Colorado, and at the Placer Mountains, near Santa Fe, New Mexico, Cretaceous lignites into anthracite; those from Queen Charlotte's Island and southwestern Colorado are as bright, hard, and valuable as any from Pennsylvania. At a little distance from the focus of volcanic action, the Cretaceous ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... 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. It's as bad as the gambler's mania. Well, the fever got into Moulton's blood, and he gave ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... armed with Kentucky rifles, which were not only muzzle-loaders, but of small calibre and less effective than the ordinary .32 calibre rifle of to-day, were hunting deer on the divide between Volcano and Shirttail Canyons in Placer county. In the heavy timber on the slope they encountered a large Grizzly coming up out of Volcano Canyon. The bear was a hundred yards distant when they saw him and evinced no desire for trouble, and two of the hunters were more than willing to give him the trail ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... he knew, always carried him back to the time when he was a car-boy at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County, ten years before. He remembered the years he had spent there trundling the heavy cars of ore in and out of the tunnel under the direction of his father. For thirteen days of each fortnight his father ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... and gravel aggregates, placer deposits, polymetallic nodules, oil and gas fields, fish, marine mammals (seals ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... occurs in the form of small grains or larger nuggets in the sands of old rivers, or imbedded in quartz veins in rocks. In the first case it is obtained in crude form by placer mining. The sand containing the gold is shaken or stirred in troughs of running waters called sluices. This sweeps away the sand but allows the heavier gold to sink to the bottom of the sluice. Sometimes the sand containing the gold is washed away from its natural ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... the treasures of the 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 a ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... had procured their emeralds. It was not until the discovery of New Granada that the source was revealed from which the stones had been obtained. The wealth of the land did not end here. From Popayan and Choco, provinces of the north-west, "placer" gold was obtainable in fairly large quantities by the simple expedient of washing. Thus, on the whole, New Granada promised the Spaniards ample supplies of the minerals which they coveted, and ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... some placer claims up around Helena, and developing a quartz prospect over at Carson City. And the freighting was by no means "played out." He, himself, had driven a six-mule team with one line over the Santa Fe trail, and might have to ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... en huida, que era cosa harto de ver, que un valle de cuatro o cinco leguas todo iba cuaxado de gente. En este vino la noche muy presto, y la gente se recogio, y Atabalipa se puso en una casa de piedra, que era el templo del sol, y asi se paso aquella noche con grand regocijo y placer de la vitoria que nuestro Senor nos habia dado, poniendo mucho recabdo en hacer guardia a la persona de Atabalipa para que no volviesen a tomarnosle. Cierto fue permision de Dios y grand acertamiento guiado por su mano, porque si este dia no se prendiera, con la soberbia que trahia, aquella ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... of Brown's Park, being raised in bare rolling hills, runnelled and gullied by the elements. The water was quiet here, and hard rowing was necessary to make any progress. We had gone about seven miles when we spied a large placer dredge close to the river. To the uninitiated this dredge would look much like a dredging steamboat out of water, but digging its own channel, which is what ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... like the Clinton ores of the southeastern United States and the Brazilian ores; important phosphate deposits; most deposits of salt, gypsum, potash, nitrates, etc.; comparatively few and unimportant copper deposits; and important placer deposits of gold, tin, and other metals, and precious stones. With the aid of organic agencies, sedimentary processes also account for the primary deposition ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... a corner of the bed among the spruce boughs, and pulled out a leather sack. She untied the mouth and ran out into my hand as pretty a stream of gold as I have ever seen—coarse gold, placer gold, some large dust, but mostly nuggets, and it was so fresh and rough that it scarcely showed signs ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... The First Telegraph Instrument Modern Telegraph Office The Operation of the Modern Railroad is Dependent upon the Telegraph Sam Houston Flag of the Republic of Texas David Crockett The Fight at the Alamo John C. Fremont Fremont's Expedition Crossing the Rocky Mountains Kit Carson Sutter's Mill Placer-Mining in the Days of the California Gold Rush John C. Calhoun Calhoun's Office and Library Henry Clay The Birthplace of Henry Clay, near Richmond The Schoolhouse in "the Slashes" Daniel Webster The Home of Daniel Webster, Marshfield, Mass. Henry Clay Addressing the United States Senate in ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... and the carpenter's wife began to cook for them, in a tent. The miners gave her a building lot, and the carpenter put up a log hotel for her. There she sometimes fed a hundred and fifty men a day. Miners came in on snowshoes from their placer claims twenty miles away to buy fresh bread from her, and ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... and rock "float" at our camp and made quite a clean-up that fall, returning to Sitka with a "gold-poke" sufficiently plethoric to start a stampede to the new diggings. Both placer and quartz locations were made and a brisk "camp" was built the next summer. This town was first called Harrisburg for one of the prospectors, and afterwards Juneau for the other. The great Treadwell gold quartz mine was located ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... there with the irrigation ditches which kept it so. And in the center of the meadow, a small inclosure marked grimly the spot where lay the bones of old John Imsen. All around the man-made oasis of orchards and meadows, the sage and the sand, pushed from the river by the jumble of placer pits, emphasized by sharp contrast what man may do with the most unpromising parts of the earth's surface, once he sets himself heart and muscle ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... arretames chez eux. 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
... 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 ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... the Frenchman's notion of the presence of guns in the canons' seats: "L'Archevque de Cantorbery avait fait placer des canons dans les stalles de la cathdrale.'' He quite overlooked the word chanoines, which he should have used. This use of a word similarly spelt is a constant source of trouble to the translator: ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... live after reproduction, mating and egg placing comes first. In all cases the rule is much, the same. The moths emerge, dry their wings, and reach full development the first day. In freedom, the females being weighted with eggs seldom attempt to fly. They remain where they are, thrust out the egg placer from the last ring of the abdomen and wait. By ten o'clock the males, in such numbers as to amaze a watcher, find them and remain until almost morning. Broad antennae, slenderer abdomen, and the claspers ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... cannot 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 ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... years of placer mining in California thousands of acres of rich lands in the foothills were destroyed. Only boulders were left. Now fifty years have passed and a new soil is being formed, but it will be a long time yet before it will be as good as it was in ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... you Spanish jade, you've never been the same to me since Rattlesnake Dick came prowling back from Shasta county to his old haunts in Placer." Rosa's ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... passes by Muleje and Gallinas, the inhabitants of those places collect the sands, from which they obtain small quantities of gold in dust. In another placer, which embraces an extension of seven leagues, they also extract some gold in dust in quantities as insignificant as those which result from the sands of ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... Dios que cada una de mis monedas se vuelva en tus manos un escorpion, y cada perla un alacran! iY que mueran de lepra tus hijos, con los dedos podridos y deshechos, para que no tengan ni tan siquiera [93-3] 10 el placer de rascarse! iY que tu hija la mayor se escape de tu casa con un judio! iY que a ti te metan un palo por el cuerpo, y te saquen asi a la vergueenza, teniendote en alto hasta que, con el peso de tu cuerpo, el palo salga por encima de la coronilla y quedes patiabierto ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... 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 Company, ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... had been prospecting with his partner, and had found a gulch with precipitous cliffs all around it where there was very rich placer digging. Directly in front was a high mound covered with big cacti, and they made their camp on the top of this. There was a little water in the canyon held in rock basins, and with this they washed out the gold and got a lot of it—Judson ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... the origin of sedimentary ores. Certain mineral deposits, like the "Clinton" iron ores, the copper ores in the "Red Beds" of southwestern United States and in the Mansfield slates of Germany, many salt deposits, and almost the entire group of placer deposits of gold, tin, and other metals, are the result of sedimentation, from waters which derived their materials from the erosion of the land surface. It is sometimes possible from the study of these deposits to discover the position and configuration of ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... "placer miners" have raised precisely such a shout in just such sandy gullies, but Sile felt as if he were the first being on earth to whom such an experience had ever happened. He at once began to dig and sift among the gravel fiercely. He ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... dites vous, existe encore entre les sujets de sa majest au Canada, ne devrait jamais s'teindre surtout quand cette mulation a pour origine le dsir d'obir aux lois dans leur libre et juste application, et les nobles efforts d'un chacun pour placer chaque province au premier rang dans la reprsentation de notre pays et faire ainsi progresser le Canada dans la voie de l'ordre et de ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... believes it, and comes to this valley to find it. If some one told him that Adam and Eve were still alive, and running a stock ranch up in the Big Horn basin, he would believe it, and if it came to him as a secret that Solomon in all his glory was placer mining in a distant valley over the mountains, he would rush off to engage Solomon to drive a chariot next year in his show. Such an ability to absorb things that are not so, in a world where all men are suspicious of each other, should ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... no 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, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... originated in the mind of Loper, in a mine in Cripple Creek, in 1899. Six years later, Loper had been attracted to the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado in Southeastern Utah, by the excitement created by the discovery of placer mining there. He confided to Russell his belief that the Colorado River offered much greater chances of ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James |
