walled canyon from the Columbia river up to a point just below the junction with the Metolius. With 4,000 second feet at the 1,300 feet of fall which can be developed at these sites, 600,000 theoretical horse power can be generated. With the low and high year flow equalized at the Benham Falls reservoir, and with a 120 foot dam in the Crooked river about 40 miles above Prineville, this low water flow can be increased to about 6,000 second feet, and the power to nearly 900,000 horse power. This is about six times the present installed steam and hydro-electric machine capacity in the vicinity of Portland, and about 40 times the low water power development at Oregon City."

This is but one river, and although a wonderful river, Oregon has many others furnishing vast power. Mt. Hood sends down half a dozen rivers, and keeps the flow of water up the whole year round.

RED MAN AND WHITE MAN

When the native red man found the new-comer white man taking possession of his land, killing his game and driving it away, depriving him and his family of their natural God-given sources of sustenance, he went to war; and fought the white man to the best of his ability. He was conquered in battle and placed on a Reservation to keep the peace. Sixty years later this same white man finds an enemy seizing his sources of life, light, heat and comfort through the cunning instrumentalities of legalized monopolies. Does he bravely oppose the new enemy like the Indian? No! But he attends primary elections, and votes this way and that way, and every other way but the right way, and his enemy wins every time, elects the rulers, makes the laws, and charges all the traffic will bear and still leave the worker alive to earn more taxes. The monopoly, the trust combine, the corrupt or incompetent legislature of his own making has captured the white man-and put HIM on a Reservation.

CHAPTER XVIII

1849-1910

GOLD AND SILVER IN ANCIENT TIMES-THE CHARACTER OF MINERS IN ANCIENT TIMES

-MINING LAWS IN AMERICA-DISCOVERY OF GOLD IN CALIFORNIA DISCOVERIES IN OREGON -PRESENT CONDITIONS OF MINING IN OREGON-MINES OF OTHER VALUABLE MINERAL DEPOSITS THE INFLUENCE OF MINES ON THE STATE

The Bible contains frequent references to the Gold of Ophir, and the Silver of Tarshish, dating back to over a thousand years before the birth of Christ. In that early period of recorded history neither gold or silver was coined into exchangeable money, but passed from hand to hand in trade by weight, the little pieces of all sorts and sizes being weighed in scales for every transaction. The first statesman of those ancient days that conceived the idea of coining gold and silver into pieces of definite weight to pass current as money, as we present day people use it, was probably Croesus the typical rich man of all history, King of Lydia, six hundred years before the birth of Christ. Lydia was a small kingdom in the western part of Asia Minor which after many years of fighting with the Greeks finally secured access to the Mediterranean sea at Smyrna and entered upon a great era of commercial prosperity. Lydia has passed into history as the industrial power of the ancient world, and Croesus, its most illustrious King, has become the synonym of the rich man for all time. While the small streams of that country did produce some gold dust, the probability is that the invention of coining the gold into money, and the seaport access to the trade and commerce of the cities of the great sea enabled the Lydian merchants to monopolize the commerce of that region and increase the wealth of the country and the riches of its enterprising King by trade. The lesson of that, and all succeeding goldbearing regions, seems to be, that gold and silver have always been the stimulants of enterprise and new discoveries.

Following down the history of mankind in connection with mines not a single sign of wealth or prosperity is discovered attaching to the common man who found a mine of any sort, until after the formation of the American Republic. The reason of this is found in the laws of all countries, except those of the United States, which made mines or deposits of minerals the property of the King, Crown or Government. And for the same reason miners in all countries but our own have been in many cases slaves. Men convicted of crime, or rebellion against the established authority, would be sentenced to a life of servitude in government mines-no matter whether the mines were of gold, silver, diamonds, salt, copper, lead or iron. For a thousand years the salt mines of Cracow have been alternately the work house and living tomb of unfortunate criminals or rebels. of Poland, Russia, Sweden, Bohemia, and Austria. The Spaniards sent their

own criminals to wear out their lives in the mines of Spain, and when short of help boldly seized Protestant religionists in the Netherlands, or elsewhere, and consigned them to a life of unpaid toil. And when they seized Mexico and Peru they forced the harmless and inoffensive natives to toil in chains until life was exhausted to produce silver for the Government of Spain. If there is any crime against humanity that old Spain has not been guilty of history makes no record of it.

One of the first questions of great importance which confronted the first statesman of our Nation was the disposal of the public lands with, or without the minerals therein contained.

In the colonies before the Revolution the title to the common minerals passed under the common law rule, to the owner of the soil; and the colonies, when they entered the Federation retained control of these lands. But the mineral lands owned by the United States after the Revolution were disposed of under three statutes.

1. An Ordinance (May, 1785) entitled "An Ordinance for ascertaining the mode of disposing of lands in the Western Territory," which was of the vaguest character.

2. The Lode Law of 1866.

3. The General Mining law of 1872, known as the law of the apex.

There was substantially no mining done in the United States till the purchase of Louisiana and the acquisition of the lead mines of Missouri, which had been one of the most alluring baits of Law's Mississippi scheme. As a result of the Louisiana purchase, a law was passed in 1807 to the effect that "the President of the United States shall be and is hereby authorized to lease any lead mine which has been or may hereafter be discovered in the Indian Territory for a period not exceeding five years." The leasing of mineral lands was entrusted to the War Department, but it did not impose on it a heavy burden till 1845, when, after the extinction of the Michigan Indian titles in 1843, active mining commenced in the native copper deposits of Lake Superior. For two years only, subsequently to 1845, the system of leasing was carried out. It was the system inherited from the mother country, and badly practised when applied on the large scale by inexperienced officials.

In his interesting address to the American Institute of Mining Engineers on "A Century of Mining," Abraham S. Hewitt tells of the process by which the leasing system was supplanted by the out-and-out purchase system:

"For a few years the rents were paid with tolerable regularity, but after 1834, in consequence of the immense number of illegal entries of mineral lands. at the Wisconsin land office, the smelters and miners refused to make any further payments, and the Government was entirely unable to collect them. After much trouble and expense, it was, in 1847, finally concluded that the only way was to sell the mineral land, and do away with all reserves of lead or any other metal, since they had only been a source of continual embarrassment to the department.

"Meanwhile, by a forced construction (afterward declared invalid) of the same Act, hundreds of leases were granted speculators in the Lake Superior copper region, which was from 1843 to 1846 the scene of wild and baseless excitement. The bubble burst during the latter year; the issue of permits and leases was suspended as illegal, and the Act of 1847, authorizing the sale of the min

eral lands and a geological survey of the district, laid the foundation of a more substantial property.'

The first mining excitement in the United States followed the first successful effort to mine the metallic copper of Lake Superior, and as we have seen, the result was the adoption of the sale in preference to the lease system. The next modification of importance followed the rush for gold in California, then a remote area, newly acquired by conquest and subsequent treaty. To meet local exigencies, a mining code was framed by the miners, through methods curiously illustrative of the working of popular institutions.

When Mexico succeeded in overthrowing the rule of the King of Spain, and set up the Mexican Republic in 1821, one of the first acts of the new government was to abolish Spanish titles and regulations of mines. Mexico was at that time, and probably is yet, the richest country in mineral resources in the world. So that when California was occupied by the United States the Mexican mining laws were in force, and till 1849 the conquered province remained under military rule. Colonel Mason, the governor, while still ignorant that the treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo had been signed on February 2, issued the following proclamation from Monterey on February 12, 1848:

"From and after this date, the Mexican laws and customs now prevailing in California relative to the denouncement of mines are hereby abolished."

"The legality of the denouncements which have taken place, and the possession obtained under them since, till the occupation of the country by the United States forces, are questions which will be disposed of by the American Government after a definite treaty of peace shall have been established between the two Republics."

Without questioning the right of Colonel Mason to revoke arbitrarily the existing mining law, the miners obeyed, and framed rules and regulations, not only for regulating the conduct of mining, but for the mode of acquiring the mines themselves, although all of them were virtually trespassers on the public domain.

Hence arose the custom, afterward embodied in the United States statute, of allowing miners to create a mining district and constitute themselves a legislative body, whose rules and regulations, if not contrary to either Federal or State or Territorial laws, have a binding obligation. These self-constituted legislators in California followed the Mexican code so far as it applied to discovery and development, but they introduced into their mining code a principle which had no place in any modern mining statute. To them the ownership of the surface was subsidiary to that of the lode, or quartz vein, which might happen to crop out at any given spot. Therefore they conceded to the owner of the outcrop the right to follow his discovery to any depth and under the "dip, spur, and angle clause" of their amateur regulations, created extra-lateral rights. and introduced the law of the apex, which came to be the distinguishing feature of the statutes passed in 1866 and 1872, and which has remained unaltered till today. This anomalous law of the apex was apparently copied from an old custom confined to the High Peak district of Derbyshire, England, and probably incorporated in the California mining code at the suggestion of some English miners. Judge Field, who was ultimately elevated to the Supreme Court of the United States, but who had been one of the pioneers of California-an alcalde before the admission of the State-a legislator in the first Assembly, and a state judge, thus

graphically describes the process by which these mining regulations were framed by these early intelligent miners:

"The discovery of gold in California was followed, as is well known, by an immense immigration into the State, which increased its population within three or four years from a few thousand to several hundred thousand. The lands in which the precious metals were found belonged to the United States, and were unsurveyed and not open by law to occupation and settlement. Little was known. of them further than that they were situated in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Into these mountains the emigrants in vast numbers penetrated, occupying the ravines, gulches, and canyons, and probing the earth in all directions for the precious metals. Wherever they went they carried with them that love of order and system and of fair dealing which are the prominent characteristics of our people. In every district which they occupied they framed certain rules for their government, by which the extent of the ground they could severally hold for mining was designated, their possessory right to such ground secured and enforced, and contests between them either avoided or determined. These rules bore a marked similarity, varying in several districts only according to the extent and character of the mines; distinct provision being made for different kinds of mining, such as placer mining, quartz mining, and mining in drifts and tunnels.

"They all recognized discovery, followed by appropriation, as the foundation of the possessor's title, and development by working as the conditions of its retention. And they were so framed as to secure to all comers within practicable limits absolute equality of right and privilege in working the mines. Nothing but such equality would have been tolerated by the miners, who were emphatically the law-makers, as respects mining, upon the public lands in the State. The first appropriator was everywhere held to have, within certain well defined limits, a better right than others to the claims taken up; and in all controversies, except as against the Government, he was regarded as the original owner from whom the title was to be traced. # These regulations and customs were appealed to in controversies in the State courts, and received their sanction; and properties to the value of many millions rested upon them. For eighteen years, from 1848 to 1866, the regulations and customs of miners, as enforced and molded by the courts, and sanctioned by the legislation of the State, constituted the law governing property in mines and in water on the public mineral lands."

The Argonauts not only carried to the west coast the habits of self-government which were the heritage of the race, but carried them into practice with the same independence and originality as characterize most of the legislation of the State Legislatures.

THE GREAT DISCOVERY

The discovery of gold in California on the 19th of January, 1848, was one of the greatest industrial events of the world. At first thought this seems to be a very unfounded statement. But a careful survey of the whole field of enterprise, the commerce of the world, and the standard of living throughout the United States, will show that the discovery of gold wrought a greater change in the United States and the financial relations of this country to other nations than any other fact or any other one hundred facts, subsequent to the independence of these states.