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letter addressed to John Hopp, the depth of the shaft to the level of the
tunnel driven beneath the Meadows was 120 feet. The depth to bedrock
in the shaft was 90 feet. The shaft was equipped with two 9-inch Cornish
pumps and a large Cameron steam pump placed in a chamber near the
bottom of the shaft. The use of the pumps for two seasons proved sufficient
to drain the ground, both near the surface and lower down. About 10
cords of wood a day was used as fuel for the boilers. A water-wheel intended
to operate larger pumps was placed on the ground, but these pumps were
not used. The drift under the Meadows, according to Mr. Lane, was 75
feet long. In the account of the operations given in the Annual Report
of the Minister of Mines, British Columbia, 1874, the length of the drift
is given as 180 feet. The drift, except for a few feet out from the shaft,
was run in gravels and the deep bedrock channel was not reached. Mr.
Lane states that about 23 ounces of fairly coarse gold was obtained by
cleaning up the rim rock and there was a slight showing of gold in the gravel
taken out in running the drift. When it was realized that the channel was
much deeper than had been supposed and that the development work was
very costly—at least $60,000 having been expended with practically no
returns—operations were suspended in 1873. Since that time no serious
attempt has been made to mine the deep channel in the Meadows except
lower down at Willow River mine and at Slough Creek mine, both of which
undertakings, however, proved failures. It was at one time proposed to
drain and mine the upper part of the Meadows by running a tunnel from
the falls in the lower part of Pleasant valley, but the project was abandoned
as too costly. An old shaft in the flat opposite Devlin bench is said to
have been 136 feet deep, but not to bedrock. In 1913 a number of borings
in the flats were made by E. H. Dawson with the object of determining
whether the ground was sufficiently rich to pay for dredging. Other
borings were made by J. T. Towers in 1914 along Williams creek near the
upper end of the Meadows, at the mouth of Mosquito creek, near the
junction of Cornish creek and Willow river, and a short distance below the
rock canyon on Willow river below the junction of Slough creek. Two
borings were made on the south side of Williams creek, 850 feet below
the Lane and Kurtz shaft. ‘There were two borings, one on the bank of
Williams creck and the other 700 feet farther south and 1,000 feet north-
west of the reduction works near the mouth of Eureka creek 13 miles
from Barkerville. Three bore-holes, two of which were near the south
bank and the other near the centre of the valley, were put down along a
line 1,750 feet above the reduction works. Another was located 1,000
feet farther up the valley and 500 feet from the south bank. There were
also a few others the location of which is not known. Unfortunately, these
borings extended down only to clay or to what was considered as dredging
depth, and, therefore, furnish no information as to the gold values in the
deep channel of the Meadows. Some very fair values are reported to have
been found in the borings along the sides of the valley, below Devlin bench
opposite the part of Williams creek above the Meadows, and off the mouths
of the tributary streams on the south side of the Meadows, but very little
in the borings in the central part of the valley. Eureka and McArthur
creeks were gold-bearing to some extent and were first drifted and later
hydraulicked out in their lower parts. The borings and old workings in