187

Messrs. A. W. Sanders and I. E. Moore did more than the amount of
work required for assessment purposes on their Rainbow and Hudson
groups respectively.

GHNERAL CHARACTER OF THE VEINS

There are two distinct types of quartz veins in Barkerville area, and
the estimation of the possibilities of lode mining is inseparably bound up
with the recognition and differentiation of the two types, and the working
out of the relationships between them. These two types will be referred
to as the A veins and the B veins. The A veins are very conspicuous
features, but are not, generally speaking, liable to be of commercial value;
the B veins are relatively insignificant features, but they constitute,
especially near their intersections with veins of the A class, the only possi-
bilities for lode mining in the area.

A Veins

This set of veins, constituting one of the most conspicuous features
of the area, is the one to which the attention of prospectors and miners
was directed in the search for the mother lode of the placer gold. The
creeks contain many pebbles and the hill-sides are strewn in many places
with large fragments of white quartz containing small amounts of pyrite,
which are believed to have been derived from the disintegration and
denudation of a belt of A veins which crosses the country from northwest
to southeast. This belt varies from one-quarter of a mile to 3 miles in
width. Longitudinally it has been traced from beyond Roundtop moun-
tain just outside of the southeast corner of the map-area to Sugar creek
just beyond the northwest corner—a distance of over 25 miles. Along
this course, the belt of veins traverses Roundtop, Nugget, and Antler
mountains, mount Burdett, Bald mountain, mount Agnes, Proserpine,
Richfield, and Cow mountains, mounts Pinkerton, Burns, and Amador, and
Island mountain, and mount Tom, to its most northwesterly known
extension in Sugar Creek area.

The veins outcrop prominently on the grassy uplands of the plateau
surface, particularly on the tops of mount Burdett and Bald mountain,
where in places they stand as much as 10 feet in relief. There are very few,
if any, regular, persistent, fissure-like veins in the belt; the individual
bodies of quartz are usually discontinuous and lenticular, whereas the
country rock in their immediate vicinity is well charged with small bunches
and stringers of quartz of the same character. Single lenses or veins vary
in thickness up to 200 feet, and may be followed by intermittent exposures,
as on mount Burdett, for distances up to a quarter of a mile. In general,
however, the veins are composite, consisting of quartz zones with partings
of schist, slate, or quartzite.

The trend of the belt of veins corresponds, as a rule, with the strike of
the Cariboo series, since the veins themselves occupy compression fractures
and zones of close folding and shearing developed during the formation of
the main anticlinal structure. The strike of the individual lenses of quartz
varies up to 25 or 30 degrees from the strike of the adjacent country rock,