And in search of such locations we must account for the numberless
shafts which still exist both in India and Peru, and sometimes sunk within
a few feet of each other, passing through the alluvium to a depth of 40
feet to the bed rock.
These mining adventurers soon extended their explorations over the other
recently acquired territories, and built Virginia City, the capital of
Montana, with the gold derived from the alluvium of a river channel which
they excavated; and its inhabitants were the founders of an institution
called the Vigilance Committee, with "Lynch law," and by it ruled
supremely for many years. But their surface diggings, by the manual
operations alone of multitudes, were soon exhausted in every direction,
and then their energies and powers of invention were dedicated to discover
and explore deeper and more permanent depositions, along the western
slopes of the Sierra Nevada, the Andes of the Western Territories, and
which originally were without doubt several miles higher than they are at
the present time--probably 20,000 feet above the sea-level--and of which,
or whatever superior elevation they formerly had, the greater portion of
it has already been removed, by the continuous natural action of
centuries, to form there, as elsewhere, the plains and prairies of the
earth, burying and diverting by the mutation the ancient river system,
whose sources of supply were consequently extinguished by the removal of
these altitudes.
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