g few visits to the small settlements to the north, but on one of
these visits he was captured. There were six or seven other buildings
near the large stone building where we took our meals, so arranged
that they made a short street, the upper row being built against a
cliff of rock and shale, the other row being placed halfway between
this row and the river. These buildings were all of rock, of which
there was no lack, plastered with adobe, or mud. One, we were told,
had been Lee's stronghold, it was a square building, with a few very
small windows, and with loopholes in the sides. At the time of our
visit it was occupied by two men; one, a young Englishman, recently
arrived from South Africa--a remittance-man, in search of novelty--the
other a grizzled forty-niner. Much could be written about this
interesting group of men, and their alluring employment. There were
some who had followed this work through all the camps of the West--to
Colorado, to California, and to distant Alaska as well, they had
journeyed; but it is doubtful if, in all their wanderings, they had
seen any camp more strangely located than this, hemmed in with canyon
walls. To us, their dredge and the steamboat up the river seemed as if
they had been taken from the pages of some romance, or bit of fiction,
and placed before us for our entertainment.

There were other men as well, just as interesting m their way as the
"old-timers," the sons of some of the owners of this
proposition,--clean-cut young fellows,--working side by side with the
veterans, as enthusiastic as if on their college campus.

One feature about the dredge interested us greatly. This was a tube,
or sucker, held suspended by a derrick above a float, and operated by
compressed air. The tube was dropped into the sand at the bottom of
the river, and would eat its way into it, bringing up rocks the size
of one's fist, along with the gravel and sand. In a few hours a hole,
ten or fifteen feet in depth and ten feet in diameter, would be
excavated. Then the tube was raised, the float was moved, and the work
started again. The coarse sand and gravel, carried by a stream of
water, was returned to the river, after passing over the riffles; the
screenings which remained passed over square metal plates--looking
like sheets of tin--covered with quicksilver. These plates were
cleaned with a rubber window-cleaner, and the entire residue was saved
in a heavy metal pot, ready for the chemist.

One da