o its ditches.
There are in some localities supposed rich gold banks and beds, which
only require water for development, but to get which would require an
outlay for ditches of many hundred thousand dollars. It is probable that
it would be richly paying investment, however, and the principal reason
why it is not undertaken is the lack of certain laws, regulating mining
claims, and the conflicts and doubts that are occasioned by the neglect
of the government to establish the terms of ownership in mining lands.
As it is now, possession is the principal title to mining properties;
prospectors and miners have established a few general rules for
determining the rights of each other, and they can occupy the properties
that they discover or purchase to a certain limited extent. No one
person is permitted to take up more than a certain amount in feet or
acres. The government so far has done nothing with these mineral lands,
whose real ownership is still in itself, and derives no revenue from
them.

Whenever difficulties arise and are brought before the courts, the
regulations of the miners of the district where the properties are
located has generally been sustained. But the apprehension that the
government will yet assume its rights and establish different rules for
the possession and use of these lands, and the uncertainty and
controversies growing out of the present loose ways of making and
holding claims, are a serious obstacle to large enterprises, and a
hindrance to the best sort of mining progress and prosperity throughout
all the western mining country. The profits obtained in some cases of
extensive deep diggings and hydraulic mining are very great. A thousand
dollars a day is often washed out by a company holding rich soil and
employing a large force; and a run of several weeks, averaging from
fifty to one hundred dollars a day for each man employed is frequently
recorded. A single "cleaning up" after a few weeks' washing in a rich
place has produced fifty thousand dollars in gold dust and nuggets; and
in some cases, even one hundred thousand dollars has been reported.
These are the extreme cases of good fortune, however; other enterprises
are run at a loss, or with varying result; but the gold washing, as a
general thing pay good wages, and a fair return to the capital invested.

It is hardly possible to imagine, and wholly impossible to describe the
ruin and wreck to be seen everywhere in the path of the larger gol