40
prospects at the surface, but a low-level adit driven below the outcrop failed to pick reef up.
In the Bulmer Claim, which adjourned the Wakatu to the north, the same promising kind of reef was found outcropping as in the other claims, but 900 ft. of adit level failed to locate any solid stone below the surface.
On the Comstock, Better Times, and other claims little more than surface prospecting was attempted, the owners evidently taking the line of waiting to see the issue of the development carried out by the Enterprise and Wakatu Companies. The result was that when these two companies ceased operations, which they did very shortly after their first crushings, all the other claims were abandoned forthwith, and by 1890 the field was almost entirely deserted. Towards the end of 1889 another company, known as the Wellington and Silverstream Gold and Silver Mining Company, was formed to take over a number of the old claims, but this company, instead of doing any further work on the reefs, directed its attention to some galena discoveries that had been made in the locality. Samples of the mineral showed on assay fairly high silver values, but the galena only occurred in small and scattered pockets, and the attempt to work them was no more successful than that of working the quartz reefs.
The Owen River reefs were segregated veins following the bedding of a belt of greywacke, but the country was extremely badly broken and the reefs had no continuity in any direction. In practically all cases the outcrops prospected by the various companies proved to be moved by faulting from their original positions. Only in the Enterprise Mine did the stone live down to the lowest workings opened, and these were less than 200 ft. below the outcrop. In all cases the quartz was heavily charged with arsenical pyrites, which remained unaltered to within a short distance from the surface, and whatever gold was in the stone was evidently in close association or combination with the pyrites. At the surface, oxidation had taken place, freeing the gold, hence the fair prospects that were got by crushing and panning samples from the outcrops. When the pyrite zone was reached, only the very poorest prospects could be obtained from samples treated in the same primitive way; but even had good values been found to occur in it it may be readily understood they could not have been recovered by the ordinary battery process of treatment then so generally followed. That fairly good values existed in at least parts of the ore in the various mines is shown by the assay results (Reps. Geol. Expl., 1887–88, pp. xxiii, xxiv) of many samples taken by Sir J. Hector on one of his visits to the field, and tested at the Colonial Laboratory.
Of thirty-nine samples from the Enterprise Mine there were only four that did not give a trace of gold. Six samples contained under 3 dwt. per ton, the lowest being 12 gr. The other twenty gave good results, one containing 19 oz. 13 dwt. 6 gr. gold per ton, and the remainder from 6 oz. down, the average being about 5 oz.
From the Wakatu Claim seventeen samples were analysed, but the results were not so good. Only one proved to have no gold, and the rest had little more than traces, the best specimen giving 1 oz. 19 dwt.
Five specimens from the Bulmer Creek Claim gave an average of 11½ dwt. gold per ton, the best result being 1 oz. 15 dwt.
From the Golden Crown four specimens were taken, the highest result being 1 oz. 15 dwt. 16 gr. gold per ton.
Three specimens from the Zealandia gave an average of 9 dwt. gold per ton.
