| Show THE WILSON MESA PLACERS TIMES MOAB UTAH what bids fair to become a genuine mining boom has been getting under way on wilson mesa the past few days for years the mining men of this region have recognized the richness of the placer and float of wilson mesa but until recently no one has had an idea of the immensity of the deposits now it vs I 1 shown that there is a section of country four miles square at a t the foot of the la about fifteen miles distant from moab which heretofore has been considered valuable only for raising the best potatoes and grain in the county but which now turns out to be literally teeming with gold old here may be found hundreds and hundreds of acres of placer that will run from five to twenty five dollars in gold and one may travel from one end of the section to the other without finding dirt that falls fails to pan good colors where bedrock is reached the gold is unusually coarse and flake gold a quarter of an inch in diameter may be found in abundance while many flakes as large as a twenty five cent piece are discovered up to the present time there has been practically no work done on any of the claims the property of joseph webb and emil bosen being in fact the only claims that have been worked at all webb and bosen with a sluice box eight inches wide and four inches deep have been cleaning up an average of an ounce of gold per day for the last two weeks and for several days they have been beating that record the day brothers have acres of placer ground that is said to be as rich and possibly pos bibly richer than the property being worked by webb and bosen they are making sluice boxes and are getting ready to work their property J F hall has forty acres of placer on which he says he can f ind find plenty of dirt that will run two hundred colors to the pan the wilson mesa placer company which secured the waters of mill creek for placer purposes from the moab irrigation company late last year and who stalled installed in their machinery and started to work their property just in time to be shut off by the cold weather before any amount of work could be done have been waiting for warm weather before again commencing operations and are expected to have a number of men on the mesa within the next week or so to start up the work H E blake superintendent of the lisbon valley copper company accompanied by J F P hall made a trip to wilson me mesa s a the last of the week to look over the placer property there and in answer to our request 11 i for information concerning the ou outlook has submitted the following to the editor of the times in response to your request for information in regard to the wilson mesa placers I 1 will say that there is undoubtedly gold an all along the mesa at the base of the la sal range for a distance of four miles at least mr hall and myself arrived at the camp came of joseph webb saturday night and sun suli day was spent in panning the ravines for a distance of from one to two miles on each side of his diggings after quizzing mr webb we received the following information he has so he says cleaned up fifteen ounces of gold from four days work and he showed gold enough to undoubtedly bear out that statement the gold is of a flaky or flat nature the colors colons ranging in size from the point of a pin to one half inch in diameter very thin as though having just been scaled from the cleavage of a rock when mr I tall hall and myself first commenced panning we tested a pan from the webb property to see how it sized up and then we went vent perhaps a mile southeast where we panned grass root dirt for a radius of perhaps one half mile square during the day we washed at least one hundred pans and in no instance even in the lightest loam of the mesa did we fall fail to find colors the lightest pan we had contained one half dozen colors visible to the naked eye and from twenty to one hundred colors was the prevailing number we found no heavy nuggets but in several instances flakes an eighth of an inch in diameter were taken from the pan by sticking the point of a knife into them all of this work was done on soil less than six inches from the surface and we scraped most of the dirt into the pans with our hands on the webb property bedrock shows in the washed ground at a depth of from three to six feet and mr webb stated that his bis heaviest gold comes from near the hardpan at that depth this will probably hold good over the ground we panned and will account for uso usi not getting the heavier particles before leaving the diggings we panned some dirt one mile north of the webb diggings and found gold fully as plentiful if not moie more so than south while the colors seemed to be somewhat heavier now as I 1 said before placer mold gold has been neglected in my early education but with the water at hand and the ne nearness arilesS ot 01 bedrock it seems to me that there is 19 a radius of four miles square at the foot of the la ia sal mountains only awaiting the action of muscle and brains to pour forth a golden golde stream into the pockets of those who will H E BLAKE |
