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Show Ingenious Methods of Salting Mines In Utah Boom Days Told Ingenious methods employed by prospective mine salters in early Utah boom days are legendary, and include cases of "reverse" salting wherein rich veins were sometimes deliberately salted with "lowgrade". Mine salting became so pronounced pro-nounced in Utah, that great care was exercised by mines and smelters to keep rich ore from falling into the hands of unscrupulous unscrup-ulous characters. But certain slickers were not to be stopped by ordinary methods. For instance, in-stance, a Park City miner appeared ap-peared daily in a mine smoking an exceptionally large pipe. By accident acci-dent one day it was knocked from his mouth disclosing the fact that gold nuggets were mixed mix-ed in with his tobacco. Another miner allowed his hair to grow nearly to his shoulders. It was later discovered that he was using this to hide nuggets fastened to his head with wax. Dinner buckets were often filled ! with high-grade galena ore, and i many gold nuggets were smuggled ; out by swallowing or by stuffing them in the nostrils or in ears. The practice of stealing ore was known as "high-grading". I Many methods were used to "salt" a fake claim once the necessary nec-essary high-grade had been secured. se-cured. In gold mines it was a common practice to fill a shot gun with gold' dust and nuggets and fire it into the rock .This method gave all the appearance of the real thing because the ore when thus fired would penetrate the rock to a certain extent. "Reverse" salting was frequently frequent-ly resorted to by unscrupulous superintendents. su-perintendents. A typical case would be for the superintendent to hurriedly substitute lowgrade ore for a newly-discovered rich vein and then make a discouraging discourag-ing report, awaiting the opportunity oppor-tunity to lease or buy the claim at a low figure. |