Life in the Yakima Prospecting Camps

The hills in this country have been full of them this past summer, and they have been of all kinds and conditions. There is the old 'forty-niner' who thinks he knows all about it. There is the man from Idaho who had big luck back in the Coeur d'Alene and 'struck it rich,' but was crowded out by some syndicate. Then there is the fellow who has done nothing else but prospect for the last 'thirty years or more,' and is still prospecting. There is the wood-chopper turned prospector and miner; he spends the money made during the summer in buying acid and the like, and spends his nights grinding rock in a mortar to 'soak' it, eagerly looking for a glint that never shows up. It is not an easy job; after crawling over rocky slopes for half a day, you dig forty feet into the side of a mountain only to find nothing. But they do not get discouraged; they keep picking until they run out of cash, come back to the settlements for a job to get 'heeled' again, and return to the mountains. The Yakima mines in the upper Natchees will prove the exception; fortunes are awaiting the picks of the prospector.