Five Levels Down, Orient's First Thought Mine Hits a Wall of Gold
A sixty-foot stope averaging better than $100 a ton — and assays running to $800 — convinces the Stevens County camp that the deeper it digs, the richer the ground gets.
Orient's big gold producer has made another sensational disclosure. In the first level below the main tunnel floor, or the fifth level from the surface, the most important strike in the First Thought mine has recently been made. After drifting about 50 feet south from the main shaft, ore running as high as $800 to the ton in gold was encountered a couple of weeks ago, according to reliable information, and now at this point a stope has been opened up that shows a face at least 60 feet wide of gold ore that averages over $100 to the ton.
What makes this strike of extra importance to the camp is that it proves that at depth the ore is as rich, if not richer, and the deposits are more compact than nearer the surface.
For the past four years the First Thought has been a steady producer, and all the ore shipped has been broken from stopes above the tunnel level. No authoritative statement has yet been made public as to the amount of ore and its value shipped to the smelters the past year; but it is believed, without exaggeration, the tonnage at least will foot up to 12,000 tons of ore averaging $50 in gold to the ton, making a total output for the year of $600,000. — Kettle River Journal.
“At this point a stope has been opened up that shows a face at least 60 feet wide of gold ore that averages over $100 to the ton.”
Orient and neighboring Ferry County camps boomed on reports exactly like this one, then emptied out when the high-grade ore ran thin. The pattern — a resource town pinning its future on a single strike, and a newspaper selling the assay rather than the geology — is still how rural Washington is pitched to outsiders. What the First Thought left behind is not a fortune but a landscape of tailings and roads that were never quite finished.
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