Colorado Paper - Some Mines of Rosita and Silver Cliff, Colorado

The history of the mining region of Custer county has been somewhat peculiar. Although, in the broader features of geological structure, it bears a strong resemblance to its newer and now more famous neighbor, 40 miles to the northward, the Cripple Creek mining district, it has been noted for failures rather than for successful mining ventures. Yet it has a number of mines that have proved themselves to be remarkably rich, and many others that have well-defined veins and very rich ore, though they never have been worked to any great depth. A few of the deposits seemed to the early miner so anomalous in form and manner of occurrence that they were popularly described as " contrary to all geological laws." The region has had several " booms," succeeded by more than usually violent reactions, the latter having proved more permanent than the former. It was, for a long time, the favorite resort of patent-process mongers, and the ground is now strewn with relics of various unsuccessful reduction-plants. Mismanagement, ignorance and disagreements among mine-owners seem to have been quite as responsible for the want of success in the region as the quality of the ores or the form of the deposits. In the early eighties, when the booms had not entirely died out, a division, then under my charge, of the U. S. Geological Survey, undertook an examination of the region for the purpose of making a study of its ore-deposits. The areal survey was carried to completion by Mr. Whitman Cross, but the study of the mines could never be completed for the reason that most of them were closed, for one reason or another, before we had time to visit them. From time to time, one or another of the important mines has been started up again, but it was not