A visitor describes seventeen patented mines on Cornwall, none working, and says plainly that he does not believe the assays.
A correspondent's letter, and the most sceptical thing in the collection. He describes Jasper as an old mining camp established in '81 that had its excitement and soon died out, set in a park of about 700 acres on the Alamosa river.
On Cornwall he counts seventeen patented mines, the property of Hon. Governor Adams, none in operation. That is the same seventeen the Monte Vista Journal is still describing as the Alva Adams group in 1903.
Then the figures, and his opinion of them. The veins are said to run from 100 to 1,000 feet wide, and said to contain gold at the rate of $8.00 to $2,000 to the ton—it may be so—if it is, there are millions here.
He does not believe it will matter either way, and the reason is metallurgical rather than geological. The ore is very refractory. It is sulphides, not free milling, and in his judgment it is smelting ore, and smelters must treat it. That single sentence explains the next forty years. Every clipping after this one is about somebody arriving with a new mill or a new process, and the 1899 Monte Vista Journal records that all of them failed.