A decade of failed mills, and Frank Moody's remark that Jasper would some day bring him $50,000.
A retrospective written twelve years after the Champion mill arrived, and the most useful clipping in the set for understanding why the camp kept failing. Several mills have been built there, but all have proved failures, and time and time again has the camp got a black eye.
The problem was the ore itself. General Sickles, Senator Moody and others had spent years and money trying to find some process by which the mountains of low grade gold ore could be handled profitably. The paper describes the surrounding country as one hundred and fifty square miles of mineral bearing quartz, mostly low grade but exceedingly rich in pockets, which is the same character the 1929 clipping still reports thirty years later.
The one figure here is a personal one. Eight or ten years earlier Frank Moody had told the writer that some day Jasper would bring him $50,000, but that he would wait until a new process for handling the ore was discovered. It is recorded in the ledger as a claim, because that is what it is, a man's expectation of his own property rather than gold that came out of it.
The closing line is the boom talk the whole exhibit is about: if the next experiment succeeded Jasper would become a second Cripple Creek, and if it failed the old camp would take another rest of ten years.