"Placer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and gravel aggregates, placer deposits, polymetallic nodules, oil and gas fields, fish, marine mammals (seals ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... shot in Guadalajara. Father Sarria had more than once administered the sacraments to Portuguese desperadoes dying of gunshot wounds. Even the women recalled terrible scenes. Mrs. Cutter recounted to an interested group how she had seen a claim jumped in Placer County in 1851, when three men were shot, falling in a fusillade of rifle shots, and expiring later upon the floor of her kitchen while she looked on. Mrs. Dyke had been in a stage hold-up, when the shotgun messenger was murdered. Stories by the hundreds went the round of the company. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... a made this trip for money if I wasn't so plumb anxious to see how Dubois saves that flour gold. You take one of these here 'canucks' and he's blamed near as good if not a better placer miner than a Chink; more ingenious and just as savin'. Say, Baldy, will you keep off my heels? If I have to tell you again about walkin' up my pant leg I aim to break your head in. It's bad enough to come down a trail so steep it ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... confront. He had rather expected to deal with it with hammer and pick,—to wrest the gold of experience from the hardest and flintiest bedrock; and all at once he felt as if he had struck a great "placer" with nuggets of the most agreeable description lying ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... down the inside office, at the rear of the rough board building, when Van came in and found him. The horseman's business was one of maps and land-office data made essential to his needs by the new recording of the "Laughing Water" property as a placer instead of a quartz claim. He had drawn a crude outline of his holdings and in taking it forth from his pocket found the knife bought for Gettysburg in the way. He removed the weapon and placed it on the table near ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... wealthier person wrapped in silver tinsel. Not the least interesting of the sights is that of men and boys here and there engaged in dipping up mud from the bottom and washing it in pans similar to the gold-pans of placer-miners; they make their livelihood by finding occasional coins and ornaments, accidentally lost by bathers. A very unique and beautifully carved edifice is the Nepaulese temple; but the carvings are unfit ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... eux. Ils vinrent placer devant nous une de ces nappes a coulisses dont j'ai parle, et dans laquelle il y avoit encore des miettes de pain, des fragmens de fromage et des grains de raisin. Apres quoi ils nous apporterent une douzaine de pains plats avec un grand quartier ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... minerals is at once an art and a gamble. Skill, acquired by long experience or instinctive—and there are men who seem to possess the latter—counts for much, but chance plays a leading part. Provisions, tents and packhorses are expensive, and though a placer mine may be worked by two partners, a reef or lode can be disposed of only to men with means sufficient to develop it. Even in this delicate matter, in which he had had keen wits against him, Vane had held his own; but there was ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... this he placed forty jars of the finest green jasper, which he filled with pieces of antique gold, also that within a pavilion he builded a second palace and set therein eight images of precious stones, each one of a single gem, and all seated upon royal seats of placer-gold.[FN27] He also wrote upon a silken hanging a writ which I read and which bade me repair to thee and thou wouldst inform me concerning the Ninth Statue whereabouts it may be, assuring me that it is worth all the eight." ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... industrial activity prevails there. The inhabitants weave fine straw hats from the fibre of the leaf of the buri palm-tree (corypha sp.), manufacture pandanus mats, and carry on a profitable trade at Mauban with the placer miners of North Camarines. The entire breadth of the road is covered with cement, and along its center flows, in an open ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... but he had seen enough of it to recognize that prospecting is an art. Men certainly strike a vein or alluvial placer by the merest chance now and then, but the trained man works from indication to indication until, though he is sometimes mistaken, he feels reasonably sure as to what waits to be uncovered by the blasting charge or shovel. Grenfell's previous account ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... distinguishing traits of his official conduct has been his impartiality, his exemption from favoritism and partizanship, when in conflict with the public interests, and especially his well-known hostility to "cliques" and "rings," such as resort to a city government as a rich placer, where they may work to enrich themselves at the expense of the people. The rigid discharge of duty which he has required of the police under his charge, and the avoidance, at the same time, of everything like oppression, or the exercise of undue ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... a belief that under the excitement of a gold craze men exercise less judgment than at any other time. Except in placer mining, which almost any one can learn, gold mining is a science. Now and again a nugget worth a fortune is picked up, but the average mortal can get a better livelihood, with half the work, in almost any other ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... obtained a kind of brass-colored and less dirty earth, in order to wash it in another large placer, that they had at one side of the said elevation, with a small stream that rises on top of the elevation, where they had a small settlement. They could, to all appearances, obtain but little profit, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various
... —Vete de ahi, enemigo, malo, falso, enganador, 15 que ni poso en ramo verde, ni en prado que tenga flor; que si el agua hallo clara, turbia la bebia yo; que no quiero haber marido, 20 porque hijos no haya, no: no quiero placer con ellos, ni menos consolacion. iDejame, triste enemigo, malo, falso, mal traidor, que no quiero ser tu amiga, 25 ni casar contigo, ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... center of the meadow, a small inclosure marked grimly the spot where lay the bones of old John Imsen. All around the man-made oasis of orchards and meadows, the sage and the sand, pushed from the river by the jumble of placer pits, emphasized by sharp contrast what man may do with the most unpromising parts of the earth's surface, once he sets himself heart and ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... Francisco, the capital of California, but not at the period when the placer-mining fever was raging—from 1849 to 1852. San Francisco was no longer what it had been then, a caravanserai, a terminus, an inn, where for a night there slept the busy men who were hastening to the gold-fields west ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... and his companions were busy digging and washing the earth and sands in the region where the little wild flowers grew. These mines were called "placer," from a Spanish word meaning loose or moving about, because the metal was loosely mixed with sand and gravel, generally in the bed of a stream or in a ravine where there had once been a flow of water which had brought the gold down from its home ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... difficultez, qu'il faut coucher sur la terre nue, ou sur quelque dure roche, faute de trouuer dix ou douze pieds de terre en quarr pour placer vne chetiue cabane; qu'il faut sentir incessamment la puanteur des Sauuages recreus, marcher dans les eaux, dans les fanges, dans l'obscurit et l'embarras des forest, o les piqueures d'vne multitude infinie de mousquilles ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... that, Cap," spoke up one of the miners. "This is goin' ter be one of ther best minin' camps in ther middle part of Nevada, an' there ain't no mistake on that. It's most placer minin' that we've been doin' here, 'cause we ain't got no machinery ter go down deep in ther ground. But that there's big deposits down under us there ain't no doubt. I've cleaned up a cool, thousand so fur this week, an' I've got two more days ter make ...
— Young Wild West at "Forbidden Pass" - and, How Arietta Paid the Toll • An Old Scout
... occasionally spin their cocoons after only three moults, and, on the other hand, "presque toutes les races a trois mues, que nous avons experimentees, ont fait quatre mues a la seconde ou a la troisieme annee, ce qui semble prouver qu'il a suffi de les placer dans des conditions favorables pour leur rendre une faculte qu'elles avaient perdue sous ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... a later story, "The Californian's Tale," Mark Twain has made us acquainted with the verdant solitude of the Tuolumne hills, that dreamy, delicious paradise where once a vast population had gathered when placer-mining had been in its bloom, a dozen years before. The human swarm had scattered when the washings failed to pay, leaving only a quiet emptiness and the few pocket-miners along the Stanislaus and among the hills. Vast areas of that section present a strange appearance to-day. Long stretches ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... defeat. He accordingly directed the sheriff of the county to notify us to show cause, before the court in Sutter County, why we should not be again expelled from the bar for the publication of the article in the Placer Times, to which I have referred, written in reply to his attack on us in his "Address to the Public." The order was dated on the fourth of October, and was served on the eighth, and required us to appear on the first Thursday of the month, which was the third. As the time for appearance ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... 'placer claim'—experts have reported against it. McFarlane has protested against it, but nothing is done. The mill is also on deeded land, and together they are a plague spot. I'm their enemy, and they know it; ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... that he knew, always carried him back to the time when he was a car-boy at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County, ten years before. He remembered the years he had spent there trundling the heavy cars of ore in and out of the tunnel under the direction of his father. For thirteen days of each fortnight his father was a steady, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... was able to identify with reasonable certainty the trails followed by the different parties, but found no signs of gold formation except some barren quartz, and this after an experience of several years in both placer and quartz mines. So honest John Galler's famous placer mine still remains in the great list of lost mines, like the Gunsight Lead and other noted mines for which men have ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... say like one yonder where it looked like different colored stair steps going up? Did any one ever find gold in the canyon? How did they know it when they found it? Did Frank ever do any mining? What was placer mining?" And on and on, only the intermittently returning fear of the trail silencing him until Frank ordered him to dismount in a narrow chasm within sight of the roaring, ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... meme difficulte a classer les montagnes; et quoique depuis quelque tems plusieurs naturalistes ayent aussi observe qu'elles n'ont pas toutes la meme origine, je ne vois pas qu'on soit parvenu a fixer des caracteres infaillibles, pour les placer surement toutes dans leurs ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... came upon the succession of Placer gold diggings, known as the hydraulic mines, which were then for the most part abandoned, and these brought to my remembrance many similar spots I had seen in Australia. The debris of the mines had stopped up, ...
— A start in life • C. F. Dowsett
... like going down into a placer mine," the geologist afterward said; and in view of what next met his eyes, he was justified in ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... carpenter's wife began to cook for them, in a tent. The miners gave her a lot, and the carpenter put up a log hotel for her. There she sometimes fed a hundred and fifty men a day. Miners came in on snowshoes from their placer claims twenty miles away to buy fresh bread from her, and paid ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather |
