25 ten millions of dollars. The gold is there extracted, by crashing machines, from the quartz, in which it is found extensively distributed, needing only the railway from the Missouri to cheaply carry the necessary miners with their machinery and supplies. The distance to that point will be about six hundred and fifty miles, which will be passed in twenty-eight hours. When completed, as it easily may be, within the next three years, it will open the way for such an exodus of miners as the country has not seen since the first discoveries in California, to which the American people rushed with such avidity, many of them circumnavigating Cape Horn to reach the scene of attraction. Meanwhile, a corresponding movement has commenced on the Pacific, in vigorously prosecuting the construction of the railway eastward from the coast at or near San Francisco, which will cross the Sierra Nevada at an elevation of about 7,000 feet, on the Eastern line of California, in the 120th parallel of longitude, and there descend into the territory of Nevada at the rich silver mines of Washoe. It is not yet possible to estimate with any accuracy the extent of these deposits of gold and silver, but they are already known to exist at very numerous localities in and between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, not to mention the rich quartz mining regions in California itself, which continue to pour out their volumes of gold to affect, whether for good or ill, the financial condition of the civilized world. During the last six months gold has been obtained in such quantities, from the sands of the Snake River and other confluents of the Columbia River, as to attract more than twenty thousand persons to that remote portion of our metalliferous interior. The products of those streams alone for the present year, are estimated at twenty millions of dollars.
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