Beyond the West: containing an account of two years' travel in the other half of our great continent far beyond the old West, on the plains, in the Rocky mountains, and picturesque parks of Colorado. Also, characteristic features of New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho ... Oregon, Utah, Nevada, and ... California, the end of the West ... the great continental railroad, together with the ... most wonderful natural scenery in the world .../ by George W. Pine.

BEYOND THE WEST.
This mine has a history of its own, which-is some
what curious. It was known for ages by the Indi.
ans, who worked it for tke paint it contained, with
which they ornamented their persons; and for that
purpose it had become a valuable article of exchange
with other tribes on the Pacific Coast.
Some twenty-five years ago, a Mexican cavalry of.
ficer met some Indians painted with vermilion, which
he knew they had obtained from the cinnabar, or
quicksilver ore. He succeeded, by bribery, to get
the Indians to show him the place. Tht-e mines are
on a cross range of the coast range of mountains.
The Indians had dug over sixty feet into the mountain, when white man first saw it, with their wooden sticks, probably the work of centuries. Quite a
number of skeletons were found in a passage where
life had been lost by the caving in of the rocks and
earth. It was supposed for some time that the ore
contained gold, or at least silver, and was treated
accordingly, without success, when a Mexican made
a small smelting furnace, filled it with the ore and
applied fire at the bottom, when he soon found by
the pernicious effects of the fumes on his person,
that he had wholly mistaken the composition of the
ore-that he had caught a tiger-that it was quicksilver ore.
Upon this discovery, a large English and Mexican
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