Old Mines of Southern California: Desert-Mountain-Coastal Areas Including the Calico-Salton Sea Colorado River Districts and Southern CountiesFairbanks, Harold W. (Harold Wellman)
History
Old Mines of Southern California: Desert-Mountain-Coastal Areas Including the Calico-Salton Sea Colorado River Districts and Southern Counties
Fairbanks, Harold W. (Harold Wellman)
Geology -- California, Southern; Mines and mineral resources -- California, Southern
ton, the most of it is medium to low grade.
About a mile and a half down the cañon from the old Silver Post Office,
and in a cañon coming in from the south, is a cropping of dark, somewhat
argillaceous limestone inclosed in shales. The limestone does not seem
to have been highly metamorphosed, yet the fossils which it contains are
almost obliterated. The faint impressions are those of coral stems,
stromatopora, and some other low forms of life. Half a mile farther down
the cañon is a cropping of brecciated marble. At many points,
particularly on the north side of the cañon, there are great masses of
apparently conglomeritic character, but with a crystalline structure.
The matrix has a green to brown color, and in it are imbedded pebbles of
the same degree of fineness, but often distinguished by much brighter
red, purple, and green colors. In this cañon, as in others of this
range, the water holds much lime in solution, and extensive tufas are
frequently to be seen. The basal members of the Cretaceous at the mouth
of Silverado Cañon consist of conglomerates passing up into sandstone,
and those into shales; dip 55° away from the mountains in the highest
ridge, but in the course of a quarter of a mile becoming much less. The
change in dip is very sharp, giving the appearance of a fault.
A cañon which enters Silverado Cañon from the northeast near its mouth
was followed up nearly to its head for the purpose of investigating some
limestone outcrops. The first outcrop in this cañon is the usual dark
porphyry. Beyond this the stream has cut a deep cañon through an immense
conglomerate of porphyritic and quartzose pebbles. The porphyritic
pebbles are dioritic and part red and black porphyries. Some of them are
similar to dikes farther up the mountains. Through this great
conglomerate bed there are dikes of black porphyry, with pale feldspar.
Tufaceous porphyries form a large part of these dikes. The base is
purple and the pebbles light green, or the reverse. These conglomeritic
porphyries differ from the great beds of sedimentary origin, in having
all the pebbles of a uniform character with a crystalline matrix. The
sedimentary beds contain pebbles of all sizes and description, in a
matrix of small pebbles or coarse sand. Farther up the cañon the great
body of the rock is crushed shale and black to gray sandstone; dip
vertical, inclining most generally to the east, strike north and south.
Two miles up the cañon is a dike of diorite porphyrite, coarse in the
middle and fine on the edges. Four miles up is a stratum of gray
limestone. More outcrops appear on the north side of the cañon, but
whether they belong to the same stratum or different cannot be told, on
account of the crushing undergone. These deposits are bunchy, swelling
in one case to a width of 100 feet. It is not crystalline. The color is
from black to gray. It contains fine specimens of a bivalve shell, and
faint traces of corals and univalve shells. These beds are said to
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