BOSTON & CRIPPLE CREEK.
The Boston & Cripple Creek Gold Mining Co. have issued two circulars to stockholders. One is a report on their properties by Fred V. Bodfish, a Victor, Colo., mining engineer; the other, a call for a 5 per cent assessment (10 cents per share) on the 200,000 shares outstanding. This stock was originally unassessable, but at a recent stockholders' meeting it was made assessable.
If the assessment is not paid by Wednesday, Sept, 28, enough of the delinquent stock to meet the costs of the assessment, advertising, etc., is to be sold at public auction on the mining location of the company at Cripple Creek.

The report of Mr. Bodfish states that the claims of the company, the "Agnes," "Leonard C.," "Etta E.," "Ontario," and "Golden Wedge," are situated in the northeastern section of the mining district, and are covered with considerable timber, and from 10 to 15 feet of debris, which makes prospecting difficult and expensive.
At present the "Leonard C." dyke is opened up in several places with surface crosscuts and shafts ranging in depth from 10 to 30 feet, but no attempt has been made to prospect for an "ore chute" by these workings, as they were simply made to locate the trend of the dyke. In prospecting, a number of pieces of quartz were found yielding from $9.60 and $20.40 per ton in porphyritic, to as high as $454.40 in hard, blue, flinty quartz.

Mr. Bodfish advises running a trench on bedrock, south of the Leonard C. discovery shaft to determine the existence of veins which may follow the general line of fracture from north to south. Deep mining will be necessary to make a success of the property.

While this report is not particularly eulogistic, it nevertheless tends to give Boston stockholders a much better opinion of the property than is held by residents of Cripple Creek. The property appears to improve vastly by perspective.
An old resident of Cripple Creek writes me as follows: "We have exhausted our means of information without finding anything about the company, and as far as we know, there is nothing of any particular merit now operating on Tenderfoot hill." Tenderfoot hill is where the property is stated by the company to be located.

By the way, the very elaborate and carefully prepared State Mining Directory for 1898, which gives every mining company worthy of note, makes no mention of this concern, except its being recorded in the secretary of state's office on May 13, 1895. I am not at all favorably impressed with the future prospects of this company.

It is rumored, and the rumor comes from a very good source, that the property of the Boston and Cripple Creek company's claims on the extreme eastern slope of Tenderfoot hill, comprising some fifty acres, is to be bonded and leased by the company.

The news will come as a surprise, as the company has expended a great deal of money in developing the property.

The management of the property is under the supervision of Fred V. Bodfish of Victor, who is one of the best known mining engineers of the district.

The main shaft of the company workings is down to a depth of 360 feet and a big plant of machinery is located on the property. They have a compressor running two air drills and day and night the drills are running to develop the property, for the Boston capitalists who are behind the proposition.

They have never encountered enough ore to ship. The biggest assays they have ever obtained was from the Miller shaft where assays indicated a value of as high as 50 cents a pound. From that shaft they have cross-cut a distance of 350 feet to find the vein thought to be the Hoosier vein.

The main shaft is sunk between two shafts and it is thought that they extend over and to the Hoosier ground and out through the producing area. The company so far has expended something like $40,000 in developing the property in sinking the present compartment shaft to the present depth.