This book is a real snooze inducer. Mr. Young spends a huge amount of time in this book describing how various mining machinery and chemical extraction processes operated, like the "cazo" process, various amalgamation processes, the arrastra, the stamp mill, various dredgers and separators, etc., etc., etc. If this sound like appealing reading to you, I've still got bad news. The author does the worst thing possible in attempting to explain these processes and operations: he tries to give plenty of detail and yet be brief at the same time. The result for the reader is you get neither brevity nor sufficient detail. You spend a full page or two reading about a certain piece of mine machinery, and when you're done reading the passage you still don't know how the devil it worked. The illustrations in this book are terrible, consisting almost entirely of very crude poorly labelled black and white hand drawings lifted from 19th century texts. I still don't know how an arrastra or a stamp mill worked, and I have 24 years of formal education and spent many of them reading technical manuals. Don't waste your time with this one. Plenty of other better books on western USA mining to choose from.

Why two stars instead of just one? That's a darned good question.

If you enjoy Old West history, mining or geology, or if you just want to know how the desert rats found gold and silver, then this is your book. Lots of detail on the geology of placer and lode mining, techniques used by the Spaniards and desert rats and plenty of colorful history. While the geology can get to be a bit much for those of us who aren't geologists, the history makes up for it.