The Trials of a Mining Engineer and the Final Success or Failure of ail Enterprise

It is the man behind the gun who wins the battle, and it is the man who overcomes the difficulties of operation who finally makes the mine a success.

A great mine owner once said: "It is easier to get a mine than a man. Give me a man and I will get the mine." There is much of truth in this saying, and many a good mine has been spoiled by poor management.

There are various kinds and varieties of mining engineers ; there is the genuine article with suitable credentials, there is the man who has taken the profession up and sort of just worked into it, and there is the mining engineer who does his mining in barrooms and hotel corridors. These latter are the men who mostly get up schemes, and do as they would not be done by, which in modern slang can be ex- .pressed "Do the investors." Loud talking, bragging, swaggering these are the characteristics of the man who does his mining in barrooms and hotel corridors; when such are met avoid them.

Those mining engineers who have taken up the business and just sort of worked into it are generally known by their contempt for technical training, and their boasting approbation for practical mining. When dealing with such men be a little careful, they frequently graduate into the class who mine in barrooms; but some of them are eminently practical, well informed men, whose advice and guidance are often of the highest merit and value. In mining there is no school which can turn out such valuable men as the "School of Hard Experience." Only very few really graduate, because to become a well informed mining engineer, possessed of both knowledge and experience, one must have worked under varying conditions, and must have had the energy and strength to have spent long hours at study after an arduous day's work had been done. There are such mining engineers ; usually they are not boastful, but their services are invaluable. The trouble with most mining engineers who hare not had a regular course of technical training is that they have not done the studying to obtain the information which an engineer should have, and as a consequence their work is superficial. A man who faithfully studies while working in the mines can, after about twenty years of effort^ observation and study, consider himself a graduate of the "School of Hard Experience," and will have obtained all which the college boy will attain in his four years course, and a great deal more besides which the college graduate will probably never attain; and often the graduate in the school of experience may justly consider his attainments far above those of the ordinary technically trained mining engineer, but in the "School of Hard Experience" there are very few real graduates.

Then we have the regular graduated mining engineers, all of them exceptionally well informed men, most of them capable of intelligently applying what they know, and some few of them combining the technical training with real and varied experience; such men are the real leaders of the profession, and if any investor is so fortunate as to know such a man, let him be wise, and keep putting money into the mining propositions his friend may advise, and the chances are he will become rich.