Mine No. 7, operated by Shótwell & Co., located in Richmond, Mo. This mine produced, during the year, 150,000 bushels of coal, and is a shaft 110 feet deep; hoists with horse power, and works thirty-five

men.

Mine No. 8, operated by William Wilson, produced during the year, 150,000 bushels of coal; works thirty men, and hoists with horse power.

Mines No. 7 and No. 8 are used together for escape shafts, as provided by law.

Mine No. 10, operated by Hayson & Co., located at Swanswick, is a shaft ninety-five feet in depth, with escape shaft lately made; works thirty men, and produced during the year, 90,000 bushels, and hoists with horse power.

The second class mines of the county are drifts, with four excep tions. The following is a summary:

No. 1, north of Hardin, about four miles, operated by Grant & Reid. No. 2 and No. 3, operated by Joseph Martin. No. 4, operated by Buford & Dail., No. 5, operated by Joseph Huston. No. 6, operated by Wm. Phillips. No. 7, operated by Wm. Bryant. No. 8, operated by Gilman Edgar. These mines produced, by estimate, 100,000 bushels of coal during the year, which coal is an excellent quality, and work forty-four men,

Mine No. 1, located six miles north of Milville, is operated by Henry Sater, and produced, by estimate, 30,000 bushels of coal, and works seven men. This is a shaft 160 feet deep, and hoists with horse power.

Mine No., operated by John Mellin, in city of Richmond, is a shaft sixty-five feet; produced during the year, by estimate, 15,000 bushels of coal, and works four men.

Mine No.

operated by Rothrock & Milligan, is a shaft, and produced, by estimate, 15,000 bushels; works five men, and hoists by horse power.

Mine No., operated by J. T. Ford, situated one mile east of Richmond; produced during the year, by estimate, 15,000 bushels, and works five men, and hoists by horse power.

There are several other small mines that are not a subject of this report, having just begun operations.

The following is a summary of the foregoing report:

Total number of men employed in producing coal in Ray county

from Dec. 1, 1884, to Dec. 1, 1885....

Total number of bushels of coal produced.

Total amount paid for royalty, mining, etc...

Total amount of capital invested....

Total amount paid for transportation....

Total number of acres of coal (estimated).

Total number of bushels produced by one acre...

541

2,245,100

$134,706

$100,000

not known

275,000 72,000

The mines of Ray county produce an excellent quality of coal and are free from explosive gases. The coal is covered by a coal rock twelve feet thick, and makes the mines, with ordinary care, perfectly safe. The health of miners is preserved by good ventilation, which is easily obtained without great expense. The thickness of vein is twenty-four inches of merchantable coal.

JOHN T. BANISTER,

Mine Inspector of Ray County, Mo.

N. B. The mines have been free from accident during the year, and are in good condition.

BATES COUNTY REPORT.

To the Hon. Commissioner of Labor Statistics of Missouri: The undersigned mine inspector of Bates county has the honor of submitting the following mining report as required by law:

COAL.

Coal is one of the most important of all minerals. Several theories as to the mode of its origin have been put forth. The one generally believed in is that the rank vegetation during the carboniferous age, grew and decayed upon land but slightly raised above the sea, and that by slow subsidence this thick layer of vegetable matter sank below the water and become gradually covered with sand, mud and other mineral sediments, forming those vast coal beds on which the industrial pur

suits of the present age so largely depend. At this age of the globe land had become more extensive, yet was flat and interspersed with great marshes, the atmosphere moist and heavily charged with carbonic acid, suitable to this immense vegetable growth, unknown to any other age; the crust of the earth was continually thickening, violent convulsions were going on, tearing asunder these layers of vegetable matter, sinking coal marshes lower, raising others higher. Currents of water would necessarily change, cutting away the deposits. The swamps in which the coal beds were formed were often very small, some of the deposits occupied only a few acres in area. Conditions favorable to the growth of coal vegetation existed in a large part of Bates county, some places light, others very heavy. The Rich Hill series seems to have been a deposit upon the low marshy plains around the borders of a retreating sea, none of the beds being very wide. We often see the coal climbing a hill at angles of ten to fifteen degrees, with the vein growing thinner as you advance until a seven foot vein in the valley will thin out to three on the top of the hill, or disappear in a fault altogether. Many claim that the reason of the coal thinning out as it climbs the hill is that the coal vegetation grew less rank on the sides of the bog, gradually getting less and less until it ceased to grow altogether.

Our coal seams are not continuous, as many suppose, nor do they run the same in thickness. In quality and position there is a radical difference, they lie in troughs, basins, dishes, patches and splices, thickening and thinning in different directions. Those who expect to find continuous beds will be disappointed; we can only know the extent and shape of a vein we see cropping out on a hillside, or that we sink a shaft through, by working out the subterraneous strata or thorough prospecting with a drill. Nothing equals the pick and drill of the practical miner.

FAULTS IN THE COAL.

In working out the vein the miner is frequently coming to slips, horsebacks, washouts, cut-offs and rock faults; they are all troublesome and make additional expense to the operator and labor to the miner in driving through them. Washouts vary in width, in places the seam appearing again in a few feet, at others hundreds of yards. Rockfaults, in the form of layers of sand stone, have been found in our mines to cut a five foot seam down to eighteen inches, bearing fifteen degrees south of west for nearly a half mile, the large vein appearing no more on the south.

Horse backs are so called by their resemblance to ridges or saddles. They appear both upon the floor and roof; most miners term slips horse backs. I feel assured the cause that made one never made the other. Slips are evidently the result of violent convulsions, which rent assunder the coal beds. A horseback from the roof is where a water channel ran over the ancient coal marsh in the early stages of its deposit, which cut away the vegetable matter.

MANNER OF MINING COAL.

As this report must come before the legislators of Missouri for consideration as a means of assisting them in framing laws bearing on the coal industry of our State, many of whom were never inside a coal mine, a brief sketch of how coal is mined would not be out of place in this report:

The tools of a miner consist of a sledge, several steel wedges, four or five picks, a drill, tamping bar, scraper and needle; this necessitates a keg of powder and a box of equibs. Two men work together in a room or entry to keep each other company in their dark abode. They are called now buddies and share alike the profits; one of them watches while the other works in dangerous places, and if anything happens to one, such as roof falling, the other raises the alarm. The Adrian, Miami, Mulberry and Walnut coal, which is only worked as yet on a small scale, is undermined with the pick and wedged down. In undermining, which is very laborious, the miner stands up until a few inches in depth is cut; he then sits down with his legs stretched wide apart in front of him and cuts in still deeper; he then lies down to enable him to reach farther under and finishes up. More skill is required in mining on this plan than where the veins are shot on the solid. The strata underlying the coal is generally fire clay, and almost as hard as sandstone. The Rich Hill coal is blasted out on the solid; a hole is drilled in the coal varying in distance according to circumstances, with proper grip, giving the powder the best advantage, from two to eight pounds of powder being used in each shot. Shooting is allowed in some of the mines twice a day, in others only once. At 12 o'clock and 5 the men are ready with their shots tamped, the signal is given by the engineer with the steam whistle to the cager below, who gives it to the nearest trapper who keeps watch at the door, who in turn raps on his door, when it is caught up by other trappers and passed over the entire mine. Each man lights his squib and retires to the top. The earth shakes above from these heavy discharges and a dense mass of smoke loads the mine. I have seen 250 bushels of coal set out in one single shot.

A railroad track is laid in all the entries and rooms: in the main entries the tracks are double. The coal is drawn from the face in cars by mules from 15 to 16 hands high, to the bottom of the hoisting shaft; the cager runs the car on the cage and signals the engineer to hoist away, when it is carried twenty feet or more above the surface, when two men roll it to the tipple and dump it onto the screens, where it is distributed into three cars standing on tracks below-one receives the lumps, one the nut coal and the other the slack. A mine car holds from one to two tons. It takes one man stationed at the foot of the hoisting shaft to oil the cars.

DEAD WORK.

Dead work in mines consists of entry driving, ditch cutting, track laying, cutting air ways, providing props and railroad ties, hauling, dumping and loading coal; bratticing up break throughs and mouths of rooms, grading down hills for railroad track, shooting down top in low coal on muleways, taking out water, driving through faults, building doors on entries to turn the air and furnishing guards for the same. Miners dig coal by the bushel, receiving two cents per bushel, weighed as it comes from his room, before passing over the screens. When a car of coal is run on the cage below the cager raps once to the engineer, which tells him coal is coming; three raps tell him men are on, in which case more caution is used. Cages on which men are lowered and hoisted are provided with safety catches to lock the cage in the guides in case the wire rope should break, or machinery get out of order. All our mines but one have a manway with steps to go in and out.

Fire damp, the greatest enemy mine men have to contend with in other countries, has never been found in our mines. Black and white damp lurks around in some of our oldest mines in the worked out parts, but the operators have kept them away from the working face sufficiently that no one has suffered harm from them. I have a few times had my lamp suddenly snuffed out by a column of black damp that was making its way through the mine from the old workings. It is produced by the accumulation of garbish, filth and powder smoke in abandoned workings. All the miners are expected to be down the shaft or slope before the haulers go to work with their mules.

Our mines are worked on the pillar and room system. The shaft being sunk, two galleries are started in parallel lines, a pillar of coal four or five yards wide being left between the entries, which the working men cut through every sixty or one hundred feet for air. When a new hole is cut through the one behind is closed up by wooden brattice in order to force the air forward to the face of the workings. Butt