*iover-toies, Fjoined in the movement onRocky
Bee.    The hardships that the fortune-seekers suffered in- the mountains will never be fully known. A large
number of men coming out of the warm, balmy air of
-   ; ._the semi-tropic valleys lost their lives among the i  - snow-banks and ice in the mountains, and many a man
was.made an invalid for life by exposure to the biting cold
during the stampede.
.  A severe blizzard raged in the mountains for several
days while the miners were slowly trudging through them. In one party of over ido men from New Mexico four men were frozen to death one morning, and it is thought that fully twenty more died in the same way in the mountains at that time. To this day there are in California and Arizona gray-headed miners who lack a finger, a toe or an ear lost in the terrible cold of that
stampede.
When at last the Rocky Belle diggings were reached
it was soon seen that there was no ore in the district worth the digging except in the claims held by Hank Binford and his friends, and that the reports of their finds 4', .    had been exaggerated beyond all reason. Binford's own
mine petered out a year or two later, and he got only a few thousand dollars from it. The specimens of ore
shown in Tucson and Los Angeles were the very choicest
from. the mine, and not hit or miss pickups, as had been
said of them.
Along in the summer of i878 a miner named Stevens
wrote to a friend in Phoenix that he had found a claim that beat anything in mining this side of the Comstock lode in Nevada, and that with a common iron mortar
land Pestle he had pounded out from $70 to $Ioo worth
of gold dust a day.     The claim was located 120 miles
:-   northwest from Kingman,-near the since famous Harqua
fiI~