Each one was a well-defined lead by itself, and without a spur.

My first instinct was to set up the usual-- NOTICE: "We, the undersigned, claim five claims of two hundred feet each, (and one for discovery,) on this ledge or lode of oyster-shells, with all its dips, spurs, angles, variations and sinuosities, and fifty feet on each side of the same, to work it, etc., etc., according to the mining laws of Smyrna." They were such perfectly natural-looking leads that I could hardly keep from "taking them up." Among the oyster-shells were mixed many fragments of ancient, broken crockery ware.

Now how did those masses of oyster-shells get there?
I can not determine.

Broken crockery and oyster-shells are suggestive of restaurants--but then they could have had no such places away up there on that mountain side in our time, because nobody has lived up there.

A restaurant would not pay in such a stony, forbidding, desolate place.