References in periodicals archive ?
The slickens (clay-like deposits of mine waste) are gone.
The climax of the book is the desperate battle in the 1870s and 1880s between the mining interests who used existing laws to justify their dumping of waste into the streams and the farmers who saw their lands covered with "slickens," mud and debris that hardened in the summer to a cement like layer overlying the fertile land now beneath it.