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** Lost Gold At The Dead Man's Mine ** A Miners Journal **


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   MAY 9   1936

   Last nights watch was quiet again. I am hopeful the hooligans are long gone. I got an early start at the crack of dawn working the dig site. John was finishing up some panning leftover from yesterday and I got 10 buckets to get him started and then came back up to the dig. We think it is now needed to have a man at camp at the creek while one man digs. We can't trust to leave the camp alone during the day. 

   I started working where John left off yesterday. I got down a little deeper and worked into the fault. Suddenly I hit an area of fairly easy digging with good gravels and rounded stone not too big. As I started working at it with the spade it dropped off about five feet in depth so as to be lower than the ground adjacent. It was a kettle in the old creek channel and it was about ten or fifteen feet across.

   I shoveled out some of the top layer to the side and took a quarter bucket sample from a few feet in depth in the kettle. John and me had set a tub with water we carried up from the creek so we could sample pan once in awhile. I filled the pan with some gravels and went at it with hope. I was not to believe what I saw. There had to be a quarter ounce in the pan. I had to sit down and think on this. What did I hit here? I panned some more and the pan was full of gold at the bottom. I finished the quarter bucket. I didn't have a weigh but there had to be one or two ounces in total. It didn't take me too long to get 10 buckets as the digging in the kettle was not too bad. I took the buckets down to John and told him what I found and gave him the pan. We weighed the gold from the quarter bucket and got over an ounce.

   John went to work on the tom and I dug like a man on fire. I dug 75 buckets in all. I got over to the creek and helped John clean out the tom and we panned the heavies. We were both dead tired at dusk when we did a weigh. We had 106 ounces total. We both just sat there looking at it under the light of a lantern. I couldn't even believe it. When I claimed up the ground I talked with a geologist who knew the area, He told me you could get yards to make an ounce or ounces to a single yard on the fault. Somehow I had hit a glory hole. I had heard of this but never thought about it much. I'd already made more gold than I thought i'd get for a season. I knew one thing for sure, from now on we needed to be real careful about anyone coming out here and seeing this. In these times a man could be robbed or worse for far less. We had some dried beef and crackers and beans and a drink of whiskey and John went up on first watch while I drank another cup and went to sleep.

   TO BE CONTINUED ................................

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   A quick note from me at this point. So the ancient river channel had flowed wide from east to west. The fault line upheaval had lifted the east side up anywhere from 60 - 100 ft so as the river ran over it became a big waterfall. The old river carried gold all the way from its source. So at some point the old river had moved (hundreds of thousands of yrs ago according to our geologist) and left the area high and dry. Some of the big hollows or as Jed called them kettles could be stacked up with gold. Then over the years the fault was buried again inder more gravel and rock. The old time hydraulic miners had exposed some of this when they worked it but never finished the northern area which was still partially or completely covered. Add to this puzzle that bedrock was thrown all over the place by the quake that caused it. Now you have a treasure hunt. If you get lucky you get rich. At this point of the journal Jed seems to be on to something. 

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38 minutes ago, DOOGY-MD said:

Great pictures!

Good team effort!

What is the fault and county rock types there?

Shale and granite depending on the location. We are finding some promising signs there. Nice chunky gold. Yum yum.

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2 minutes ago, GhostMiner said:

Shale and granite depending on the location. We are finding some promising signs there. Nice chunky gold. Yum yum.

There is also a large amount of quartz - some with crystal in it. 

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  • The title was changed to ** Lost Gold At The Dead Man's Mine ** A Miners Journal **

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