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Metal Detecting For Native Silver


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Silver Dog Doug, the founder of that chunk is and old Family friend.  He brought it over to my house to show and it's and anchor of a double arm full of Wowness!  He was detecting the middle of a wash when he heard this hub cap target!  It's a great find to a dedicated detectorist like him.

LuckyLundy

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Virginia City is synonymous with silver.  Chris, was there any native silver found in those mines?  I think I've read that before the silver discoveries there, prospectors were looking for gold and as they worked up the wash towards Virginia City they encountered that "pesky blue stuff" in their sluices.  That material wasn't native silver, but a very pure form of the ore.

Anyway I saw a vial of blue crystals in a Museum in Virginia City and have always wanted a small vial of that "pesky" stuff.

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The main silver mineral at Virginia City was Argentite, now called acanthite (blame mineral scientists for changing the name). The mineral is silver sulfide and is 87% silver by weight. It is really more black than blue, but can be kind of a gray / blue color. If you work hard, sometimes earthy acanthite specimens can be found on some of the mine dumps at Virginia City.

See: http://nevada-outback-gems.com/mineral_information/Acanthite_mineral_info.htm

The attached photo shows a specimen picked up in the Virginia City area off a mine dump. You can see the silver wires and flakes in the photo, it is most likely high silver electrum. The dark stuff around the silver is acanthite.

Most Nevada mines that contain native silver produced it only in small pieces - little flakes and wires kind of like the photo below. Not much of that stuff would make a decent specimen. Probably much of the Nevada native silver would not be visible to a metal detector.

Some other native silver can be seen at:
http://nevada-outback-gems.com/mineral_information/silver_mineral_info.htm

comstock01.jpg

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Thanks for that Chris.  We don't have much silver here in Eastern Oregon that I know of except for a deposit at the ghost town of Mineral, Idaho, just across the Snake River from us.  It's a ghost town now, inhabited only by rattlesnakes (and lots of them).

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I've wanted to hunt the gold placers in the Sierritas where the silver dog came from. Besides the club claims out there the best I could figure was they were right smack in the middle of a trailer park now and the others are on State Land :sad:

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Weren't there silver mines in the Patagonia area of southern Arizona worked by the Spanish/Mexican miners?

I read of huge black sheets of silver inches thick and many feet long being found down there way back when.

And another spot east of the Supers. Chris can PM me on that one. Supposedly you could pick native silver nuggets off the ground .

 

-Tom

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The "Planchas de Plata" were found south of Patagonia just south of the border on a ranch called "Arizonac" which led to the region being called Arizona and eventually the U.S. state. 

They were huge slabs or "planks" of silver and large balls. 

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