Gold Seeker

Now that's a much better background!

I found a few sources on this subject matter doing a web search, here's a link to one of them. https://www.psi.edu/about/staff/hartmann/coronado/campsite.html

Well that didn't last long, I see the spot price of gold is going back down, below $2000 now!

I doubt you'll find any gold big enough to detect with a detector most of the gold you'll likely find will be fine gold but it's not unheard of finding a picker or small nugget in North Carolina. If there's any gold in that stream it will be down either on bedrock or a clay layer which the heavy gold can't get past as it sinks when the sediment is stirred up, if you have either clay or bedrock in the creek check on top of them and also any cracks in the bedrock will have gold that dropped out of the flow and trapped in the cracks, break open any cracks and or scrape/clean out any material in them with a hammer, chisel and using a straight blade screwdriver, piece of stiff wire, stiff brush, etc. to get as much if not all of the material out and pan it to see if you have any gold, it also possible to find "flood gold" that hasn't had time to sink down yet on/in sandbars especially if there's bigger rocks that also dropped out of the flow in the sandbar. It helps to also classify out the bigger rocks from your gathered material with a classifier before you try panning, you can use a piece of metal window screen for a makeshift classifier do this with lot of water using a catch pan to contain the fine material that goes through the screen. Good luck, I hope you find some gold if you try again, let us know if you do try even if you don't find any gold!

Great find on the ring! Are you in a gold bearing area of North Carolina? If so have you did any prospecting for gold in that creek running through your yard?

In gold bearing streams/creeks and rivers the gold is usually found on the inside bends of the water course, the water slows on the insides bends and goes faster on the outsides bends, that's the reason you see gravel/sand bars mostly on the insides bends, as the water slows anything suspended if heavy enough will drop out of the flow, on the outside bends the water going faster is stronger hence as you mentioned it erodes the bank and that material will get deposited on another inside bend downstream. Also keep in mind that those streams and branches of the stream have most likely moved from where they were during the Civil War and the years after so also look for low laying areas nearby that may have been the stream bed in the past, to help identify an old stream bed also look for rounded rocks and pebbles, also most water courses when they move they tend to move towards the outside bends because of the erosion and the buildup of new land on the insides bends, so what is an inside bend now could of been a outside bend in the past.

We played with mercury as kids as well any time a thermometer got broken. But we used to ride in the bed of the pickup truck....and sitting on the sides going down the interstate highway at 75 MPH, we were lucky none of us ever fell out, I have 4 brothers and 4 sisters and there was almost always 4 or 5 of us back there and usually one or two of our dogs!!

While I would of loved to have been around when there was gold everywhere before most of it was mined out, especially if I could have a modern metal detector, but that would of never happened and also it was a hard life back then no matter what you did for a living..unless you had a lot of money and even then life was still harder than it is today, so I'm happy I'm alive now instead of back then, my life is hard enough now-a-days so I wouldn't wish for a time it would be harder. That all being said if I had a time machine that would take me and a metal detector back in time (and back to the present) to whenever I wanted, now that would be the golden ticket!!!

OK so you disagree, but I still say the quarter lost silver form the surface of the coin, in the video I posted one can clearly see the mercury/silver amalgamation taking place as he dips and rubs the quarter in the mercury, it's as clear as day, also being that the silver content in the quarter out weights the copper content 9:1 there's going to be a loss of silver, granted a very small amount of mercury may have stuck to the quarter but it would be easily removed when he then rubbed the quarter with the cloth. We'll have to just agree to disagree but I think the science is on my side in this subject, especially with the high silver content in the quarter. On another note to help prove the cleaning of the quarter of mercury with a cloth would remove any mercury on the surface is when gold miners used an amalgam plate to recover gold, i.e. a copper plate coated with mercury that the gold slurry runs over to capture fine gold the mercury/gold amalgam was easily removed from the plate for the gold extraction process, they simply scrapped it off the copper plate, so using a cloth would further remove the mercury.

Not sure what you're trying to say...but mercury does dissolve gold and silver as well as many other metals, but you're correct about copper and some other metals because manganese, copper and zinc are resistant in being dissolved/forming an amalgam with mercury. "Mercury dissolves many metals such as gold and silver to form amalgams. Iron is an exception, and iron flasks have traditionally been used to trade mercury. Several other first row transition metals with the exception of manganese, copper and zinc are also resistant in forming amalgams. Other elements that do not readily form amalgams with mercury include platinum." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(element)

I did a little reading on silver and mercury, silver and mercury will form an amalgam, just like it will with gold, the mercury will dissolve the gold until it reaches a saturation point and it's does the same with silver, so when he put mercury on the SL quarter it dissolved a bit of the surface silver which left the quarter shiny. Here's video where the guy does the same with a 1953 silver quarter, you can see the amalgam forming as he rubs it off and eventually he cleans the quarter with a cloth and it looks pretty close to a new quarter albeit with some loss of surface silver. I wouldn't recommend doing this with a silver coin especially if it's a rare date that you may want to get graded because it will lower the grade from the loss of silver and the grading service may very will be able to tell what was done to the coin...or maybe they won't be able to tell but I wouldn't risk it with a rare date. And also as mentioned and as we all know or should know breathing the mercury fumes is not good!!

First I've heard of using mercury to cleanup a silver coin, please post a photo of how it looks now.

25 cent a day in 1930 was federal minimum wage, the average starting wage for a common laborer in 1930 was 43 cents a day, skilled laborers and or professionals would make much more.

That's great and I would get one..BUT I don't live in California and it wouldn't work in my state with California written on it. Maybe another version that is more generic with no state mentioned, maybe a federal/national agency, like "National Lead Abatement Collective"

It's very possible, if there's one there could be more!

Some nice finds you got, good job, love the gold coin...but it's odd that the "51" is so well defined but the "18" is almost worn away!

The tapered bars are "casted" bars poured into a one piece mold, there are also bars that aren't tapered but they are from either 2 piece molds, or gold that has been ran through a press into uniformed thickness and width and then cut into uniform bars.

In 1906 the United States government passed the "National Gold and Silver Stamping Act.", however there isn't a law that actually requires that gold/silver to have a purity/quality mark..but the law does require that any gold/silver that does have a purity/quality mark MUST be fairly accurate and even more accurate since an update in 1981, and any marked gold/silver must also have a "Hallmark/Makers mark" accompanying the purity mark or the purity mark is mute and may not be accurate. Here's a little more info... https://www.stuller.com/articles/view/national-gold-and-silver-marking-act/

I knew how this process works already...but I thoroughly enjoyed the video! There is one bit that is untrue....the reason the gold bars are tapered, he said it was so a man couldn't grip it easily to pick it up.....why would anyone be worried about someone picking it up, it had to be picked up to move it around, the true reason was so that the bar would drop out of the mold easily after the bar was poured and cooled.

Well that explains how the knife got in the field, it's got drunk on it's birthday and passed out in the field!!

Nice half-dime, I think that's a type 3, I think type 2s are "No Drapery"

It was on the Discovery Channel.

You have indeed found an epic place to detect, amazing to find so many gold coins!! If you don't mind saying what country are you finding these coins?

It's a slag ladle, used in steel/metal foundries to haul away the molten slag from steel/metal production, they haul it out of the foundry to dump the slag.

I wonder how big these buckets actually are, 5 gallons or smaller, I don't recall him saying how big they are?