Where’s the Gold? from the Jan/Feb 2024 issue of Gold Prospectors Magazine

By: Kevin Hoagland

Let’s start the new year with what a bit of research can lead you. The clue is in the history, and I have no idea why the original miners walked away.

This area is one that I have been interested in for quite some time, so I decided to take my research

to the field and see if I could first, find the location and the X marks the spot from 1800s

Kevin Hoagland » documentation and second, confirm that the area was open for mineral entry. There are a number of

mining patents with some gaps.

In a commonly known book that had a great deal of information, there was a section that states “Two prospectors using a rocker box were recovering $4.00 a day.” Although that may seem dismal, that $4 a day was when gold was $16 per ounce. Today that is around $500. Further research showed that the wash was continuously worked, the gold was coarse, and then nothing for years until a hardrock mine was located and in production for a number of years. In fact, this photo was taken from the ore dump in front of the adit to the mine.

Where’s the Gold Answers

A: Yep, that’s it. And it makes no sense to me why anyone would leave gold. Nothing here adds up. Miners working the wash and recovering coarse gold is all I would need to go looking for the source.

Information is almost nonexistent for the gap in years between the original writings and the time that the hard rock was opened. Maybe the first miners of the gold passed away, left the area for what they hoped to be more gold or maybe they just could not find their way back to this spot. It is all up in the air and, frankly, it doesn’t matter why, just that they left.

As far as the access to the area, it is under patent and is on its third family ownership in the last 100+ years, so it is a non-starter. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t more just like this area that are on open lands. I’ve talked for years about prospecting the peripherals. You could end up opening a generational gold mine yourself by going just 100 feet farther than the last prospector.