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Mark Twains Lost Gold Mine
To briefly explain it, it is said that three young German brothers that were fleeing from an attack from Indians, came to a mountain gorge somewhere in the neighborhood of Mono Lake, on the east side flank of the Sierra Nevada. They were staggering, disoriented and starving, through the gorge and completely collapsed on a ledge in order to rest. One of the men noticed that the ledge looked like a vein of cement showed big lumps of dull yellow metal. They noticed it was gold and discovered they had run into a fortune.
Each one of the three brothers loaded himself with around twenty five pounds each of their newly found fortune and started their way towards the west again. However, they ran into trouble along the way. One of the brothers fell down and broke his leg and the other two were forced to leave him and continue on their way. A second one of the brothers who was completely tired and worn out could not continue on and fell on the trail to die. However, the third was able to reach the gold settlements of California but his was completely exhausted, sick and out of his mind. He had thrown out most of his cement except for a few fragments, however these little fragments alone were enough to cause a frenzy of exhilaration.
The brother that did make it had his load of gold and he decided to settle down to work on a farm for wages. However, he gave his map to a man whose name was Whiteman, and as Mark Twain said himself “… described the cement region as well as he could and thus transferred the curse to that gentleman--for when I had my one accidental glimpse of Mr. W. in Esmeralda he had been hunting for the lost mine, in hunger and thirst, poverty and sickness, for twelve or thirteen years. Some people believed he had found it, but most people believed he had not. I saw a piece of cement as large as my fist which was said to have been given to Whiteman by the young German, and it was of a seductive nature. Lumps of virgin gold were as thick in it as raisins in a slice of fruit cake. The privilege of working such a mine one week would be sufficient for a man of reasonable desires.”
There was also another anecdote about mines from the pages of the Mohave Daily Miner of August 1986. There was a man that had been claiming to have found the Lost Dutchman Mine that has been sentenced to refund nearly half a million dollars to his backers. This man, who is Robert S. Jacob of Chandler, Arizona, had been claiming that since 1965 he found the mine; throughout the years he was able to convince people of investing in millions of dollars in a venture to take the gold out of the Superstition Mountains. He was then charged for fraud in December of 1985 and pleaded guilty.
The prosecuting attorney, who was the Assistant Attorney General Barnett Lofstein said that the guilty plea was not an indicator that the mine did not exist. He stated, “We do not know whether it existed or not, just that Mr. Jacob didn’t find it”.
What? Ok well, it is not easy to find a lost mine and it is not all that easy to just arrive to your home with a ton of gold in a bag. But we can certainly get more pleasure out of this hobby then people used to in the past. Most weekend gold miners take up this hobby as a sport and do it in order to get out in the fresh air, get exercise, enjoy the blue skies, and most of them absolutely love the feeling of sore muscles after a hard day of work.
No matter what your reasons for prospecting are, if you go for the right reasons, you’ll definitely get something out of it. Most important thing of all, enjoy and good luck to you.
