Could be but I doubt it; that would have meant that Waltz's ore should have tested high for silver content, much higher than it did, which was only some 2 oz/ton vs over 5200 oz/gold. What I really think the Pit mine is,
is the lost Peralta mine. Aka Ludy and Jacobs mine, Ludy brothers etc. LOVE that photo amigo, it is (almost) enough to tempt me to go visit the infamous Pit mine myself. However our time for this trip is pretty well already spoken for (can not spend the winter) so will not have the opportunity this fall.
Hooch wrote
So now you are calling me a liar? Hmm.
You like math do you Hooch? You think that a SMALL mine,
could not have produced some 800 pounds of gold huh? Well how about this amigo:
Dick Holmes had an assay done on the ore from beneath Waltz's deathbed. It returned @ some
$110,000 in gold per ton, and two ounces of silver. That is, divide $110,000 by the then-current price of gold, $20.67 per ounce, or in other words each ton of Waltz's ore (the type found beneath his bed) had a gold content of 5321.722302854378 ounces. Lets round that down to 5300 for the moment.
Now how much gold does it take, to make say, 800 pounds? As you know gold is measured in Troy weight, and there are 12 Troy ounces per Troy pound, so 800 x 12 =
9600 ounces of gold.
Remember that assay figure now? Rounding DOWN we have 5300 ounces per ton of rock. Now divide that 9600 by 5300, and you will know about how many tons of the rich gold ore that Waltz would have had to mine out, in order to have gotten 800 pounds worth of gold or a quarter million. Do you have a high number of tons of ore for your result, or is it more like
less than TWO TONS of rock?
How much space does TWO TONS of rock take up, when it is a solid mass? (
Put your hands down Don Jose, Cactusjumper and Springfield and you other greybeard prospectors!) I will give you a hint -
it is less than two cubic yards.
Even allowing for waste rock removal, some lower grade ore (surely it could not be ALL bonanza grade) and you still end up with a relatively small amount of rock that got mined out, which matches fairly well with the (alternate) version of the LDM as a mine shaft with a hole no larger than a barrel, and not more than a dozen feet deep. No need for a huge funnel shaped pit, cross tunnel etc for the amount of gold he should have gotten then would be
HUGE as well, not just a quarter million but many millions.
I don't know where you got the idea that Waltz was living in a "shack" he had a modest
adobe home, and was apparently quite comfortable right up until the great flood of 1891 (spring) which flooded him out and he also apparently became sick due to it, eventually dying of pneumonia as he was not a young man.
Not everyone would go mine out
ALL the gold he could get, many people would only mine as much as would make one comfortable, as it appears Waltz did. We could also take into consideration that up until 1886, there were hostile Apaches roaming the Superstitions whom did not hesitate to kill any whites or Pimas or Mexicans they could, and by the time they were finally rounded up, Waltz was then an old man, at 76 years of age when Geronimo surrendered. He may not have been physically able to go back and mine the gold in a big way. Would you go ALONE trekking into the Superstitions, if there was a good chance that a war party of Apaches was in there waiting for new victims?
You are certainly welcome to your own opinion(s) Hooch, just thought
perhaps you had not done the math to see that the LDM really could be, and logically is, a
relatively small affair. Waltz and his partner apparently only worked with
hand tools, possibly not even black powder, so you know it takes a LOT of work to bust up rocks with hammer, drill, pick and bar, I would not expect that a hard rock mine made by hand tools alone would be a very large affair. But the richness of the LDM ore also points to a smaller size mine, no huge pit requiring ladders etc for this would have produced much, much more gold and there is no evidence that Waltz ever got more than a bit over that quarter million (plus the several thousand used to help his friends, etc).
To tie this in to the topic, what if the Apache Trail
IS the Military Trail that Waltz referred to? It was the route you would take to get to Fort McDowell, which was in existence in his day, and no doubt
Army pack trains traveled it, on the route between Ft McDowell and Ft Reno in the Mazatzals. I would point out that when Waltz said the "military trail" he was saying something that
must have been common knowledge among the people listening (one version has it that he said this in a saloon packed with people trying to get clues from him) so it is not likely that the "old military trail" was one rarely used or hardly known to most people. Logically it would be a military trail used enough and long enough, that it was known to many folks as "the" old military trail.
What this could mean is that
the mine could actually be in sight of the modern road today known as the Apache Trail! (And by extension, very likely would mean the mine is
outside of the Wilderness Area, and thus not subject to the severe restrictions!)
Good luck and good hunting Hooch, Cactusjumper and everyone reading this, I hope you find the treasures that you seek.
Oroblanco
