Did Waltz really have a rich mine?

[Azquester]

Back then it took a lot of gold for the money so if Waltz had large amounts it was very large amounts not small at all. That mine should've been found long ago if it was that rich it would be awful hard to conceal. Large amounts of Gold. I could see why he would try and conceal it. It must've been fairly easy to get to and had so much showing anyone would pick it off and take it.

I think he got his stories mixed in the end and I don't think there's a pit above it. I think it was an outcrop of quartz with a small inclined shaft and I think it's not that far into the range so he did an excellent job of concealment. Old methods of Prospecting used back then would be the key. Exploratory shafts and trenches were common. Winnowing was used with the large rocks tossed up on the banks of the washes. Find these area's close to the main range and you may just find his mine.


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[azdave35]

Cheers azdave35.

hal...i'd be willing to bet you could probably find an app for your phone that would sort the contrast between the colors (gold and white) and give you a percentage of the gold to white..they have an app for everything else....lol

 

[azdave35]

Another sweeping statement. Can you prove that assertion?

Cactusjumper also wrote


Ores were generally shipped to smelters. Smelters refined the product which was then sold to the US Mint. There were smelters operating in Sacramento in Waltz's time period. Just cruise through the AZ newspapers available online at either the library of congress site or the AZ state archive site, there are quite a few ads for it. As for whether Wells Fargo was shipping through sub-contractors, that would still count as being shipped by Wells Fargo and the receipts certainly would be. We have even posted photos of a shipment of silver bars in the Tucson Wells Fargo office on this forum some time ago. It would be a waste of my time to re-post again. And how far away WOULD a miner in Arizona ship his ore in the late 1860s, 1870s or 1880s? Would you believe that some sent it to Philadelphia, PA, El Paso, Texas, one even to Germany? The freight would have been enormous, but it was done.

Hal - I agree with AZ Dave, you can do a visual 'assay' or guess-timate, and going out on a limb here I would guess the famous matchbox to be 20% gold. I suppose that a kind of visual assay could be done using a high density photograph and counting how many 'dots' of the image were gold, to get a surface percentage too.

roy...only rebellious ores were shipped to a smelter...both then and now..rebellious ore being sulfides..telurides ..chlorides ..etc...free milling ores like ldm ore were just ran through a mill and recovered by gravity..there were plenty of local mills in the phoenix area back then

 

[audigger53]

Back then it took a lot of gold for the money so if Waltz had large amounts it was very large amounts not small at all. That mine should've been found long ago if it was that rich it would be awful hard to conceal. Large amounts of Gold. I could see why he would try and conceal it. It must've been fairly easy to get to and had so much showing anyone would pick it off and take it.

I think he got his stories mixed in the end and I don't think there's a pit above it. I think it was an outcrop of quartz with a small inclined shaft and I think it's not that far into the range so he did an excellent job of concealment. Old methods of Prospecting used back then would be the key. Exploratory shafts and trenches were common. Winnowing was used with the large rocks tossed up on the banks of the washes. Find these area's close to the main range and you may just find his mine.


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The blankets used were made from wool. The course fibers will grab the rough edges of the gold and hold it.
BTW about the Golden Fleece. Even now in Turkey they will take a fresh fleece and stake it down in a stream during the winter. When the spring runoffs occur they wait until after all the rains have passed and go get the fleece. The Wool and Lanolin of the fleece traps the gold dust. They then burn the fleece and pan the ashes.

 

[Oroblanco]

roy...only rebellious ores were shipped to a smelter...both then and now..rebellious ore being sulfides..telurides ..chlorides ..etc...free milling ores like ldm ore were just ran through a mill and recovered by gravity..there were plenty of local mills in the phoenix area back then

I should have written "ores that WERE shipped" as free milling ores could be processed by the miner himself. Even so, that does not produce pure gold, it still needs to be refined and this is why that was mentioned in the newspaper clipping about the ores being reduced as much as possible BEFORE shipping, to reduce the waste rock. Not ALL ores were shipping out of Arizona, obviously, there were some smelters operating within the state at least by the 1870s and probably earlier, certainly there is evidence of silver smelting in southern Arizona much earlier than that.

To all:
The process there seen in the picture posted by Bill Riley is showing the ancient method of separating gold DRY, not using water, simply by putting the gold bearing dirt/gravel or crushed ore onto the middle of a blanket, then with two people standing in a stiff wind or strong breeze, lightly tossing the dirt up and catching it again on the blanket. The lighter dirt would blow off the blanket, leaving mostly gold and some heavies like black sand, and was known as "winnowing". Generally it only works well with larger gold particles, if the gold is fine (tiny) it will not separate well. Another method that is similar but uses two gold pans, and can be done by one person is known as 'dry panning' and you simply pour your dirt (with gold in it) from one pan into the other while standing in a good wind; the effect is the same although the amount of dirt you can process is quite small so the process is slow, and again with tiny gold particles is not too efficient at capturing it.

 

[Real of Tayopa]

Hi ORO, CORRECT AS USUAL. The procees was developd from winowing wheat or Rice. ---- genuine sock coffee.

 

[Azquester]

I think the process came about when the Cowboys rolled up their bed rolls while on the trail. Each time they would throw the dirt of the blankets they saw small amounts of gold in the weave. That's how they came up with it. Of course that picture I posted would be the two cowboys returning from Broke Back Mountain so they were probably just tidying up the camp for another "I can't quit you" encounter.

It gives Sock Coffee a hole new meaning...

 

[azdave35]

I should have written "ores that WERE shipped" as free milling ores could be processed by the miner himself. Even so, that does not produce pure gold, it still needs to be refined and this is why that was mentioned in the newspaper clipping about the ores being reduced as much as possible BEFORE shipping, to reduce the waste rock. Not ALL ores were shipping out of Arizona, obviously, there were some smelters operating within the state at least by the 1870s and probably earlier, certainly there is evidence of silver smelting in southern Arizona much earlier than that.

To all:
The process there seen in the picture posted by Bill Riley is showing the ancient method of separating gold DRY, not using water, simply by putting the gold bearing dirt/gravel or crushed ore onto the middle of a blanket, then with two people standing in a stiff wind or strong breeze, lightly tossing the dirt up and catching it again on the blanket. The lighter dirt would blow off the blanket, leaving mostly gold and some heavies like black sand, and was known as "winnowing". Generally it only works well with larger gold particles, if the gold is fine (tiny) it will not separate well. Another method that is similar but uses two gold pans, and can be done by one person is known as 'dry panning' and you simply pour your dirt (with gold in it) from one pan into the other while standing in a good wind; the effect is the same although the amount of dirt you can process is quite small so the process is slow, and again with tiny gold particles is not too efficient at capturing it.

actually with ore that has that much gold in it they wouldn't have bothered with the expense of running it through a mill...they would have taken a hammer to it...most of the gold would be liberated and it would be in a form you could have sold anywhere..no need for refining

 

[audigger53]

To all:
The process there seen in the picture posted by Bill Riley is showing the ancient method of separating gold DRY, not using water, simply by putting the gold bearing dirt/gravel or crushed ore onto the middle of a blanket, then with two people standing in a stiff wind or strong breeze, lightly tossing the dirt up and catching it again on the blanket. The lighter dirt would blow off the blanket, leaving mostly gold and some heavies like black sand, and was known as "winnowing". Generally it only works well with larger gold particles, if the gold is fine (tiny) it will not separate well. Another method that is similar but uses two gold pans, and can be done by one person is known as 'dry panning' and you simply pour your dirt (with gold in it) from one pan into the other while standing in a good wind; the effect is the same although the amount of dirt you can process is quite small so the process is slow, and again with tiny gold particles is not too efficient at capturing it.

[/QUOTE]
If the dirt is wet/damp the gold dust will be in the blanket. Just like the wool cloth as the last step on a wet rocker. The wool will grab the dust and you then burn the blanket and pan the ashes. The problem with panning the dust is why they use to "coat" the metal pans with Mercury to grab the dust. Later they would scrap it off and take a Potato , cut it in half, core the top and bottom, and then put the amalgam into the bottom half and squeeze the 2 halves together and put it in the campfire. standing it straight up. The heat would evaporate the Mercury into the top half and the gold dust would now be in a solid form. They would take the top half flip it over and put it in cold water to recover about 1/2 of the mercury.
The other way was to take the Amalgam and put it into a wet leather pouch and then squeeze it so the Mercury would come out the sides of the leather pouch. Very few places will accept gold in that form now days.