Greetings,
Colorado Mine Hunter wrote:
I would first sample just upstream in the mouth of each of the canyons from Fish Creek down to La Barge/Tortilla to see which one actually has any placer gold.
Well CMH you have a good starting point, as you can pan gold in Fish Creek, small flakes and colors anyway. I hope you will be able to put your plan into action some day.
Cactusjumper wrote:
The LDM is likely just a rich surface deposit. It came into the vertical portion at about 80' and ran for a relatively short distance on the horizontal. Rich as all get out, but no depth. Sounds a lot like the Bully Bueno Mine.
Joe I see that you mentioned that the LDM is "likely" a shallow but rich surface deposit, which is what some folks accused Waltz of having found while he was alive and selling gold; for his own part, Waltz adamantly denied this theory, and made that famous statement about there being "enough gold showing in the mine to make millionaires out of twenty men". According to Milton Rose, he not only found the Lost Dutchman mine, up near Four Peaks incidentally, but mined it out in its' entirety, taking out something like $30,000 in gold and the vein was just a pocket, by his words. So
if we are to believe Mr Rose, he found the LDM and removed
all the gold so there is nothing left for anyone to find.
Small but rich pockets do exist and they are the small-time prospectors' dream, (I knew someone who hit one of these pockets, a rather famous person in our circle now deceased) but other than the expressed opinions of people who had never seen the mine of Jacob Waltz, there is no reason to believe that what he had was a small pocket or surficial deposit. Unless of course we take the words of Milton Rose as gospel, in which case the point is moot and everyone who looks for the LDM has zero chance of finding anything but an empty hole. The trouble is, there are quite a number of empty holes in the Superstitions, none made by Waltz but created by the Dutch-hunters who came after him - and one tunnel ran for over 150 feet without a single piece of timbering, so some of these are pretty danged dangerous without any gold at all. Unfortunately more than one Dutch-hunter has found one of these old workings and concluded that this MUST be the mine of the Dutchman, without finding a single bit of ore to make the claim believable. One could as easily make the claim that almost
any gold mine we are unable to enter to confirm or deny, is and was nothing but a small surficial pocket, it may be comforting to someone who does not care to hunt for the mine but really is unfounded speculation. If it were just a small pocket, why on earth would Waltz have NOT said so much, which would have helped to keep the bushwhackers, trailers and claim-jumpers from bothering with him at all?
I would also take exception to the claim that the old-timer Dutch-hunters used good old prospecting methods to try to find the mine, and can give you a few examples. Sims Ely and Jim Bark were no prospectors, and even confuted an ancient dry-washing placer mining technique (winnowing) with lode mining - many of the early Dutch-hunters were NO prospectors OR miners in any way, just look at Celeste Jones, Julia Thomas, Reiney Petrasch, and many others - these folks had no clue how to locate a mineral deposit and many relied on the "clues" or maps to try to find it. So simply because they were "old timers" certainly does NOT make them expert prospectors or miners. There are exceptions of course, but a good number of the old-timers were very much treasure hunters without a clue how to actually locate gold in the ground.
Thanks for the replies friends, I really do enjoy reading others ideas about how to find this famous mine whether it is a method I would attempt or not. Sometimes a different approach pays off.
Oroblanco