Speculation
Let's assume the old bird had a couple hundred pounds of highgrade gold ore - let's say it was 25% gold by weight if that holy matchbox is any indication. That's 50 pounds of gold - 700 ounces@20$/oz=$14,000. That's equivalent to $840,000 today - cash money, no taxes. Let's say it was only half of that - still pushing a half million in cash for a low profile recluse chicken farmer. I'm guessing he could easily live on selling eggs and nicking his stash now and then for 20 or 30 years. I know I could, even in today's inflated world. Two hundred pounds of highgrade is no problem to deal with. Ask some of the retired miners up in Montrose, CO.
Sure, Waltz may have gone hiking in the AZ hills now and then for something to do to keep active. Did he prospect the hills? Yeah, considering that's what his life had been for all those previous years, he probably did break rocks out of habit. What else is there to do out there? Did he discover a secret mine - the richest in the world, where no miner would ever go - and ship $254,000 worth of ore to CA, 13,000 gold ounces, worth $15,000,000 dollars today? Sorry, I need more than "what ifs" to swallow that whopper.
You are proposing a scenario that is wholly fictional - then compare it to the stories of Waltz. Remember
the Apaches were still very much active right up into 1886 - how many men in their sixties (and older) do you think would go off ALONE into the mountains, knowing that there was a fairly good chance he might run into Geronimo or Nana with forty braves all too willing to kill and lift your scalp? I can't buy it that Waltz would have gone into the hills in that time period ALONE, unless he had a really
good reason. Like to go dig out some more gold to support his lifestyle.
People have tried to assign Waltz only one or two or a few trips into the mountains, so then to say that huge figure ($250,000 or $254,000, depending on Higham or Terry) as if he must have hauled that out in just a few loads. He had from 1868 to 1890 to have done that, 23 years time. According to more than one source, he was a regular at a saloon, and that takes money to keep buying booze even if only your own. He may have even been gambling too, and money can evaporate really fast that way. Gambling was one of the most popular pastimes of the period too, so it is not a long stretch to see that as a possibility. If that huge quarter million is divided by twenty years, it is not so huge - $12,700 worth a year. That equates to 614 oz per year (roughly) and now recall that incident reported by Mitchell, that he sold two burro loads for $500. You get about 25 which would be a trip every two weeks or so. Still sound like it is so big to "swallow"? As Hal pointed out, this nice income would certainly allow Waltz to live just by selling a couple dozen eggs per week, which should not have even provided enough income to support food at the prices he would have to pay. There is no reason to assume that "huge" figure of money, a quarter million, was obtained in one or two shipments.
If the ore ran like the only assay we known of, then it amounted to roughly two and a half tons. How many burro loads does it take to amount to that? About 25. You could not do that with two burros in less than a DOZEN trips. This point means that $250,000 was almost certainly not obtained in one or two or three trips.
It had to be at least a dozen trips, and who knows, may have been triple that or more. We don't know how much was brought out each time.
To further reduce that value, the shipping costs would have been high! This is one of the arguments used to support the contention that no miner would ship ore, but they were shipping ore - however only rich ores because of the shipping costs. I do not have the prices at hand but you should be able to find them fairly easily, and if memory serves it was very high, on the order of a dollar a pound. So shipping fifty pounds of ore would cost fifty dollars, and at the $110,000 per ton (not an arbitrary figure, this is from the actual assay so we don't have to guess) he would have to pay $50 for the shipping, and only receive $2700. For two and a half tons, this means something like $5000 in shipping costs. There may well have been other fees too, for smelting/refining, so that quarter million dollars could have been reduced by ten percent or more. We do not know whether that figure was a NET price or gross before costs and deductions.
The Peralta land grant might well have been a big reason to not file a claim that might get seized, and I would say that another factor was that Waltz was the only prospector active in the area. In the Bradshaws and many other mining districts, there were plenty of other miners around, and most would not only respect your claims but even helped to defend against Indian attacks robbers etc. The situation was very different in the Superstitions than in areas where many other prospectors were working. Plus there were a goodly number of people in the Phoenix area whom were active rustlers, robbers and even murderers, with very ineffective police work for most of the time Waltz was living there. He was trailed by several people - what would YOU do, if you had found a good mine, and then had people trying to trail you to it on more than one occasion? File a claim where no other mining claims had EVER been filed before, so that you must name the location (close) and make it easy for these thieving skulkers to sneak in and steal from your mine, since it is miles away into a wilderness and you can't very well stand guard over your mine? Even if you moved to live at the mine, sooner or later you would have to go to town for supplies, and they would have their opportunity.
Anyway had Waltz simply brought some gold from the Bradshaws, it makes NO sense for him to then tell his closest friends that his mine is in the Superstitions. Why wouldn't he simply tell them it was in the Bradshaws? These people had taken him in, in his old age, when his home was practically ruined by the flood, he was sickly and had no "visible' wealth. He was even a foreigner by birth, and there were plenty of people with deep prejudices against foreigners in that day. To propose that he lied to them, to "keep them interested" after they had shown him such kindness and were not related to him by blood or marriage, simply won't float for me.
Oroblanco
Tea or coffee anyone?
We will get at your story one way or the other amigo, the truth slips out here and there like that one.
