sdcfia
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- Sep 28, 2014
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Another thought has occurred to me about Carson's vein, and that is he might have cleaned it out already. The last trip he made into Silverton he wasn't carrying much, and its hard to believe a guy would walk away from a rich surface outcropping after putting out the effort to get up that high on foot without getting as much as you could. Its also possible he had to leave some ore behind he had already broken out of the vein, if he wasn't feeling well enough to make enough trips up and down the watershed to retrieve it all. That may explain why people later found float down Twilight Creek, because it got washed down from a pile of ore he left behind.
I finally dug out my copy of Treasures of the San Juans and reread the Carson story. My memory of my friend Buddy's version of the story (Ouray 1974) is quite sketchy at best - I don't even remember him identifying "Carson" by name, but he did talk about the assay and the Needles. I do remember that he had looked himself for this outcropping as a younger man and firmly believed it was still waiting to be rediscovered. This could merely reflect the optimism of a seeker, but Buddy was very savvy, and if his own high-grade mine that he was still working at the time I met him is any indication, knew what he was talking about.
A couple observations from the book regarding the diggings being worked out. The final summer Carson worked the outcropping was very short due to his health problems, as you indicated. Even so, he still managed to bring a smaller amount of very-rich ore into Silverton, and shortly thereafter reportedly died of a heart attack. If true, this does not indicate that the outcropping was worked out, but does suggest Carson could have returned to the diggings again but simply died beforehand. Also, Juan Quintana, the sheepherder who claimed to have found, collapsed and dispersed Carson's pole shelter near the diggings, also claimed that he carried out a major effort to hide the outcropping at the same time. This doesn't mean that the outcropping might not have been found later by somebody else, but if Quintana's story is true, does suggest that it was still viable at the time Carson died.