Mike:
Got back from a summer long trip and noticed your interesting posts about Jesuit mining and silver/gold bars attributed to them. I haven't posted on the new TN forum for a couple of years now but felt I had to respond to/add to/comment on what obviously is some great research on your part.
First, I have a silver bar obtained in 1964 from Jack Stone, now deceased, who was the owner of Arizona Assay in downtown Phoenix while I was the assayer at Polaris Laboratories also in Phoenix. I was to go with Jack to cut samples at a manganese mine near Magdalena, Sonora, Mexico, but my son got sick and I couldn't go that weekend. Jack came into our lab the next week and told the story of finding 6 silver crosses and 7 silver bars in an arroyo while eating lunch. He and his 2 workers divided them up and he kept the odd piece to give to me as I had originally offered to go and help.
My bar is 3" X 1 1/4" X 1/8" thick and weighs 58.25 grams. The obverse is a heavily raised 1701 with a definate Templar cross over a "V". Reverse are some church symbols with KINO at the top and S.JUAN at the bottom. It does not appear to be a poured/ cast item but more of a struck piece. I took scrapings across the top edge and gave them to United Nuclear in Buckeye,AZ who at that time had one of only two spectrographs in Arizona, U of AZ having the other. The results came back as: 91% Silver, 1 1/2% Gold, 5% Iron with the balance being Arsenic, Antimony and Manganese. I have no idea if my bar is legitimate or not but I do have a copy of an identical picture of it in an advertisement for Whites 1990 catalog of metal detectors. I may have shown the bar to Springfield when he spent the nite at my place some years ago - I don't remember.
On the Milton Rose matter, when his 3 part story on finding a lost mine came out in Gold Magazine in 1972, I made it a point to locate him as my group was searching in the same area - El Ruido in Sonora. I located him in Salome, AZ working on the Lost Frenchman. Over the next couple of years I made many trips to visit him and exchange notes. He still had a leather suitcase with some silver bars left from the 30's find but they were all rough cast shapes of circles, triangles, squares and rectangles about 1/2 to 1 lb mostly with no markings nothing like the pictures you posted. He had been selling some over the years to finance his research and explorations. He always said he made a mistake selling the impure gold bars to the smelter in Miami,AZ and keeping the silver ones which had almost no value in the 30's.
You talked of pictures? There were no pictures of his find. Maybe you are referring to the pictures and story published in Arizona Highways October 1945 entitled The Mystery of Cerro Ruido by Norman G. Wallace and picked up by Choral Pepper in her book The Mysterious West. But this one is a total Hoax! It seems a bunch of cowboys, Forest Service and a railroad guy were sitting around on the veranda of a Southern Arizona ranch drinking beer and decided to conjure up a lost mine story just for kicks. M ade some pictures of a secret cliff marker (on Ruby Road , AZ) a rainstorm, an old caved mine tunnel and a ruined church facade (actually in southern Mexico one guy had a picture of). They wrote the story and submitted it to Arizona Highways. Fifty years later Arizona Highways published the story that totally debunks this lost mine (Feb. 1998).
But old Milton was not above using a little "literary license" himself. He told me that in his lost mine story he called the church ruins "The Aztec Temple" but it was nothing more than an adobe building almost totally melted. His dynamiting of the tunnel portal with the carved name "Pure Conception" was added because it was his way of making the story appear more exciting, not that it wasn't exciting enough with the fight with the den of snakes and all - which he said really happened.
On your comments about "Ron ---". I have known "Ron" for over 15 years and partnered with him on one of the Tumacacori treasures. His 1985 find was 280 lbs of gold bar. The first 87 lb find was sold to the late Bob Pate, wealthy industrialist/treasure hunter. NO ONE dropped a dime on him to the IRS. His bars when assayed, came in almost always around 90% (.900 fine). They were NOT old NOR Spanish. Our group determined that they were probably some rich Mexican ranchers "piggy bank" buried during the time of one of the Mexican revolutions and that they were most likely coin melt bar (50 peso Mex and US $20 - both .900 fine). Why melt good coin? Why cast them with crosses and V's? I don't have an answer for that. He evidently came back to his hoard to make a withdrawal as 4 of the systematicly plotted location spots were dug up previously before "Ron" interpeted the location system.
Enough rambling,
Take care and keep up the good work.
Sonoita Bob
