As usual, a lot of stuff to respond to since I was last here...
Tramp wrote: In my opinion and evaluation he is a sedately married man happily doing a job that he enjoys. but. like me, has never had a bribe offered to him, so, so much for an early retirement.
Sedately married? What’s that? I have been married to the same woman (2nd wife) for 28 years and we haven’t killed each other yet; does that count? I have been offered a bribe, though – once, by a colleague at the Bureau of Reclamation, to speed up review of a report: it was a six-pack of Dr Pepper and I never got it (of course, I didn’t give her any preference, either, so maybe I would have if I had done what she wanted). As for the “happily doing a job that he enjoys” bit…. Ten years ago I planned to die in place here, it was the greatest job in the world; five years ago I figured that I’d retire, but not until after I’d put my son through college. Today, I can tell you off the top of my head that I’ll be qualified to retire in exactly 148 days. I still love the Forest, I love the work (when I actually get to do any of it), and I love the Forest Service and what it stands for – the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run, as Gifford Pinchot liked to say. However, the Forest Service I signed on with is rapidly dying under this administration (we started going down under Carter, so I hate both parties equally), crushed by politicized leadership, overbearing and contradictory regulation, unfunded mandates, a bureaucracy that only a Russian could love, and a constant draining away of personnel, funding, and experience. It’s being replaced by one that depends on computer databases rather than fieldwork and hires children born and raised in cities to run those computers and who don’t go to the field to gather data and don’t look at it as a career, but just another two year job. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the Forest Service is the worst possible Federal agency, but it’s a whole lot better than all the rest. I still don’t know if I’ll retire this year – this is MY Forest after all, I grew up here, my Grandfather worked at Roosevelt Dam in the 1920s, my mother was born in Globe, raised in Phoenix (as was I), and still lives inside the Forest at Payson (where I can’t afford to retire now, thank you very much Clint Eastwood and Charles Barkley) and I still have so many things to do – but it’s getting real tempting.
Oro wrote: Ask any geologist or assayer, gold ores are highly individual in character with no two sources exactly alike - there were accusations that Waltz's ore was from the Vulture mine (which he never worked at) or from the Bulldog mine, others have pointed to the Mammoth mine or the Black Queen (near Goldfield) but the ores from these sources differs from Waltz's ore.
That’s exactly my point, actually, one of two: first of all, not only are no two ore bodies exactly alike, but no single ore body is exactly the same from one end to the other; the second is that there are, what?, 8 or so developed mines in the Goldfield area. Are there accurate descriptions of all of their ores sufficient to compare to the alleged Walz sample? With all the potential variability involved, how can we rule out the possibility of a Goldfield origin? Even more to the point, what is the provenance of the matchbox gold so often cited and shown as the Dutchman’s gold? Is there a documented chain of possession? Given Holmes’ minimal acquaintance with veracity, can we put much or any faith in the assertion that the matchbox gold is authentic – especially given the proximity of Holmes old (squatted) homestead to several other gold mines he could have stolen from - I just threw that one out for argument – I really don’t know what the ore from, say, the Red Rover looks like (maybe MesaBuddy does, since he likes the northern interpretation).
Oro wrote: I have to disagree about the discovery rate for new mineral deposits being made by the individual prospectors…
Actually, I think I was talking about exploration rather than discovery, per se, and wasn’t thinking about things like diamonds. Anyway, I’ve seen a lot of big company exploration over the years well outside any previously claimed areas with no visible surface mineralization. An example: a decade or so ago Kennecott drilled a boatload of holes west of Superior through a thousand feet of valley fill and volcanic ash looking for copper; the only prior claims in the area were for perlite. I will concede that exploration and discovery take place at all levels, but I still hold that major discoveries leading to profitable developments very rarely come from small prospectors nowadays – at least in areas as heavily worked over as central Arizona.
Oro wrote: why should we assume that the Dutchman's mine was located in the Superstitions (etc.)?
Roy, my friend, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell people for years! A thousand people have looked throughout the Superstitions for a hundred years and found nothing and yet right next door there was gold all over the place! If I was looking, I’d be prowling around Goldfield, not inside the volcanic caldera – especially since, at the time, before “Goldfield” became a place name, that whole area was often included in references to “the Superstitions.” I wouldn’t look so much to the North or NE of it, though, as you quickly get back into the volcanics after Government Well. Which means that the LDM was most likely “found” back in the 1890s when Goldfield was crawling with miners. As for the “North of Phoenix” school, that’s a possibility as well (Cave Creek, Rackensack, Red Rover, etc), but that’s all country that Dick Holmes would have known, which is, of course, as good a reason as any to tell him to look in the Supers….
Blazer wrote: If he cannot reply to my post personally because of his unique position, I think he would have said so. I would sooner believe his taking the time necessary to form detailed response.
I could – short of violating the Hatch Act, my “unique position” doesn’t restrain me all that much, I just don’t have that much more to tell you. You don’t like the Superstition Wilderness because you say we haven’t done the right thing regarding the boundaries. It so happens that I don’t like the Sierra Ancha wilderness because it includes roads and uranium mines from the 1950s and the rules about technology use in wilderness are preventing me from any sort of cost effective stabilization treatment for my deteriorating and wildly popular cliff dwellings. I wish that I had the time to research all the ins and outs of the laws and regulations concerning wilderness, but I don’t. I can barely keep up with the laws and regs concerning archaeology and historic sites. All that I can tell you is that if there are problems such as you have identified, they came about not as the result of any sinister agenda, but simply because we didn’t have the time or money to do everything asked of us by Congress. I know y’all think that’s a lame excuse, but it’s the only one I have. You know, when I first started with the FS 30 years ago, the book Prinicipal Laws Governing the Regulation and Management of the National Forests (approximate title – sorry, but I don’t keep one at home, which is where I am right now) was less than half an inch thick. Today it is nearly six times that big. It’s sensory overload. Like I said, I can barely keep up with my own stuff, much less be able to cite chapter and verse of someone else’s’ function. I’ve given you about all I’ve got on the subject – it’s time for you to talk to the Wilderness guys.
Mrs. Oro wrote: The "moratorium" law was that NO PUBLIC MONEY WOULD BE SPENT on new patenting.
Beth, you are right on the money (sorry about the pun – and the “breather” joke – I forget that my sense of the absurd comes from an entirely different life history than most of y’all). That was the reason; we call it “moratorium” just for need of a convenient expression – and it isn’t the FS that handles patents, it’s BLM. We don’t even have total control over our own administered lands – patents, exchanges, any transfers of ownership still go through BLM. For us, it was a bit of a “breather” though, since processing patents so often depended on a mineral exam and you could count the number of examiners available to us within the FS and BLM on one hand – the work piled up faster than lawyers could file motions. The part that I don’t understand is how the “moratorium” came to include work being paid for by the applicants. We do that all the time with land exchanges – since we don’t have enough people to do the studies ourselves, we happily accept work paid for by the proponents. I could probably find out or at least get an opinion from our geologist, but I can’t guarantee that it would be very satisfying.
About “the Stones” Blazer wrote: Scott has a lot of resources and contacts available to him. I am sure he will consult all of them before he challenges any of Jim's comments.
He’s right, I do and I have but nobody seems to pay any attention. Quite frankly, the last thing in the world that I care to do is go point for point with Hatt over the stones. Not because I would lose the debate, but because it would be time-consuming and pointless. I’ve read Jim’s stuff. His belief in their authenticity is just that – belief, faith, if you will – and like so many others, he is convinced that those things are real, are important, and “mean something.” Arguing with True Believers is counterproductive and frustrating. There is no scientific, historic, or logical reason to believe that the stones are anything but a hoax just like all the runestones and Viking stone maps that have fed a cottage industry in Wisconsin for generations. Even if they were “real” and were somehow historic, as has been frequently recognized by many other than myself, there is absolutely nothing on them that is related to any recognizable landscape, no scale, no direction, etc; no reference point that would allow anyone to use them as a map. As Oro points out, hundreds of people have tried and none have found a damned thing. But none of this makes a bit of difference to the True Believers, who simply choose to believe what they want to believe; any evidence or analysis to the contrary is deemed either incompetent and incorrect or conspiratorial. As Blazer said, supposedly quoting Gollum (and I’m paraphrasing both of them here), “What you believe … carries more weight than any expert's opinion.” So what’s the point of debate or analysis?
As far as I’m concerned, the burden of proof is not on the people explaining why they are fake, it’s on the people who claim that they are not. As for who faked them, if I cared, I might follow up on Glover’s evidence regarding Johnny Steel – nobody ever talks about him. The one guy I’m pretty sure had nothing to do with them (sorry Jose) is “Baron” Reavis; if they had been part of his scheme, they would have had clear references to the Peralta family, dates, land grant boundaries, etc. Also, he was familiar enough with the system to know that archived documents were the way to go, not a bunch of rocks covered with “code,” cartoons, and squiggly lines.
Bottom line on the stones – they make no logical (or logistical) sense and every bit of objective evidence and analysis says that they are fake. Unfortunately, there will be people who will never accept that and will believe in their authenticity no matter what. There’s folk that be taken by belief and religiosity and for them what matters in the ‘verse is only what world they conjure from their own desires and then there’s folk be taken by science and logicality and for them the only real world is that they can touch and measure and where one thing follows another according to rules. Ain’t many bridges twixt those two worlds and not much point tryin’ to build one, especially where the lure of treasure’s involved.
Cheers – and welcome back Mike!
Scott
PS to OldBillinUT I wish I could repay the generosity of your donation to the outfit with some help with your question, but old tree markings are tough and there’s no specific technology or technique out there that I'm aware of to make reading them or reconstructing them any easier. If you could send me a photo or two, I might be able to help if I had a context for it - kind of tree, terrain, proximity to roads or trails, proximity to past logging, mining, sheep ranching, etc, but I can't guarantee anything, of course. Have you tried contacting the Forest Archaeologist where it's located? He or she may have some sense of it or maybe some archival info that could help. Anyway, on behalf of all of us in the FS, Thanks.
