Over the years, I’ve proved to myself over and over again that I don’t have to wait many weeks after rains before I head out to the goldfields to do some gold digging.

The pit was a classic one—exposed shale bedrock with all the material being washed out one end of the pit. Within a few minutes I had a nice mellow signal that was in open ground.

Adam’s condition had been deteriorating every step of the way. At times, I could only coax him ten or twenty feet before he laid down again. He refused to eat or drink. At this point, I realized we might not get out of the canyon by dark and might need help getting Adam out at all.

It took me awhile before I finally got a nice mellow signal. My nugget turned out to weigh in about two dwt (pennyweight). Over the next few hours, we all picked up a few more nuggets apiece.

The father-son duo spent years combing this bit of Pennsylvania wilderness with high-end metal detectors, drills and other tools to prospect for a fabled cache of Civil War gold.

The first experience involved an overgrown gold mine operated during the 1880s. A razed mill adjoined the mine and could be glimpsed from the isolated public dirt road I was traveling.

Many of the gold camps were violent places, but in this regard, the town of Auburn exhibited a different behavior. There were few of the duels or lynchings that characterized many of the other early settlements.