Old tailing piles extend for miles. There was still plenty of water flowing here, so WPA members set up highbankers at several settling ponds.

Every time we prospected here we found gold, sometimes some really coarse flakes, but no large nuggets (yet).

Once you have determined that the land is locatable, the next step in the claim research process is to determine if the land has already been claimed by a previous locator.

I was amazed and surprised, and I took a moment to admire how beautiful this coarse chunk of gold was. It later weighed exactly one-half ounce.

FBI agents were looking for an extremely valuable cache of fabled Civil War-era gold—possibly tons of it—when they excavated a remote woodland site in Pennsylvania three years ago…