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Placer Gold in the Black Hills, South Dakota
March 2001 by Edgar B. Heylmun, PhD
During the Indian Wars in 1874, General George Custer and his men camped on French Creek in the southern Black Hills, near the present site of Custer, South Dakota. Two of his men found placer gold in French Creek. Word got out, and before long, a party of prospectors arrived. However, the government had signed a treaty with the Sioux Indians to stay out of the Black Hills. This led to prospectors sneaking in and working creeks all over the region at their own risk.Search for the Legendary Sierra Azul
One of the most unique mining stories to derive from the days of the Spanish conquest of the Southwest is the legendary story of the Sierra Azul, or “Blue Mountain” of Arizona. The first reports of what some historians maintain is nothing more than mere myth, came in the middle of the seventeenth century, and it survived as a frontier tradition into the nineteenth century.
It Pays to Know Your Bedrock
On our last trip, we brought ropes and went down the first waterfall forty vertical feet, only to be confronted by a second, sixty-foot-high, overhanging waterfall that emptied into a slot canyon.
Melman on Gold & Silver
I find it difficult to recall a period when the world has encountered so many simultaneous threats which “should” have driven gold and silver higher, and yet the precious metals markets—so far—have failed to rally to any significant extent.
Picks & Pans: George Duffy Jr.—Pocket Miner Extraordinaire
During the Miocene and Pliocene mid-Tertiary Epochs, the Great Basin, Mojave, and Sonoran deserts within parts of California, Nevada, and Arizona became the source—the genesis—of ubiquitous epithermal “precious metal” fissure-gold veins associated with extensive acidic volcanic lava flows that blanketed much of the Cordillera during this time.
Ganes Creek Hits 10 Years—Part II
You keep all you find at Ganes, with weekly tallies kept for a loose competition that I find helps motivate me. I seriously try to find more nuggets than anyone else in a given week, and usually make it or close to it.
The Montezuma Quadrangle, Summit County, Colorado
The Montezuma mining district of Summit County, Colorado, is a rugged, structurally complex area of the Rocky Mountains. Home to the first silver claim in Colorado, the Montezuma district hosts stockwork gold deposits, disseminated molybdenum, and abundant silver-bismuth veins.
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