The Gold Mine You can find
Today's Treasure Tale
Sunday, March 5, 2000
YOU CAN FIND THIS LOST GOLD MINE!
A story in Treasure Trails (one of Lost Treasure's many sister publications) led the author and a friend to this lost mine. It's still there, he writes, and you might be the one to open it up and strike it rich!
By WILLIAM L. GILBERT
From page 30 of the September 1977 issue of Lost Treasure magazine.
Copyright ©1977, 1998 Lost Treasure, Inc.
In the Fall, 1973 issue of Treasure Trails, I read a story of the "Too Much Gold" lost mine written by Vern Hammond. It was on the American River in California where Auburn Dam will eventually flood it. With time running out, I searched for the mine and found it, and now I've decided to let other treasure hunters in on what I found.
From 1965 to 1968, my TH'ing companion George Kapus and I made many trips to locate the site, discover the best way in, and try to dig it out. Due to unusual circumstances surrounding the site, we never did open the mine. But we satisfied ourselves as to the authenticity of the story. All known clues fit like a glove.
The story told of a group of Forty-Niners who were the first to mine a section of the middle fork of the American River, about halfway between the present towns of Auburn and Forest Hill. More specifically, the area is off the Forest Hill Road, approximately one and a half miles past the Grizzly Bear House, and 1,500 feet below in the bottom of a nameless canyon.
Free gold was plentiful and easy to mine for the first miners who arrived. The group was lucky, for they found it virgin territory.
During their operations they uncovered a two-foot-wide vein of quartz with gold, running across the river and on into a hillside.
At that early stage of the gold rush no one knew much about bardrock mining. So they kept working the easy river gold and only experimented with the gold in quartz.
When winter of 1850 set in they had dug a tunnel eight or 10 feet into the hillside, extracting ore and piling it up by the entrance. None of the miners ever returned, so nature had apparently covered the entrance, with winds and rains scattering and covering the pile of ore. After all, it had been 125 years.
I had panned and explored much of that area. I thought I knew it pretty well. But there is a big difference in looking at a map and then finding a particular spot in the bottom of a strange canyon, 1,500 feet below a blacktop road.
By the time you reach the bottom after a two-hour, tortuous descent through brambles, boulders, creeks and sheer dropoffs, you aren't sure where you are, and you wonder if you shouldn't maybe just chuck the whole idea and look for an easy way back to the car.
In most treasure stories you read of "easy finds," such as someone deer hunting who stumbles on a fabulous find. We just knew we'd find our lost mine, and just knew all we had to do was climb down that canyon, find it, memorize the lay of the land, then find an easy way out. Then we'd be rich!
But it didn't turn out that way.
On our way down the canyon we came upon old diggings, holding ponds for sluicing water and cabin sites. And not one pull tab, coke bottle, beer can or paper trash. Obviously, we were the first to enter that area in many years.
After we bad rested and had a swim-it must have been 110 degrees in the canyon-we started doing some serious searching for the mine.
We'd just gotten started when two men came down the canyon the same way we had. We proceeded to pan the river as if we didn't know anything about a lost mine. After introductions, we learned they had driven from Long Beach, California, and they also were looking for the mine.
We have since experienced the same thing several times. We've gone on trips to check out a story two or three years after we read it. And we'd come upon two or three families doing the same thing!
Publishers of Lost Treasure would be surprised at the number of families who not only enjoy the reading provided, but also the number who get out and enjoy the adventure, travel, exploring, sightseeing, and the good old country or mountain air as they follow a published lead. And they generally manage to bring home some little treasure found along the way.
You can't beat it for family run, and you can always have that feeling you could be the lucky TH'er to find the big one.
We offered to help the newcomers look for the mine, not knowing we were in the wrong canyon due to a faulty map. The canyon we searched was filled with sand, washed down from the diggings we'd come through. The sand was 10 or 12 feet deep, 200 feet wide and 300 feet back up the canyon.
We also discovered we were not the only ones to look here for the mine. The area where it should have been was really dug up. After a time, we quit. The two from Long Beach got into their car and left.
Then we started doing some serious thinking and looking. Could the story be a hoax? Could the map be wrong?
There are many canyons that look the same. We decided to check out one or two on both sides of the one we were in. After all that work getting there, we weren't about to give up, Besides, we'd found the best swimming spot anywhere, and also an untouched diggings to explore with metal detectors later.
We checked the west side first, where the mountain came to a sheer dropoff into the river. We then headed for the first canyon on the east side.
When about 200 feet from the mouth of the next canyon, we took a close look at the mountain's face where it met the loose jumbles of river rock and fallen rock. Nothing seemed promising until we came closer to the high water mark, about 50 feet from the canyon's mouth.
There we saw a pile of rocks under brush and deadfall that looked different from the surrounding rocks. Clearing it away, we realized it must be a tailing pile from a small tunnel. Was it the lost mine tunnel?
Checking the mountain face carefully now, we could see no indication of a caved-in mine. Rehashing the story again, we remembered it mentioned the sun shining into the tunnel in the morning so no additional light was needed.
That meant the mouth had to be at the northwest corner of the tailing pile. We followed a little gully, caused by a small seasonal creek, and climbed up some rocks and made our way through buck brush. We made several discoveries.
For one thing, the small creek was caused by man when he created erosion by building a firebreak many years ago. We'd seen the firebreak on top of the mountain but never used it as we thought we'd better go straight down the canyon, so as not to miss anything or be led off into the wrong canyon.
Then, too, the firebreak passed 40 feet above the mine, maybe over the vein. But we didn't know for certain the lost mine was there. About five feet above the mine the early gold diggers had built a rockwall-supported trail leading from camp to camp. There is a similar rock trail from below Placerville (Old Hang Town) to Coloma. Wherever a bank was too sheer, the miners built a rock wall trail out of rocks from local streams.
We climbed back down to the tailing pile, wondering if nature had covered the tunnel. Or had the miners found it, worked it, saw that the vein pinched out and blasted it shut? We guessed a narrow finger could pinch out that quick, but not a two-foot-wide vein, unless it ran into a fault.
Looking at the only likely spot left now, we began moving dirt and large rocks that had fallen in. In a few minutes we uncovered the tops of two rows of rocks the size of basketballs, the rows about two feet apart, and leading into the mountain side.
Digging and clearing some more, we found a flat, smooth path leading from the mountain's face out to the tailings. We thought it must have been for a wheel barrow.
Every clue in Vern Hammond's story fit now. This had to be the Lost Mine of Too Much Gold-the mine we were seeking!
We drew up measurements for our mining claims, shot pictures both close up and from across the river, and took a good look at surrounding landmarks so we could find it when we discovered an easier way in.
We noticed a dirt road across the river and watched people going by on trail bikes and four-wheel drives, Not knowing who else might know about the story and thus come looking for the mine, we didn't ask anyone how they got on the road, or where it went.
That was a big mistake. We thought it would be easy to find out on our own. But our map showed several roads leading down.
Next we went into Placerville and checked county records to see who owned the river claim, as the land was on a patened section. Since the mine was on the edge of a claim, we wanted to avoid legal squabbles.
Visiting the claim owner, he told us he had just received a check from the government. They had bought out all claims on the river and were going to control and flood the whole river as far as Forest Hill.
The state owned the mountain from the river to the road on top. We called the State Bureau of Mines.
We learned the state owns the land and no claims can be filed because of the dam and future flooding. But we could go in, and if we didn't set up anything permanent we could do anything providing we removed each piece of equipment when we were through.
Then we arranged to have the ore milled. The Selby Smelter on San Francisco Bay-they had worked ore during the gold rush-was checked with. They'd run the ore, but with other ore, and we'd pay whatever it averaged out.
We didn't want that. We contacted a Walnut Creek smelter that agreed to do it on an individual basis. We didn't want to mix our high grade ore with someone else's low grade. Talk about counting chickens before they hatch!
Now we had to learn how to get to the mine on that dirt road. It's amazing how many natives don't know anything about their area after the word "gold" has spread. We could only guess At the number of persons who had stopped at local stores and cafes asking for directions to the bottom of that canyon, and leaking out what they were after.
We must have driven 500 miles in five weekends, on both sides of the American River, asking every rancher, taking every unfenced road trying to locate the right one.
On our first trip my car gave us trouble with a broken plug wire. We were stranded on a rock cliff and were saved a long hike when an old miner, working a dry washer and gold dredge, rowed across the river and took us back to his side. We found it was four miles to the mine from that approach-much too far. But we found an old hydraulic gold camp with rock houses and a later wooden cabin. And still no beer cans or pull tabs.
This country is awesome. On the North and Middle Forks, and probably the South Fork too, there must be a dozen old gold camp sites. Once they sported many saloons, hotels, stores, and hundreds of miners. Go into any canyon and wherever you see an area flat or wide enough for a town site, overgrown with brush and trees, you'll find one.
Forest Hill area abounds with treasure tales such as Wells Fargo loot, Yankee Jim's Lost Ledge, the lost Cabin Mine, and a small creek in an almost inaccessible canyon that is full of nuggets the size of rice to peas.
We finally found the right turnoff and realized we'd passed it many times. But it is so far down the canyon below the mine site that we didn't know the government had dozed the road from there to a washed-out bridge above the mine site, so they could survey all the claims. And, so we are told, dig some gold for themselves.
The road is good enough to use with any pickup until about one and a half miles from the mine. Then you hike across the river at a crossing, or with four-wheel drive and winch, pull yourself across. We noticed many tire tracks of those who did.
There are five places where vehicles can cross, and if you need to, you can check each one to find the most suitable for your vehicle. About half a mile from the mine there is a washed-out section of the road. Two stout 12 or 15-foot planks would get anyone across a few years ago, but I wouldn't promise that now.
The mine area is covered by the Greenwood quadrangle, 7.5-minute series, topographic map. It is by the mouth of an unnamed canyon between Brush Mountain Canyon and Sharps Ravine, Using these directions and matching the picture with the actual site, you have a true waybill to a possible fortune.
Why don't I go after it myself? On my last trip to it, I was accompanied by my father and two small sons. Helping my sons across the river at the site, my father started across on his own and slipped on the rocks. He fell into the current and was carried downstream.
When I got the boys across and raced to him, he was banged up, half-drowned, miserably cold and in shock. That ended my last big try. I had my thrill with the search and the discovery.
If you do go after the gold, I suggest a group of you make the trip. Blast the overburden away, and blast as much ore out as you can as quickly as possible. Stockpile it on the north side of the river so you can load up the trucks in a continuous process.
Once the mine is opened, it is up for grabs as you will have no legal claim to protect you. But it's there, and you might just strike it rich -- William L. Gilbert
