Do you know what they used to call underground miners? “Underground Savages!”

What was an “Irish baby buggy?” It was a slang expression for a wheelbarrow.

A “Cackler” is what they called a miner who let others do the heavy work.

“Johnny Newcome” was a novice miner.

Don’t forget the “Little Red Wagon.” That’s what those traveling toilets they had at some mines were nicknamed in the old days.

Modem miners, no doubt, have their own slang; but the language used by miners years ago was very interesting. And fun, too!

A “Nipper” was a boy who ran errands for miners. A “Shoofly” was a transverse passage in a mine.

Miners were also known as “Muckmen.”

How about “Red?” That’s what they used to call gold. Why? It’s a bit of a mystery.

“Blue?” That’s what they often called silver? Once again, you figure it out.

As for “Sparkle,” well, that’s an easy one. That’s what they used to call diamonds.

Who was “Quinine Jimmy?” That’s another name for the doctor on duty at a mining camp. He was also known as “Old Pills.”

“Windy shot” is an explosion “that fails to break the coal.”

“Tick hole” is a small hole or cavity in a rock. So was “Vug.”

A “Tool nipper” was another name for a youngster who worked in the mines.

“Sourdough” was a miner who came south from Canada seeking to make his fortune in America. Most of the “Sourdoughs” returned home with empty pockets.

“Stomachlobber” was what they called the camp cook. He was also called “Sizzler” and “The gut burglar.”

“Strawberries” is what miners once called beans. “Sow bosom” was bacon. “Belly wash” was the term for non-a1cholic refreshments. Coffee was “Blackjack” or “Blackstrap.”

To “break one’s pick” was to become discouraged, and quite a few miners did.

“Ground hog” was a small hand-truck used to push ore cars inside mines. They were also called “Barney,” “Larry,” “Bullfrog” and “Mule.”

Let’s have a quiz now. Some common examples of old mining slang follow. See how many you recognize:

1. Glory hole; 2. Muck; 3. Nosebag; 4. Powder monkey; 5. Slave markets; 6. Aladdin’s lamp; 7. The picklock that never fails; 8. Buzzard dollar.

Answers: 1. A mine that is loaded; 2. To work with a shovel; 3. Lunch Break, usually inside a mine; 4. A miner who knows how to use dynamite; 5. Where miners are hired; 6. To find gold; 7. Gold; 8. A silver dollar

Last but not least: What is a “Boar’s nest?” That’s a mining camp where women are not allowed.

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Can you imagine finding a slab of gold so large you have to chop it with an ax to make it small enough to move? Or a chunk of quartz so filled with gold that a hammer blow shatters the quartz, but the gold has to be cut from the vein? How about a ton of gold in a small surface cut?

In these days when some of us have to be satisfied with finding a few flakes of gold, it is hard to believe such finds were actually made. It is even harder to believe that these finds were made practically in our own backyards!

We hear of huge nugget finds in Australia, deep mines in South Africa, fantastic mines in South America and other exotic places. Most of us will never have the opportunity to visit these far away places. But maybe we can explore some of the places where fantastic finds have been made in our own area.

All of our mining areas have their own special stories. Gold rushes to many areas were started by the mere rumor of a fantastic find. Many of these rumors proved false, but resulted in some of the lost mine stories that are now a part of our folklore.

The early miners were primarily placer miners. Most were inexperienced; very few even knew what natural gold looked like! Placer gold was easy to recover and identify. As the miners gained experience, many began looking for the source of the placer gold.

It was found that the trace of gold could be followed upstream to the point where it stopped. Then by searching the hillsides above the stream, the lode source could sometimes be found. Some of these lodes were developed into valuable mines.

Each mining area has a distinctive type of gold. Gold, in its natural form, is never found in a pure state. Other metals are always alloyed with the gold. The purity of the gold is determined by the percentage of other metals in the alloy.

Each mining area also has distinctive sizes and shapes of gold particles. Some areas are noted for the size of the nuggets produced; other areas produce only microscopic particles of gold. The type of gold in the area determines the method of searching for it.

All placer gold originated in a lode vein. If large nuggets were found in the stream placers, they sometimes led to fabulous lodes. The early miners discovered many valuable lode mines and pockets by following the placer leads.

Southwest Oregon is noted for pocket mines. Most of these were located by following the placer leads to the source. As a vein of gold weathers and wears away over the centuries, gold will spill down the hill or mountainside, spreading in a V-shaped pattern as it migrates down to the nearest stream. Some pockets produced only a few ounces of gold. Others, such as the famous Gold Hill Pocket, produced up to a ton of gold.

Some miners specialized in pocket hunting. They developed an inverted V method of searching for pockets. When the placer lead stopped in the stream, they started digging test holes on the hillsides. As the rows of test holes progressed uphill, the inverted V pattern was established by the holes which produced gold. The pocket of gold was found at the point of the inverted V.

Some pocket hunters worked on the theory that pockets always occurred in groups of three. When the surface pocket was worked out and the vein pinched off, they kept digging and sometimes were able to strike a second and third pocket.

The first lode mine in Oregon State was a pocket mine. It was called the Hicks Lead. This small pocket produced $1,000 in two hours. It was later sold to a group of miners who built the first arrastra in Oregon State.

The fabulous Gold Hill Pocket was discovered in 1857 near the top of a small 2,000 foot-high mountain. This pocket was a fissure-vein four to five feet wide and fifteen feet deep. The outcropping rock was literally tied together with gold. It was almost impossible to tear it apart with a sledge hammer. At least $700,000 was recovered from a very small area. With gold valued at $20.67 per ounce at that time, this works out to over $14 million at today’s gold price. Gold Hill is a landmark along the 1-5 Freeway two miles from the city of Gold Hill.

The Steamboat Pocket was discovered in 1860 near the headwaters of the Applegate River. Over several year’s time, it produced over $350,000. Compared to these two, other Oregon pockets seem minor. However, each was a fabulous find in its own right. At the time of their discovery, many of these pockets were made in extremely isolated areas.

One of Oregon’s most famous pockets, the Briggs Pocket, may have been the re- discovery of a lost mine. During the Indian uprising in 1855, two men on their way to join the fighting found an outcropping of quartz. They each broke off a chunk, which was later sold for $100. They were never able to relocate their find. Almost a half century later, in 1904, an 18-year-old hunter, Roy Briggs, relocated the lost mine. This small pocket produced gold in slabs one inch thick and two to three feet long. A total of at least $50,000 was recovered from the vein 12 to 14 inches wide, 12 feet long and 7 feet deep. Reporters for the Rogue River Courier described the Briggs tent as having “gold in sacks, in cans, in bottles, in the mortar, in the gold pans, in tin cups and cooking utensils, everywhere”. This discovery was actually made in Thompson Creek near the Oregon-California border.

Several large nuggets have been found in Oregon’s placer mines. A 204-ounce whopper was found in 1859 on East Fork Althouse Creek. Buck Creek produced the famous 80.4 ounce Armstrong nugget. A 34-ounce nugget was found in Brimstone Gulch.

In the early mining days, and even extending well into this century, gold had no special specimen value. An outstanding nugget would be tossed into the melting pot along with the common gold. Most of our record-size nuggets have been lost as a result of this practice.

Miner John Dodge took a mighty swing at the shale bedrock at his mine near the Yuba River, and stuck his pick in the gigantic Downieville nugget, which may have been even larger than the Calaveras nugget. When the monstrous heart-shaped nugget was pried from its resting place, it was weighed on a make-shift scale. A plank was balanced, then the huge chunk of gold was placed on one end. Small rocks were then placed on the other end until it balanced, then the small rocks were weighed. The pile of small rocks weighed 227 pounds. Then the nugget was chopped into three pieces to make it small enough to carry. Each piece was later sold for approximately $17,000.

Have all the big nuggets and slabs of gold been found? I don’t think so. Several very interesting discoveries have been made in recent years. A California deer hunter tripped over a rock. When he picked the rock up, he found he was holding a fist-sized gold nugget.

A Colorado miner noticed a rock by the road as he drove to work each day. When he stopped for a closer look, he found a piece of float weighing several hundred pounds. It was loaded with visible gold and is now in a Colorado Museum.

Our chances of finding a large nugget or a massive slab of gold may actually be better today than ever before. New improved diving and dredging techniques now allow us to explore and work many areas of virgin ground. Underwater placers, never before accessible, can now be worked with ease. As just one example of many, the nuggets shown is this article were just-recently dredged out of the Klamath River by Dave McCracken on claims managed by The New 49’ers Prospecting Association.

The development of new and improved electronic prospecting instruments may now enable us to locate deeply hidden veins. These deeper penetrating instruments may be able to locate nuggets the earlier miners missed by inches in ancient river channels.

We now have many opportunities never before dreamed of. I am getting a serious case of gold fever just writing this. I’ll see you up in the hills. Good luck.

About the Author: Roy F. Mayo was born a few years before the great depression of the 1930’s. His early life was spent in Western Oklahoma and Texas. He served in the US Army during WWIl, and has lived in Washington state since 1955. Having been a small-scale gold miner for more than 40 years, he has searched for gold in most of the western mining states. Roy has stated that he found gold in many places, but his richest reward has been the pleasure of exploring many historic places with his family.

Roy started his writing career quite by accident in the early 1970’s. While searching an area in Idaho where a group of Chinese miners had been murdered, the local librarian encouraged him to write the story for reference material in the library. This later became his first book, GOLD AND STRYCHNINE. Now a world-renowned author, he has eight published books and is presently working on guide books showing gold locations in several of the Western states. These will be in the same format as his books, WASHINGTON STATE GOLD MINES and GOLD MINES OF SOUTHWEST OREGON.

• Here is where you can buy a sample of natural gold.
• Here is where you can buy a basic gold prospecting kit.
• More about gold
• More about the history of gold
• More about how to prospect for gold
• Schedule of upcoming events
• Books and videos by Dave McCracken.

The definition of the word a prospect is to look, to search, to explore and discover

The history of the bow and arrow dates back over 25,000 years, as well as man’s use of the horse as a riding and pack animal. How much further back does the history of mining and prospecting date? No one can answer this question for sure.

The first written account of a prospecting party was done in glyph form by a captain of Egyptian infantry, where a party of some fifty men were embarking on a journey to the present-day land named Iran. This was five centuries before Christ. Though reduced in numbers by the end of their journey, they brought back gold.

The Pre-Inca civilization in the land we now call Peru was deserted for some reason about 20,000 years ago. They not only could prospect and mine gold and silver, they could plate gold upon objects!

Welcome to an ancient fraternity – gold mining!

Well then, we have evidence that man has been looking and discovering for one whale of a long time. Surely he has looked at every square inch of the earth’s surface for the sources of silver, gold, platinum and, up until recently, lead! – and has found every possible source of these metals and mined them all out, right?

Umm, I don’t quite know how to write this any other way than to report that the answer is no. That is, he may have looked at many of the sources, found some of them to be sure, and then wandered back to what he knew of as civilization. . . and then couldn’t find the place again. Or, he caught a fever and died or got shot in an argument over politics and couldn’t recover from the subsequent wounds. There are many instances where the discovery was made and the “natives” interrupted the process of removal and enforced strict “immigration regulations” by force of arms and left no survivors.

In 1803, Lewis and Clark found the Nez Indians riding Spanish saddles and armed with Spanish muskets. When asked where they obtained them, they replied that it was “only ten days ride to the trading facility.” No such facility has ever been found within the 400-mile area so described. Outside that boundary, in present day British Columbia, remains of a Spanish Fort including stone foundations were discovered by the first Anglo-Saxons penetrating the area in 1862. Pictographs on the rocks showed Spanish horsemen with their distinctive scalloped helmets riding horses with captive Indians being towed by chains and harassed by huge dogs. Ah, Spanish colonizers! Famed in song and story for their wonderful “humanity.”

Arrastras, ancient devices to crush stone and free valuable metals, have been found all over the West, from Washington State to Texas. Pre-Roman in origin, they have been used throughout the world to crush ore. They mark spots where ore was carried for handling.

They would also mark the spots where nearby mines had been worked in the distant past.

There is hardly a spot on earth larger than a ten dollar bill that does not have tales of lost mines and buried treasure connected with it. And one could spend three or four lifetimes just investigating the ones in his own neighborhood, unless he sharpened his investigative wits and began looking for hard evidence alone.

An arrastra had a circular stone floor/ foundation. It was fitted stone; good cement was not invented until the late years of the last century. Some did, however; use pigeon’s blood and ground calceous rock, but it was a formula not widely known.

In the center of the floor you would find a hole that accommodated the pivot that the stone-drags rotated upon. If the area had seen much use, the floor would be worn quite smooth with grooves worn into it as well. Some had gutters along the sides to collect the amalgam. When the stone had been ground, mercury was mixed in by hand to seize the gold or silver. The powdered stone was then washed or blown away and the mercury decanted into containers for transport to a refinery.

Arrastras can be found all over the Southwest, the Northwest as far back as Minnesota, and following the western edge of the Mississippi River. The Spaniards had hundreds of years to explore the region, and they really did, all the way into present-day Canada.

A very famous lost mine of Spanish work lies within the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico. It was re-discovered as late as 1949! The two men who discovered it had a slight falling out over the division of spoils, and one man was shot to death in a gun duel. They brought out actual bars of gold from a vast hoard that had been buried and hidden from view since the late 1600’s, when the Indians in New Mexico rose up and murdered everyone of Spanish-type and ran survivors back into Mexico.

Wherever they could, the Spanish would hide their mines before leaving, having every intention of returning. In many cases, they were killed before they could return, and the Indians would pull the place apart so that no one would know where the mine was located. The Spaniards were kept out for a hundred years, and many of their operating mines were never again located.

Some mines have actually been re-discovered! King Solomon’s mines were found again in 1983 by a helicopter survey-group in the middle of the Arabian Peninsula, hidden from all but aerial view. The slave barracks walls are yet standing after two thousand years! One could almost write a tone poem on the irony of that piece of data; the most durable of all structures – the slave barracks, complete with bronze chains, waiting for more occupants down through the millennia.

Another lost mine that may have been found is the famed Tillamook gold mine of the 1820’s through the 1840’s. Trading posts in McMinnville and Forest Grove in the Oregon Territory used to be visited by Indians that traded raw gold for the articles they wanted. They would never tell anyone where they obtained the gold, and efforts to follow them to its source were all defeated. On her deathbed, one Indian lady told her paramour the general location, and he spent the rest of his life searching for it.

One day in 1984, a man contacted me and asked me some burning questions about the mine, which I answered to the best of my knowledge. I gave him this advice: “Don’t waste much time searching for lost mines or buried treasure, son, it ain’t worth the effort.”

He gave me an odd look and began emptying a pocket of ancient coins, the copper closures of an old pocket-purse, and showed me photographs (Polaroids) of a very rusted musket barrel, and some bones that looked very much like a human skeleton, and views down into a very steep canyon with a waterfall and the entrance to what could be a mine adit or a cave. Then he showed me a sample of rotten quartz with gold rattling around in it, loose! The coins were all pre-1843. The musket barrel was from an old Hall Carbine, Army issue for the cavalry in the 1840’s.

He reported that in the opening of the “cave” as he called it, there were old timbers bracing the entrance that gave off a funny smell. It was evidently an adit, from the description. The last time I saw the man, he was driving down the street in a brand new $40,000 pick-up truck and looking like a Prince of the Realm!

An old friend of mine told me the reason almost all of my own efforts in the field of treasure hunting and looking for old mines had amounted to zilch was because of my lack of proper research.

He would happily spend two years researching a locality before he ever loaded his truck up for the trip to it. It must be true, as the only real find I have made myself was in his company on a trip to a ghost town in Utah. He knew the name of every prominent citizen that had lived there. He knew the precise location of every likely target to search. In order of importance, he always searched the assayer’s office and home first. The Sheriff’s office came second, and then the Mayor’s office and home. Next came the Red Light District, as those girls were very busy!

Why the assayer, of all people? They were the biggest uncaught felons in the territory! They would call in a mine owner and demand several burlap bags of ore to test in a “cross-sectional analysis.” After obtaining these bags, they would take what was needed from each bag, assay it, and refine the remainder and keep it for themselves. They would then give over the results of the assays to the mine-owner, charge him three dollars for each assay, and hide the remainder for a rainy day.

How much ore is needed for an assay? About five ounces, no more.

After searching the assay office in this ghost town, we found nothing. It was 108 degrees in the shade, and the only shade was up against the bank behind the stone foundations of the site. I staggered over and leaned up against the dirt. I had not turned off my metal detector, and it gave a loud signal! Hidden in the bank were 52 boneash, half-pint testing cups with about an ounce of melted gold, under glaze, stacked one within the other. How come the assayer had never returned to claim his stash? He was a millionaire, many times over and possibly couldn’t be bothered with a mere 52 plus ounces of gold!

In one Idaho ghost town, this same person found six unopened crates of 1879 Springfield rifles, hidden in the foundations of an assayer’s house. And downtown, in the hollow walls of his establishment, he found four large gold-pan sized ingots of gold and three of silver that had been melted down from ore. The assayer apparently used a steel gold pan as a mold, so the resulting slug would fit into the wall without notice. Each of these ingots weighed over sixty pounds.

What does all this mean? One thing for sure, our ancestors were a busy lot, full of enterprise and hard work!

Mines and treasures have been discovered, lost again, forgotten about and re- discovered down through the ages. It is certainly not a new thing in earth’s history! Nor is the violence that often accompanies such discoveries.

The most sane advice ever given to me about that facet of mining/treasure hunting was, “After you have made a good sized discovery, proven it out, and know that it is real (and not just a hope), go to your favorite tailor and have him sew a strong zipper on your upper and lower lips. Then, keep it zipped SHUT!”

• Here is where you can buy a sample of natural gold.
• Here is where you can buy a basic gold prospecting kit.
• More the history of gold
• More about gold
• More about how to find gold
• Schedule of upcoming events
• Books and Videos by Dave McCracken.