U.S. customs agent and rich, Arizona gold placer--long post.
January 27, 1999 at 09:20:44
NOTE: if I had any more information on this gold placer, I'd be there, right now, sluicing it myself. But since I don't, I'll tell you the story the way I heard it. . .
About four or five years ago, my two sons and I decided we'd take a little prospecting trip down to Montana to the Sweet Grass Hills. They're a group of moderately tall mountains(3 total)that rise up abruptly from the prarie landscape(the middle one, and lowest of the three, called Gold Butte guards the yellow metal). They really are unique in that there are no other mountains around for well over a hundred miles in any direction--just lots of prarie.
Anyway, there was a gold rush there in the late 1800's--and quite a wild little settlelment sprang up. It's gold history started as a placer rush and then turned into the realm of the hard rock miner(which it still is). So, the boys and I were going to stir up the ground and see if we could pan out a little color, and also investigate the old town site(mostly obliterated now)and mine dumps. But to get into Montana, we had to stop at the U.S. border crossing(I live a half an hour north of the U.S. border or, in local parlance, in the deep south of Alberta). The customs agent walked up to our truck and asked me where we were headed. I told him we were going to try our luck gold panning in the Sweet Grass Hills.
That set him to talking.He'd always wanted to gold pan himself, but never found the time--but he was going to shortly. He told us that he was finishing out his term as a Customs official at this quiet little border crossing(I think the grass grows faster by far than the amount of people that cross there), because he had spent the rest of it at an extremely busy port of entry in New York State on the Canadian border. He said he only had one month more of work to go and then he'd retire.
Years earlier, while he was a Custom's agent in New York State, he'd checked through Customs one winter, an Elderly, but very healthy Canadian man in his late sixties, that was on his way to Arizona. He said the man was very talkative and that the purpose of his trip to the U.S. was for placer gold mining. Curious, because gold prospecting was always something he'd yearned to do himself, the customs agent asked the Canadian if he was having any luck. The man said this was his fourth year and yes, he was having good luck--but he had to tell a little story first. He had retired from his engineering firm at the age of 65 ready to travel with his wife--but she unexpectedly died. That made the man want to do something special with his life to fill the gap and occupy his time. Gold mining had always appealed to him(geology was a passionate hobby), so he ordered a whole bunch of USGS(US geological survey)maps for Arizona. Then he eliminated locations that showed good mineral potential that were near any populated areas. Similarly he eliminated all areas that were at a low elevation, and easily accessible(roads, etc)--he focused only on higher, remote locations, with seasonal water. The first year he went prospecting and checked out his hunches. He had a good four wheel drive and 4wheeled in as close as he could get, and then threw on his back pack and headed up. It took him most of the first season to finally find a good spot. The next year he went back, but took a series of light-weight, inter-connecting, aluminum sluice boxes with him. He said the trail to his find was well concealed, narrow and treacherous, and he had to make lots of repeat trips(by foot) to get his supplies and equipment up to his location. His first season of sluicing he'd taken out over 90,000 dollars of gold!(This happened when gold was high). He'd gone home and tried to interest his two sons in the venture, but they were well established, prosperous engineers themselves, and had young families and commitments, and simply weren't interested. The following two seasons, the man had taken out close to the same amount, but it was in the low 80's. After picking his jaw up off the pavement, and placing his eyeballs back in his head, the Custom's man wished the fellow good luck and the gent told him he'd stop on his return in three to four months and tell him how he did. The elderly man came back to the border at the end of his season and stopped to chat as promised. He didn't look very well. He'd caught the flu, so sick he'd almost died, and had been layed up part of the season and hadn't done very well at mining. When asked how well not very well was, he said he'd only taken out about 60,000 dollars worth--and that while he'd been sick, he'd thought a lot about life, and decided he wanted to spend the rest of it with his family and not die alone in the mountains of Arizona, so he was never returning to mine his secret, high placer again.
Now came the dilema in the Custom agents life--part of him was dying to ask the location, but the other part knew it would be a huge conflict of interest because of his position of authority--so he didn't ask. I asked if he had even got the man's name and address(by this time my interest level was at a record high!), and he said he hadn't(Note: coming back into Canada from the U.S. you don't have to stop on the U.S. side, and so there would be no paper trail of any kind for a name or address, and indeed, there is no paper trial going into the U.S. unless you have something to declare), but that now, facing his own retirement, he'd wished he had, because in a month he could contact the man and ask about the placer without any conflict whatsoever. He looked extremely wistful as he said it, and I could see in his eyes the permanent longing for the loss of a great opportunity. He wished the boys and I luck and we headed to the Sweet Grass Hills. We found a little gold, and had a great time, but the real treasure from the trip was the above story.
Lanny in AB
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