The Many Lost Treasures of Mariposa, CA (Photos Added)

[calisdad]

Still here, still fascinated.

When you say 'Burma Road' you mean that switch back puppy that goes north towards the Kinsley Ranger station?

Now I have to call my friend Barber Bob McCabe to see if he knows anything about McCabe Flats.

enjoy-
C-dad

 

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[EagleDown]

Still here, still fascinated.

When you say 'Burma Road' you mean that switch back puppy that goes north towards the Kinsley Ranger station?

Now I have to call my friend Barber Bob McCabe to see if he knows anything about McCabe Flats.

enjoy-
C-dad

calisdad. Yeah, that's the bad puppy. Where you drive 5 miles just to get 1 mile closer to the top!!

(Exaggerating the mileage a little here.) would you believe that one night, during a full moon, when I was much younger (and dumber,) just as I started down that road, I lost my headlights and came all the way down with-out them Like I said, "much dumber.)

Glad you enjoyed it.

Next, I'll tell you about another treasure, that's easily obtainable.........

But only when the time is right. (lol)

Eagle

 

[EagleDown]

Hi to all of my Friends,

I just wanted to make a little note here.

When I speak of a place on the Merced River, I usually put it in terms of up-river, or down-river, rarely as North or South. The reason for this is clarity.

The Merced winds back and forth through the mountains, in the canyon it has spent a millennium carving for itself. Unless, you happen to have a compass in your pocket, (which I have never owned,) it can be pretty difficult to know which direction North or South is sometimes. But, even at night, all you have to do is listen to the river singing, and you will know which way is up-river or down-river.

Love and Respect,

Eagle

 

[EagleDown]

~~~\/~~~

Hokay, this one is another difficult one to give away, as I had hoped to profit from it some day. But, I’ve had to force myself to face reality, and I realize that the chances of me ever dredging in this spot again are pretty much nil. So, with that said………….

~~~\/~~~

Buried, but not forgotten

It was late August, 1978 and I was dredging on my uppermost claim on the Merced River. There was a deep hole just below where I later found a small crevasse where I recovered a little over three and a half pounds (troy) of gold.

We had been in a three or four year period of drought with very little snow in the higher elevations, and almost no rain. The river was lower than I had ever seen it in the past. As a matter of fact, it was so low, almost everyone was getting ear infections due to the water being so warm and moving so slow. Believe me, “swimmers ear”, (as they say ain’t nothing nice”. (lol)

Anyway, I went into this deep hole just to check it out, just using my floating air-compressor, and found that my 20 foot air hose lacked about 2 feet of reaching the bedrock. I had started at the up-river end of the hole and crawled along the bedrock which sloped down at about a 20 degree drop. I was just kind of playing around this particular day. Exploring you might say. I managed to pop about 8 or 9 pretty little one pennyweight nuggets out of the cracks that followed the slope down to the bottom.

When I got to the deepest part of the hole, I found a natural “dike” that was about 3 foot high at its’ highest point, and about 8 to 10 inches thick. It extended from the road side of the river, straight across to the opposite side, where it disappeared into the overburden. After studying the contours of the edge of the overburden a bit, I figured that since the hole didn’t hold any rocks or gravel, that any gold passing through during flooding would probably follow the side where the overburden tapered down to the clean bedrock.

So, the following morning, I returned with some tools and a piece of angle iron. I found a crack, well above the water and drove the angle iron vertically down into the crack. Then after I was sure that it wouldn’t become dislodged during usage, I tied a 3/8s rope to it and then, using the rope, I climbed down the almost vertical side of rock, until I was in the river. I then took the free end of the rope, swam across, and found a sturdy tree trunk to tie it to.

After everything was prepared, I had to go back upriver about 50 yards or so and float my dredge down to where I planned to dredge. I tied the bowline of the dredge to the rope that was stretched across the river, then because the water was moving so slowly, I had to put another rope on the discharge end of the dredge and tie it to a boulder about 30 feet down-river. Other wise, the force of the tailings coming out of the sluice box would shove the dredge up-river into where I was dredging.

I dredged a hole about 6 feet in diameter, and bout 4 feet deep and found mostly fine gold. Then the overburden started becoming more compacted and I started seeing an occasional small nugget. But, so far, nothing like I had expected. By the time I was ready to quit for the day, I had expanded the hole to about 10ft in diameter and about 6 feet deep. While I was cleaning the sluice box, I noticed somebody climbing down the bank from the road. I quickly panned the concentrates and found I only had about a quarter oz. of gold. After all the work I had put in, that sure didn’t get me too excited. (lol)

After making sure that everything was secured for the evening, I picked up the gold pan (with the gold still in it,) and waded back across the river. As I got closer to the other side, I recognized the man who had come down to the rivers edge to greet me. I had let him and his dad dredge on my claims about 2 years before. (I never charged anything, I just asked them to let me know if they found anything worthwhile, so I could figure out the travel of the gold.)

After we got re-acquainted, I asked if he and his dad had been doing any dredging. Sadly, I found out that his dad, who flew a crop-duster during the planting/growing season, had hit a power line and had died in the resulting crash about a year earlier.

He told me that he had been coming to the river periodically since then, hoping to find me there so that he could keep their promise to let me know where they had found a nice deposit of gold.

And, I’ll tell you where that was, in my next post. (lol)

 

[TheRandyMan]

Keep them coming O great Eagle! I am lurking and laying my plans for the coming year

 

[EagleDown]

Keep them coming O great Eagle! I am lurking and laying my plans for the coming year

Well there you are my Brother. I was wondering who that was "lurking" in the shadows.

I'm a little over due on the finale of this story. Sorry about that, not only have I been wondering just how how much I should disclose, but I've been having some computer problems too. I've lost a full page once, and almost two pages another time. For some reason, the computer takes a course of action on it's own, and turns itself off, or sometimes, reboots itself. I've had it in the shop twice and they can't seem to figure it out. (Yet) Oh well, I guess it's a good thing it's not mobile, it would probably have got even by now for all of the work I make it do.

Eagle

 

[maui]

eagle, thanks much for the new one and waiting for more. [smile]
my computer has been doing goofy things also and have not been able to be on it much, hopefully
i can be around for awhile.
take care my friend. ron

 

[EagleDown]

~~~\/~~~

Hokay, if I can finish this without my computer taking charge again:………………

Picking and Grinning!!

While we were talking, I was busy gathering my equipment so that I could head back to my camp. That done, he led the way back up my self made path to the road.
He stopped on the road, directly across from where I had been dredging and directed my gaze to two large boulders submerged in about 8 or 9 foot of water, right in the middle of the river.

He said; “See those two big boulders right out there”? “My dad and I dredged behind them, the last time we were up here”. “I can see from here that there has been some materials moved by the river since then”.

Well, I don’t remember all of the conversation, but the gist of it was; that they had dredged behind the lower boulder and had, in the course of one day, picked up 18oz of gold off of the bed-rock behind it. They had moved all of the pile of rocks, gravel and sand while doing so. Now, since there was more materials behind it, chances are that there would be more gold dropped there since then.

By now, we were back at my camp and I grabbed a couple of Pepsi’s out of the cooler. We sat and talked about how the river use to be, compared to now (then.) It might be hard to believe, but up until about 1976, you could spend a whole year in this area and not see more than a half dozen people in all that time. Of course, that ended when some idiot wrote an article for Sunset Magazine, (I think in 1975,) about the wonderful trout fishing on the “Beautiful Merced River”. Every year after that saw more and more people showing up on the river, until there were so many that it wasn’t safe to leave anything, like face masks, regulators, tools, gas cans, etc. on the banks near your dredge. It would be guaranteed to disappear over night. Late one evening, I took a walk down-river to check on my dredge and found some guy pawing in my dredge sluice box. I yelled at him, and when he looked around, he saw me and two other men standing on the road with guns all pointed at him. I’m pretty sure I saw the river behind him turn brown. (lol) He took off, up river, and we returned to the camp just in time to see his car throwing gravel, as he went out of the campground.


Anyway, after an hour or so, my friend Bud had to leave for his home in Chowchilla. So, we said our good-byes and he headed on up the road. I haven’t seen him since, though I think of him often, and in my prayers, I try to always remember to thank him for his honesty.

After he left, I sat there quite a while thinking about where he said that they had found their gold and re-thought my assumptions of how the gold traveled through this particular area.

I finally decided to go on into my camper and wait to see what tomorrow would bring. By now, it seemed to me that every time I thought I had this game figured out, something would come along and change the rules. (lol)

I was up the next morning at my usual time, 5 am. Don’t know why, but all of my life, I’ve woke up at 5am on the nose. Unfortunately, that left me with about four hours to kill before heading for the river.

(I had company show up, so I’ll have to finish this little saga tomorrow.) Sorry.

Eagle

 

[auferret]

I'm a little over due on the finale of this story. Sorry about that, not only have I been wondering just how how much I should disclose, but I've been having some computer problems too. I've lost a full page once, and almost two pages another time. For some reason, the computer takes a course of action on it's own, and turns itself off, or sometimes, reboots itself. I've had it in the shop twice and they can't seem to figure it out.

Try using Google Documents. It automatically saves on their servers and you can access it from any computer. It is not as elegant as Word but it works very well for this purpose.

 

[EagleDown]

[/quote]
Try using Google Documents. It automatically saves on their servers and you can access it from any computer. It is not as elegant as Word but it works very well for this purpose.
[/quote]
Thank you auferret! I'll be sure to check it out.

eagle, thanks much for the new one and waiting for more. [smile]
my computer has been doing goofy things also and have not been able to be on it much, hopefully
i can be around for awhile.
take care my friend. ron

Hey ron, I've been wondering where you are. Once again, thanks for letting me know that you're still interested in my little experiences.

Eagle

 

[MariposaMountainMan]

Hey I somehow stumbled upon this forum. Eagledown your stories are awsome! I live in Mariposa and my uncle has had claims down there for a long time. You say you knew Pistol Pete, Did you ever know Bigfoot (my uncle), Or Fritz or Pierre? Fritz used to know ole Pete. I still know all the people down on the river with claims but we can't dredge anymore in cali. Keep up the good work on here Eagle!

 

[EagleDown]

Hey I somehow stumbled upon this forum. Eagledown your stories are awsome! I live in Mariposa and my uncle has had claims down there for a long time. You say you knew Pistol Pete, Did you ever know Bigfoot (my uncle), Or Fritz or Pierre? Fritz used to know ole Pete. I still know all the people down on the river with claims but we can't dredge anymore in cali. Keep up the good work on here Eagle!

Hey MariposaMountainMan!! Welcome to TN and glad you stumbled in.
Yep, I met Bigfoot and Ziggy. Pierre Ott was a good friend. I assume by Fritz, you mean Fritz Clark?
I use to have a copy of a picture of Fritz Clark, (given to me personally by Fritz,) standing in the portal of the Colorado Mine, with his arms full of a fifty+ pound chunk of gold.

I don't know about the dredging, "Moratorium" (According to Websters) is defined as: A temporary pause in activity. I remember Gov. Browns last tenure as Gov. of CA, and as I remember, he is all about money. If we could get enough miners, (dredgers) together, we might be able to convince him that the state is losing money by not selling permits or collecting taxes on sales of equipment.

Oh well, only time will tell. Frankly, I think all miners should get together and drawing on the 1872 mining laws, form our own lobby group. A moratorium on dredging is fine, as long as it's done in a sensible manner and for a minimum impact on the industry.

Oops, I didn't start this thread so that I would have a "soap-box" to preach from .

 

[EagleDown]

Incidently MariposaMountainMan, I met Bigfoot right after he filed the Bigfoot Mining claims above Railroad Flats. He had no objections to me dredging the area just below old Pete's place, (Hermit Bar.)
Later, I was dredging there and Ziggy showed up and told me "they" didn't want anybody dredging on their claims. So, I haven't dredged that area since then.

Eagle

 

[MariposaMountainMan]

Ya that sound about right. Kinda finicky he is. I was never around when Ziggy was around as I am only 25. Me and my uncle Bigfoot never did much dredging together. I usually dredged with Fritz and Phil. My uncle Bigfoot used to have three claims Hermit Bar, One right at the third campground, and one past Bill and Hildy's house and above the old damn down there. He has since sold the farthest one down river to a guy named Bill from NY. I tell ya, it's deep water to dredge in down there but he has found a lot of good gold down there. I was just down at the river moving rock at hermits bar. I sure wish I could get to some of that bedrock beneath the old ancient river above the road right there. I did some panning during the summer across the river just below Pete's where the draw is. Unfortunatly I had an encounter with a bear cub coming down to the river.

 

[EagleDown]

Yeah, while I was in Florida, back in the seventies, I had a dream about that dam. The funny thing about it was, I had never been to that spot, and never had seen the dam.

But, I dreamed that I was dredging a deep hole under the dam and had filled 2 five gallon buckets with nuggets. I lifted the buckets by the handles and carried them up the slope to where only my head was out of the water. I was checking out all the surrounding hills just knowing there were a bunch of people watching, and waiting for me to carry the buckets up to my truck. Then I woke up in a cold sweat. (Of course, while awake, I knew I couldn't carry that much gold.) (lol)

When I came back to CA, I took a walk with Bigfoot and Fritz McCrea down to the North Fork. When we got to the dam, Bigfoot looked, then turned to us and said; "Would you look at that, I bet there's buckets of gold in that hole"! (lol)

(I just figured out which Fritz you were asking about.) Fritz was the friend that put me on to Bagby and later suggested trying below Briceburg. I only lived a block from him and Donna down South. As a matter of fact, he was one of two friends that I took to my lost gulch near Palmdale. (The other was John Voltzer.) If I ever get my Explorer fixed up, I'll be making a trip up that way. Maybe we can get together and I can show you some of the places I found over the years.

Eagle

 

[EagleDown]

~~~\/~~~

Now you see it, Now you don’t

It was about 8:30am by the time I got suited up and down to my dredge. I was getting a little anxious, so it didn’t take me long to gas up, put on my full face mask and weight belt. I made sure that the dredge was placed in the right spot, so that I could reach the boulders easily. I had two 5 gallon “jerry cans” of fuel on the dredge so that when one ran out, all I had to do was climb aboard the floats, pull the gas hose from one can and stick it down into the other one, fire the dredge up, and go back to dredging. (A matter of about 5 minutes.)

So, finally, I fired the engine up and slid off of the float and dropped to the bottom. As it turned out, the large boulders were sitting on the bed-rock, on the down-river edge of the deep hole. When I looked at the pile of materials behind the boulders, I wasn’t quite as sure as I had been that there would be much gold trapped there. I think I could have wheeled it all off with about 4 trips with a wheelbarrow. (lol)

Well, as they say, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained”. So, I put the suction nozzle near the top of the pile and started to work. As the sand and gravel went up the hose, it left the larger rocks exposed, so I would take them and toss them over to my left, where there was nothing but exposed bed-rock. Then I would start the cycle over by going after the sand and gravel again.

It only took about an hour or so before I started seeing the bed-rock that the pile of materials had been hiding. And, OMG!! The bed-rock was dotted all over with nuggets. Talk about “picking and grinning”, this was where that phrase originated. (lol)

I had a “8 ounce” glass vial that I would take in the water with me. I had the vial well over half full, when my engine shut off. No big deal, I still had about a minutes worth of air in the reserve tank, and all I had to do was stand up and with a jump, I could easily grab the dredge floats and climb on aboard. I sat the vial on the float, so my hands would be free, then climbed on. I switched the gas line over to the other jerry can and fired the engine back up. (Boy, I loved that 16hp Honda, with it’s electric starter.) (lol)

I slipped back into the water and started back dredging. I picked up a couple of sweet nuggets……….then remembered, I had left the vial (and about 5oz of gold) sitting on the float. I jumped back up to the dredge, and guess what? NO VIAL!!

The vial had vibrated off of the dredge float and back into the river. Now, when the dredge stops running, the current will carry it back until it runs out of rope as you might know. So, when I initially fired the dredge back up, it was right on top of the pile of materials that had already passed through the sluice box. Well, look as I might, I couldn’t find the vial. So, I mentally shrugged my shoulders and got another vial out of the tool box, and went back to dredging, figuring I’d go through the pile behind the dredge later.

After I cleaned out all of the materials and gold from behind the boulders, I noticed that the clean bed-rock sloped down towards the over-burden where I was dredging when Bud showed up the day before. So, I edged over that way and started dredging out the loose over-burden until I got to the spot where the hard pack met with the bed-rock. Another glorious sight!

Where the hard pack and the bed-rock met, it looked like a golden necklace. There were no nuggets more than about a pennyweight, but for about 3 feet, the ones that were there were literally touching one another. All in all, from behind the boulders and this gold necklace, I picked up over 6 ounces of gold, plus the 5 or so ounces I lost when the vial fell off of the float.

No, I never found that vial. By the time I finished cleaning the area of hard pack at bed-rock, it was late in the afternoon and I was tired. Frankly, as much as I love finding gold, the having was never as important as the finding. (lol)

I got tied up on other things and by the time I could have brought the dredge back to the area, I really wasn’t interested enough to bother with it.

~~~\/~~~

During the trip to the Merced I made this last August, I checked out the area that this story is based on. I could see that a tremendous amount of materials has moved down the river since the last time I was there. (1985)

The “deep hole” is all filled in with boulders and the boulders that I dredged behind are almost buried in over-burden. BUT, I could still see them when the sun was at the right angle. Unfortunately, now I believe it would take 3 or 4 days with a six inch dredge to accomplish what I did back then in one day.
But then, going by how much materials have been moved in the intervening years, it would be well worth it. Those big boulders are high enough that I’m sure that they are still catching gold.

Eagle

 

[EagleDown]

Hmmm, No comments/questions??

Kinda makes me wonder if anyone wants to read about more of my experiences.

I still have more, i.e.; My research on:
The "Mariposa $50 gold slugs".
An old mine with very visible gold in-situ.
My trip into the King Solomon.
A Civil War cache in (near) Mariposa.
A creek with "pickers" showing, after every rain.

And more.........

Eagle

 

[diggemall]

Eagle;

You keep posting, we'll keep reading.

I, for one, find your stories interesting, even though I know I'll never be in the area(s) you reference to put any of the info to any use.



Diggem'

 

[Wheresthegoodstuff]

Hey Eagledown,

Keep your stories coming. Really enjoy readying your posts, I am subscribed to this post, so that whenever you post a new story I get an email.

Wheresthegoodstuff

 

[EagleDown]

Eagle;

You keep posting, we'll keep reading.

I, for one, find your stories interesting, even though I know I'll never be in the area(s) you reference to put any of the info to any use.



Diggem'

Hey Eagledown,

Keep your stories coming. Really enjoy readying your posts, I am subscribed to this post, so that whenever you post a new story I get an email.

Wheresthegoodstuff

Thanks guys! I guess I'm human after all, I still like to know that I'm appreciated.

Eagle