From "Treasure State Treasure Tales" by Jean Moore 1950:
WAS THE STOLEN BOULDER A NUGGET?
In 1867, a new mining camp in what was later called the Phillipsburg area was born and christened Cable in honor of the second transatlantic cable. It competed with its sister camps such as Bannack and Virginia City, offering new opportunities to strike it rich. Too many disappointed prospectors quickly made a rush to the new camp.
Cable soon became noted for its extremely rich ore which brought in many high-graders, or gold smugglers. It was not difficult for the high-graders to conceal pieces of the rich ore on their person; and it was said that many smugglers were able to retire from this illegal business, which made honesty a very unrewarding virtue.
Cable contributed many interesting chapters to Montana mining, and the story of the stolen boulder is one of them. As treasure stories in general have a habit of varying with the years, so the Cable boulder story has varied in the number of characters involved, the date of its disappearance, and other minor incidents.
Accepting the most popular version, two miners, whose names have evidently not been remembered, hired out as miners at the Cable Quartz Lode in 1868; but they were fired when it was disclosed that their mining experience had not exceeded that of panning a little gravel from a stream.
Instead of leaving the camp when their jobs were terminated, the two ex-miners hung around for some time. They asked peculiar questions of the assayer, such as the size of the largest nugget ever found in the world; how a person would dispose of a huge negative found; and what would be the required statements in relation to ownership of such a valuable object?
The assayer asked his questioners if they had found such a treasure; but they just laughed and shook their heads. “Why don’t you wait to do your worrying until after you find one then,” he said, and he heard no more from the men who left camp shortly after the conversation.
A short time after their departure, a man who worked in the Cable Quartz Lode described a boulder so heavy it couldn’t be moved by a man’s strength. It was so heavy, in fact, that it was impossible to even start rolling, he said. He enlisted the help of two men, and the three of them managed to push it out of the way.
At the boarding house that evening, one of the men mentioned the heavy rock, and the other boarder showed considerable curiosity and asked to see the boulder. The miner took them to the site, but the huge rock had completely and mysteriously disappeared. How it was taken from the mine, by whom, and where it went – these things were never solved.
The men were quite certain now that the boulder was really a big nugget. All agreed that plans to remove the boulder from the mine must’ve been carried out while the miners had been eating and that several men must have been in on the clever, well-timed planning. One of the miners recalled the two men who had asked so many questions about nuggets. Had they somehow returned and managed to remove the boulder, or nugget?
As far as solving the mystery of the disappearance….it would have been quite impossible to trace even a huge nugget to its original source after it had been broken up.
In 1889, W.A. Clark paid $10,000 for a nugget taken from the Cable Quartz Lode and called “the largest nugget in the world.” If the heavy rock not been stolen, Clark’s nugget might have been called “the second largest nugget in the world.”
