lilorphanannie
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El lobo and spanish gold //////// this book that more than any other that ignited my interest in terms of lost mines and treasure. It is a lightly written biography about a man named Richard Thompson authored by C.E. Ricketts. I spent several years in a mining camp located in northwest Sonora state in the early 90’s. I was part of an exploration team hired by an individual investor from Seattle. We had claimed some 90 thousand acres of desert and were testing to hopefully block out an ore body of gold placer. The place is named La Cienega, its orginal name was San Idlefonso de La Cienega. The area around La Cienega is the richest area that I know of in the world for gold placer. I know that’s a big statement but I challenge anyone to prove it wrong. I am not saying commercially economic, but in my travels exploring for gold placer I have seen nothing to compare and Ive been to 17 countries searching. The problem is logistics and the lack of water. But the gold is there. I understand an Australian company is working a placer there extracting some 600 kilos per year. If you google ‘the boot of Cortez’ you will see a large gold nugget some 389 ounces sold a while back at Heritage auctions in Dallas. It is claimed to be the largest nugget found in this hemisphere ,which can be argued. The small community of La Cienega had @ 80 inhabitants while I lived there. These people made their living with cattle and by nugget hunting. As the dayime temperatures usually exceeded 118 , they would set out at first light and nugget detect until @ 11am. In order to maintain harmony we set up a buying office with calculator and scales and agreed to buy all the gold they recovered at spot price. As I was the only employee fluent in Spanish I was the appointed buyer. Each night after digging test pits in the desert I would come back to my camp trailer to see a line of 10 to 50 people waiting for me. People were coming from ranches far off of our claim to sell their gold. It was 3 hours of washboard dirt road to town and almost impossible to make a run without a blowout for the extremely sharp rocks. And most people did not want to go to town. The people trusted me totally and I developed true lasting friendships . I was even offered a free house in the town and ejido membership. A rough guess on my part is that I purchased some $500k in gold nuggets at $9/gram. Which was the going price at that time. I truly believe there are underground layers there that contain several hundred million dollars in gold in a rectangular cube say 100 x 100 x 12 feet. Those deposits will never be worked as they don’t fit any textbook placer model that will support its economic viability. ////// Anyway, our camp was well financed and I had my own camp trailer. In the front room was my lab and scales etc. along with a small library of books that the investors personal assistant had purchased. All of the books were relevant to some degree to the area we were working and to the state of Sonora in general. I read them all . I was especially intrigued by the above mentioned book ,and as I read and reread I realized the area where he lived and worked was the actual La Cienega where I was at. I began to try to put together anything I could extract as factual in the book and see if I could coroberate anything. As most who read the book consider it largely fictional, but I was living right where the central part of the book was written, and I was free on Sundays. Well ,little by little I was able to confirm many parts of the chapters in the book. The book is not a treasure book but alludes to many “clues “that suggest treasure type or valuable findings”. In the end, I was able to contact the writer, I also met with and interviewed two elderly ladies in the village who remembered Don Ricardo. I was also able to trace his wife of the La Cienega chapters to an Indian reservation in Arizona. Also a grandson from another marriage who lives in the states and possesses much of his grandfather’s information. He is trying to get someone interested enough to make a movie about his grandfather’s life. Also in La Cienega I was able to track down the mining claim originally concessioned orginally to Don Teodoro Salazar , the Teodorina mine. I eventually found this mine. The mining investor I worked for formed a stock company ,and raised money by promoting mining claims, as many of these companies do, they abandoned the claim and moved their activities to Alaska. To this day they have not extracted one ounce of gold . I quit on principle and returned to Colombia where my family was. But I returned some six months later to La Cienega and built a headframe to drop down into the legendary and fabulously rich Teodorina mine. The vertical shaft was @ 90 feet deep and that was all I could see from above. Once I got to the bottom I saw that the horizontal tunnel was backfilled. I had no idea how much backfill there was and eventually had to give up. The information I had indicated another shaft , I circumnavigated the area for several weeks and could not find evidence of another entrance. There was more information available at the state historical society and the mining office ,but I had run out of time and called it a day. As time went by I returned to Mexico to live and work. In my spare time I followed up on any lead in the book relative to where I was working at the time and until I hit a dead end. My primary interest were mining leads not treasure leads. Several of the areas where Richard Thompson had claimed are now active working mines. I also made considerable progress on the chapter 11 entitled treasure cave. I was able to track down decendents of the warloard Saturnino Cedillo ,one who is now a judge in Chicago (go figure) and a granddaughter. I was also able to find the opal mine verified by the unique german surname and by visiting the ranches able to find the entrance to the tunnel. I corresponded with historians ,authors on the life of Cedillo and locals . Once again the story appears to be largely true. I realized that the undertaking not only for properly and safely exploring the tunnel was way out of my means so I put the project on the back shelf as they say. I am not intimidated by caves or tunnels as I have entered and mapped over 150., but this one if theres still anything there ,the logistics would be way over my head. And as time has passed I have been fortunate enough to find easier and satisfactorily profitable “projects”. But in closing the leads I followed up on in this book were true. Although they were not written as leads and therefore seem vague. I actually did much more research than I have mentioned here ,there are stories within the story .but this is the gist of it, reference to this book which many who read it consider fiction.
