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What the Old Time Miners Left Behind

When you are out prospecting you come across various things that nature has done and then things that the gold prospectors before us did. Sometimes both are hard to see or understand fully, it is literally decoding the past. In the days of the early gold rushes often prospectors in the desert had little resources at hand to construct or mark things compared to those miners in the high country when gold can be found in the pines. In the desert you have to keep your eyes open and think like an old timer (if that is possible). The old miners were out in the desert far from anywhere with very limited resources. All roads you find were made for one of a few possible purposes:

• 1) Economic Gain = mining, cattle or something profitable

• 2) Dwelling = safety and shelter

• 3) To connect one resource with another, mine to mill road, town to town road etc.

• 4) To gain access to another resource

I'm sure we could list a few more reasons but the ones above will do for now. So lets say you are an old gold prospector out in the desert far from anywhere with just your small supply of food and water, possible rifle, gold pan and pick, knife, rope, canvas tent, tobacco and other limited supplies you could carry via horses or mules. As you are spending your time looking for placer and lode gold you are also having to spend time finding water and food etc. as you do this you will loose a boot tack here a button there, toss out an old can or two. You are leaving workings and clues that say that you were there. You are also moving rocks, stacking rocks, making mine and prospect tailings etc.

At some point you have to leave what you have found to cash in the gold you have recovered or else it has no value. This means you also have to again return should you want more gold. This could take weeks or months so you would have to with limited resources mark your finds or your way back. In the desert you have little wood compared to the forest areas so you might use stacks of rocks to mark your claim or find or provide a route marker. That is not to say there are not plenty of trees in the desert, there are but you generally won't find them suitable for mine shaft headers etc. unless they are large ones near a spring and while those types of areas do exist the wood there is generally limited in quantity. However thick branches from Palo Verde or Mesquite Trees could be used as claim markers. You might carve into to or otherwise change the appearance of large saguaro cactus. Many miners and prospectors used rope to make markings in cactus and these can be hard to tell apart from natural growth and for the most part are now erased by time. You also might consider putting long pieces of rock into cactus, thick branches from Palo Verde or Mesquite Trees or carving into the large saguaro cactus to mark your gold prospect or that way to it. The list can go on and on for how to and how were trails and finds marked in the desert, we can't cover them all. In the forests you had much more to work with with larger trees, but this too had its own set of challenges.

The point is keep your eyes open, every piece of old trash you dig in gold country got there by some means, it means something, activity. Every dig and hand stack of rock was done purposefully. There was a reason. Anything out of the ordinary if done by man was done for a reason. Look, think, observe while you are gold prospecting in the desert and in the forest its sometime these little clues that lead to big finds.