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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldsheet who wrote (81159)	1/26/2002 6:33:58 PM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 116790

I will give it to you. People say Scott, Wimmer, Wimmer-Marshall, Liz Wimmer. But nobody except Marshall says Marshall. It is clear he was in on it. They must have co-operated. Liz says she told the boys from 1846 that flecks were gold. If she had lived in placer country she would know. And they would ignore her, being a woman. That is how ape clans work. Greybeards rule, women are ignored. Marshall taking credit and trying to take Gregson's share is standard boss stuff. I never believe that. Even Captain Cook, would have ended up on the rocks except for his understudy, William Bligh. (Bligh later proved he was the navigator who did it, not Cook by sailing 4000 miles in an open boat.) They are forgetting the Indians. People know the Indians knew prior about gold. There were ten there and some Mormon soldiers, not named. Salt Lake City area has gold too. I have it that it was the Indians and Mormons who pointed the likelihood of gold, with Wimmer being a presence of reminder. (The Mormons were quick as a whip to want to work the beds. That proves they had learned something.) Marshall Bennet, Gregson and Wimmer must have got together to search the sluice, perhaps even locating the mill where they had heard reports of gold. Liz Wimmer's nagging on the ssubject, gold being found in placers by the Spanish in 1842, may have precipitated the venture. Nobody mentions the government geologists, who later showed up uncommon fast (Humphreys) when the gold was found. A party had gone up the Sacramento and mapped in 1847. They had carried the reports of gold. Also if any Cornishmen had seen the quartz in the hills he would have guessed gold washed out of it pretty fast and had his pan out. If Liz had grown up in Georgia she would have panned with a dinner plate in any likely black gravel whenever she did the dish and clothes wash. One report I heard was that Marshall or Wimmer had predicted the likelihood of gold and were testing the head of the tail race for that purpose. That the boys could bring up gold dust as Mrs. Gregson relates is not trivial. Another report has the group being told how to mine placer and test for gold sometime after the discovery. Only Wimmer is supposed to have seen sluicing techniques. They have to know that. Most people haven't got a clue how a sluice operates or where and how to pick up the gold. They gathered 3 ounce of pure gold in a short time. They had to run the sluice, rake and clear it, clean it up and pan the heads to pure gold. That is not that ABC if you have never done it. Someone had to show them. If you don't know the first thing about panning you have to be shown. The Cornish have a whole language for it. When you get to a concentrate you "pitch up" the "tail" of the gold. It is called a tail because in the water stream it forms a tail, but you look at the head of the tail for the gold. Don't ask me why they say that. Wimmer knew how to test for gold with soap. Sutter had Aqua Regia which dissolves gold on hand as a "matter of course". Sutter tried to get the leases for the land and failed. He was a Swiss. The Swiss have panned placer gold in their country for 4000 years since Celtic times. They have an uncommon dependence on gold as monetary value to this day and still pan for gold here and there. I wonder if Sutter's mill crew were not less fortuitous than has been related. The man who made the most money in the California gold rush sold shovels to the miners. EC<:-}