Howdy folks I'm Hank Sheffer and welcome to another true life story right here with Larry
Hendrick on Mysteries of the Superstition mountains in 1957 while I was on leave from
the military my dad decided he wanted to go to California and meet with his sisters
I had never met my aunts because I was a babe in arms and the photographs that I see in our albums
and I never knew any of them until we made on this trip
but after we were through meeting our my aunts and stuff we came back to Arizona and
spent a week or two here in mesa Arizona and dad evidently knew something about
he had to carry offs about mining and stuff so he decided we'd take a trip up to Wickenburg
of course this is where rich hill was found where nuggets as big as hens eggs were picked up off the
ground for many years and we went northeast of uh Wickenburg until we found a little dirt road and
we followed it it turned into a wash and he was driving a Pontiac station wagon and we drove down
this wash for a couple of miles and found this old timer sitting on an upside down bucket alongside
the wash he was very friendly and it seemed like he just was very happy to talk to people and he
and dad was asking him some questions and he just opened right up and spilled the beans so to speak
what he had done is he explained that he was working old mind tailings from mines that were
uh operated in in the 1800s and these tailings were just nothing but dirt piled in there and
what he'd done is taken he'd carved underneath the tailings and dug a big hole back into the bank
and he took ordinary tin cans with the lids off of them and put them in there to where they all
was touching each other and he you might have had about a hundred of these ten cans
stacked underneath this this uh mine tailings and he would wait till it got a heavy rain and then
he would come back and and dig those out and pan them and he was doing this to several different
dumps and he he demonstrated dad asked him well how do you how do you get the gold out of there
and he demonstrated the whole thing there was no water in the wash but in his vehicle he had a 10
gallon cream can full of water and then he had this bucket that he was sitting on and he would
he filled the bucket with water and he took his pan and he scooped up some sand out of
the wash he reached in his little pouch and took a pinch of gold and dropped it in the
in the pan and then just put it down in the bucket and done all of his
his uh panning right there in the bucket and sure enough before very long that you could see the
gold down there then he had a bottle that he took out and he dropped a little bit of mercury in this
pan and rolled it around and the gold stuck to the mercury then he would take his his uh
mercury bottle and he had a cloth that I don't know what it was but it looked like
a handkerchief but I'm sure it wasn't because I can't get mercury to run through a handkerchief
but he poked it down in the cloth down into the bottle poured the mercury in the cloth the
mercury went through the cloth the gold stayed in the cloth and he put it back in his pouch
it was the darnedest thing you ever saw and it was just amazing how this old-timer was
making a living out there he was just crusty as could be how he was making his liver and
out there in the desert just working these old mine shafts now I don't think that's a
Mystery the Superstition Mountains but boy it was sure a mystery how that got done
thank you for watching this episode of Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains