Word: goldings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...been worked almost continuously for more than a century, ever since 1876, when two brothers, Moses and Fred Manuel, first stumbled on a promising vein of quartz in the Black Hills schist. The mine's total yield to date adds up to about 10% of all the gold ever mined in the U.S. (an estimated 325 million...
...Homestake contribution could be encompassed in a solid gold cube 12 ft. to a side, worth at present prices about $10 billion. But at Homestake, the road to El Dorado is mostly dark, deep, hot and dirty. The gold keeps getting harder to find and the tunnels and shafts grow deeper and longer. There are now 250 miles of underground cart tracks, and some shafts plunge so deep toward the earth's molten core that the temperature reaches 135° F. Expenses go on rising. It now costs $200 to extract each ounce of Homestake gold. That is high...
Contract miners like Aberle and Burns rarely see the gold they dig, which is usually invisible to the naked eye. Like other miners at Homestake, they get paid only for the volume of rock they shake loose and ship out - plus an hourly bonus based on fluctuations in the price of gold. (In the past month the bonus has nearly doubled, from 310 to 570 an hour. The daily gold rate, chalked on dimly lit blackboards deep under the earth, is watched by miners as keenly as it is by the gnomes of Zurich...
...guys working their butts off and not making any money," says Burns. The alternative to working on a contract team is to hire out at a flat $7.50 an hour in support jobs like motorman or cage operator. Adds Burns: "If you're going to mine gold, you might as well make money at it." Aberle agrees. But as they call it a day after 7½ hrs. underground and start on the regular 40-min. commute upward to the surface, he ponders some roads not taken. Says he: "And I always wanted to be a wilderness guide...
...Gold fever, the most infectious of monetary diseases during times of perceived economic distress and uncertainty, is epidemic. From Zurich to Chicago, from London to Hong Kong, goldbugs are scurrying once again to buy into their favorite hedge against disaster. With people battered by inflation and recession, worried about oil and lacking confidence in leaders and cures, the gold rush of '79 has turned into a stampede as schoolboys, housewives and pensioners have jumped in along with big investors. It is a surge that bodes little good for late-coming, small investors, the fragile international monetary system, the dollar...