Word: prospectors
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Fool's Silver. Albina Rodriguez had shocked her family and friends by marrying Simon Patino, son of a Spanish-Indian cobbler. Simon, the underpaid clerk of a German merchant, promptly got fired and had to make good on a $250 credit he had advanced to a prospector who had found, not silver, but "worthless" tin in the Andes...
Died. Major Frederick Russell Burnham, 86, oldtime Indian scout, Klondike prospector, soldier of fortune; of coronary thrombosis; in Santa Barbara, Calif. At various times a cowboy, stagecoach-guard and deputy sheriff, Burnham fought in campaigns against the Apaches, in South Africa's bloody Matabele Wars (which he virtually ended singlehanded by killing the Matabele god M'Limo in a cave), and in the Boer War. Back home in California, he struck it rich in the oil business, spent the rest of his life in prosperous comfort...
...good way to find hidden minerals may be to study the plants and trees that grow in the neighborhood. In the current Mining and Metallurgy, Finnish Geochemist Kalervo Rankama tells why vegetation is a prospector's friend...
...plants as mineral "indicators" is still a new science. When it is further developed, a prospector will have to know botany as well as geology. For example, if he finds a plant called Amorpha canescens growing where little else grows, he will have a good hint that the rock beneath the roots is worth investigating for lead...
High on the chill slopes of Bolivia's 12,000-ft. altiplano, a cholo (half-Indian) store clerk one day let a prospector settle a $250 account for a claim to a tin mine. The clerk's boss, outraged by the deal, gave him the claim and made him pay the bill. That was how, at the turn of the century, cholo Simón I. Patiño got into the tin business. For years, he and his sinewy wife wielded picks, hauled up buckets, smashed ore. By 1910, they were rich...