Chapter II

We were from the same small town, LaGrange Idaho. LaGrange was settled in the late 1800's as a part of the mineral explorations of that time. There were deposits of all kinds of minerals in the area, some all mixed together. The major discoveries had happened in the 1860's with occasional small discoveries later. Mostly silver, but occasionally mixed with gold, or very rarely deposits of gold. Some placer mining was done in the streams around town, and a few men made enough to move into town and settle down but for the most part it was hard rock mining, a difficult and dangerous profession. I hear that the population during the boom years was over 10,000, but after the inevitable bust, the population stabilized at about 2,500. It never has wandered very far from that number. People come, people go, but that part of the country just seems to have a natural level of population it can support. People come into the area for the skiing, the fishing, the hunting and the hiking. They take a deep breath of that crisp mountain air and tell themselves: This is where I want to spend the rest of my life, or retire, or raise my kids, or start my business. They sell their house in the suburbs, and buy a little place in town, completely unprepared for what living out here really means. Mostly it means fixing what you have, jerry rigging equipment, and doing it yourself. They last about five years, go broke, sell their little Boutique or Shoppe and go back where they came from. If you haven't been here for ten years, you are still the new guy in town. If you don't quite click, it could take a lifetime. People are slow to trust, and loyal to the end.
The town got its name from a mountain just outside town known locally as "Old Baldy". When viewed at a certain time of day someone thought it resembled New Grange, in Ireland, one of the oldest buildings in the world. Older even than the pyramids and Stonehenge.
My great- grandfather, Seamus O'Neal, came into this country a little behind the main wave of immigration out of Ireland. A Paddy in the company of a band of Cousin Jacks, he hired on at the largest mining operation in town, glad to have steady work. By all accounts he was a loud, opinionated, fiery little Irishman who never met a man or a bottle he didn't like. He worked hard in the mines, played hard in the taverns and cribs.
When he had a day off, he would occasionally head off into the hills prospecting. It had been a couple of years since anyone had found anything of significance, so people didn't take his prospecting very seriously. The area he was going over seemed pretty barren, and the formations didn't quite "look right". But Seamus had noticed a fold in the rock that was only visible from across the valley at one particular spot. Although he had noticed the fold from afar, finding it was another thing when you were up on the mountain fighting the buckbrush.
Finally, one day as he rounded a corner on a ridge, Seamus saw the formation he had been looking for. The area here millions of years a go had been the bottom of a vast sea. The current mountains had pushed their way up through the deposits left by that ancient sea, cracking them and pushing them aside, where they weathered away. Very rarely the sedimentary formations remained intact in small blocks. The volcanic activity percolated up through the porous and fractured stone, depositing whatever minerals were in the magma into the holes in the stone. Usually they deposited quartz (some in a beautiful purple color, some a nice smoky tone) mixed with pyrites. Occasionally, gold would percolate up and form spiderweb traces in the crumbly rock. Here on the back corner of the ridge, a portion of and old sedimentary chimney had slumped off from the cliff behind. Right at the base of the cliff where it had separated was a hole in the rock, but a very likely looking hole. It went straight down, and it was impossible to tell how far it was straight down. He dropped a rock, and it almost immediately hit stone, although it rolled downhill for a quite a while after that. It couldn't be more than ten feet to whatever solid rock was down there.
Like most prospectors, he carried a hunk of rope with him. There wasn't a handy tree anywhere close to tie off to, so he took his pick and jammed it sideways in a crack in the rock, then beat on it with a rock until it was wedged. Tying off to the rope, he lowered himself down the hole. He landed on a sharply sloping pile of scree, which went down and forward for about sixty feet. From there he couldn't tell if it continued. Throwing rocks down the slope wasn't real conclusive. It was just too dark to really see and the echoes made it just about impossible to determine the extent of the hole. He decided to go back to town and get his miner's lamp and return.
He climbed up the rope and out into the daylight. As he dusted himself off, he caught a slight glimmer on his pants where he wiped his hands. On closer examination it appeared to be flakes of gold.
Seamus went in to town and very quietly filed a hard rock claim on the area he had been prospecting. Understanding his own proclivity for drink, he wanted to nail things down as quickly as possible, just in case he had a few and just had to tell someone. Besides he really didn't know anything at this point. That didn't keep him from sharing with his friends that he "had something going" on a hot new prospect. Since Seamus was known for telling creative versions of the truth, in which he figured prominently, people didn't take him very seriously.
The next time he had a day off, Seamus loaded up his mining gear and headed up into the hills. He took an indirect way to his claim, checking his back trail occasionally just to make sure no one was following him. Two years before a couple of unsavory characters had attempted to hijack a claim by shanghaiing the owner and trying to file on top of his existing claim. He thought they were maybe remnants of the old Plummer Gang. You had to be careful when it came to gold. People got crazy around the stuff.
When he arrived at his claim, he carefully marked the "corners" and put a rock pile close to the hole with a brief description of the claim with the registration information on it in a can in the middle of the pile. He wanted to make sure things were all up to snuff.
When he was done marking his claim, he lit up his miner's light and went down in the hole. It seemed to be about sixty feet long, sloping sharply to the north. It was not a cave as such, just a big crack between the rocks. He very carefully climbed down the slope to see how far it extended. It pinched out at the North end and there was no indication there was anything more to it. As he turned to climb back up the slope, the beam from his miner's light splayed across the east face of the rock. It returned a gleam of golden wires across a large section of the wall. In a vein of quartz, the wires of gold were easy to spot. In a game where gold content was measures in ounces per ton of ore, this was unbelievably rich. But since this was a chunk broken off of the hillside, it couldn't be more than a couple of feet through. Maybe the piece of what it had broken off of was above somewhere. There would be enough time to figure that out later. Using a single jack and a drill, he loosened a piece out of the cliff face about the size of two big fists, put it in his pack, collected up his tools, and climbed out of the hole.
When he got to town he headed straight for the Assay Office to get his sample assayed. It was, indeed gold, and the one chunk he had in his hand was worth about $150.00. It was some of the richest ore he had ever heard of. Given that the area of the face of rock he had seen was a bout 10 feet square he figured a little math in his head and thought that he should be able to take about $25,000.00 out of there, and that was a conservative estimate.
Jack Langston was tending bar at the Passtime Saloon like usual when Seamus walked in. Seamus walked up to the barkeep and said "Jack I've done a lot of business with you, these last couple of years, and I've always thought of you as an honest man. Well tonight I am going to test that honesty a little." With that he plunked his chunk of rock on the bar and said, "First off, I'd like to buy a drink for the house. Then I want the best beefsteak you can stir up, and the best bottle you have behind the bar. Not the stuff on the shelf, but the stuff I see you bring out from under the bar when the rich folk are visiting. I'll be wanting a room for the night and a companionable lass. I want to drink until I've had me fill, and I expect someone to take me up to my room. You can keep a reasonable fee for yourself, but tomorrow I'd like to know what I paid for.”
The next morning he woke up with a big head, and it felt like his nerves were more or less on the outside of his skin. It hurt to think. There was a bottle of the good stuff on the night stand, and a couple of stiff shots took the edges off of the morning.
He went up to the Glory Hole mine where he had been working and told the foreman he was quitting, and they could keep his pay. He was now a self-employed man with his own business concerns to take care of.