I've not done any gold panning, although I would have if I had any interest in gold. Reportedly, I live in a gold area. Starting in the 1500's and 1600's, European prospectors reported gold in all of the rivers heading in the Appalachian Mountains,
In the 1920's, an Indian family passed through the town I grew up in, and camped there a few days. The old Grandfather of the family stated after looking around a bit that if he lived here, he would shoe his horses with gold, there was so much of it present in his estimation.
The Indians around the time of the Jamestowne settlement had a copper mine several miles east of here. The Shawnee Indians had a silver mine somewhere in northeastern Kentucky, several miles west of here, Somewhere around a short-lived Shawnee town named Eskippakithiki, but diligent searches have never turned it up - only the Shawnees know where it was, and they aren't telling.
Some Long Hunters reported, in the latter half of the 1700's, that there was a mountain in eastern Kentucky that never had snow at the top of it, even in the deepest winter. It's known there are uranium deposits here, and the speculation is that the snow melted due to the heat of the radioactive decay of uranium from a particularly rich deposit. Background levels of radiation in this section of the Appalachians is 11 times the average levels in most of the rest of the country.
I know that in this immediate area where I now live, there are deposits of coal, salt, and iron. These hillsides where I sit are shot through with abandoned coal mines, some of which still show coal seams if you're bold enough to go in after it. Roadside cuts frequently show coal seams, anywhere from 1 foot to 12 feet thick. This area of the Appalachians was originally settled by the Sword brothers, who came here because they were Long Hunters, and the hunting was good due to the proliferation of salt licks all over this area. A nearby community is named "Swords Creek" after the Sword brothers. And, in the creek at the foot of my mountain, you can see rust form on the banks when the water is low from all of the iron being leached out of the ground and washed downstream.
In the Corner Settlement where I grew up, 20 miles or so from here, I did find a couple of small veins of gold in the limestone-quartzite bedrocks of the area, but I always left them where I found them, and didn't tell anyone that I had found anything. They were pretty tiny anyhow, not worth the bother of trying to pry them out to me, but if I told anyone, we'd have been swarmed with riches-hunters trying to tear everything up for the gold that might or might not be found in larger veins.
So, there is no shortage of minerals here, and I have reason to believe that gold and silver are among them. I just don't have any interest in "precious" metals. If I were to pan and find any, word would get out if I tried to cash it in, and next thing you know we'd be swamped with outsiders trying to pan their own... and then there goes the neighborhood. I'd rather have the land and what's on it - and peace of mind - than have outsiders trying to rape it for what is IN it. We saw that story a hundred or 150 years ago when the outsiders came in, raped the land for it's coal, and left us with nothing but misery. They eventually moved on for greener pastures after depleting this one, like a swarm of locusts... and took all the wealth with them when they left, leaving us for dead.. I've no desire to see that repeated.
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In the 1920's, an Indian family passed through the town I grew up in, and camped there a few days. The old Grandfather of the family stated after looking around a bit that if he lived here, he would shoe his horses with gold, there was so much of it present in his estimation.
The Indians around the time of the Jamestowne settlement had a copper mine several miles east of here. The Shawnee Indians had a silver mine somewhere in northeastern Kentucky, several miles west of here, Somewhere around a short-lived Shawnee town named Eskippakithiki, but diligent searches have never turned it up - only the Shawnees know where it was, and they aren't telling.
Some Long Hunters reported, in the latter half of the 1700's, that there was a mountain in eastern Kentucky that never had snow at the top of it, even in the deepest winter. It's known there are uranium deposits here, and the speculation is that the snow melted due to the heat of the radioactive decay of uranium from a particularly rich deposit. Background levels of radiation in this section of the Appalachians is 11 times the average levels in most of the rest of the country.
I know that in this immediate area where I now live, there are deposits of coal, salt, and iron. These hillsides where I sit are shot through with abandoned coal mines, some of which still show coal seams if you're bold enough to go in after it. Roadside cuts frequently show coal seams, anywhere from 1 foot to 12 feet thick. This area of the Appalachians was originally settled by the Sword brothers, who came here because they were Long Hunters, and the hunting was good due to the proliferation of salt licks all over this area. A nearby community is named "Swords Creek" after the Sword brothers. And, in the creek at the foot of my mountain, you can see rust form on the banks when the water is low from all of the iron being leached out of the ground and washed downstream.
In the Corner Settlement where I grew up, 20 miles or so from here, I did find a couple of small veins of gold in the limestone-quartzite bedrocks of the area, but I always left them where I found them, and didn't tell anyone that I had found anything. They were pretty tiny anyhow, not worth the bother of trying to pry them out to me, but if I told anyone, we'd have been swarmed with riches-hunters trying to tear everything up for the gold that might or might not be found in larger veins.
So, there is no shortage of minerals here, and I have reason to believe that gold and silver are among them. I just don't have any interest in "precious" metals. If I were to pan and find any, word would get out if I tried to cash it in, and next thing you know we'd be swamped with outsiders trying to pan their own... and then there goes the neighborhood. I'd rather have the land and what's on it - and peace of mind - than have outsiders trying to rape it for what is IN it. We saw that story a hundred or 150 years ago when the outsiders came in, raped the land for it's coal, and left us with nothing but misery. They eventually moved on for greener pastures after depleting this one, like a swarm of locusts... and took all the wealth with them when they left, leaving us for dead.. I've no desire to see that repeated.
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