StrangerThan
Posts: 1515
Joined: 4/25/2008
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I grew up in Western North Carolina which prior to the California gold rush was the largest gold producing state in the union. One my outdoorsy human interest pieces I did for a magazine was on panning gold. It was fun. I ended up with like... oh maybe 4-5 flakes.
North Carolina also has a decent amount of corrundum, which is the base for rubies and sapphires. Ruby = red. All the other colors = sapphire. I always thought sapphires were blue. Well, they are, they're also brown, purple, almost clear, a variety of colors. Almost none of these have any commercial value btw. It's just fun and something to make earrings for your daughters to keep.
NC is also home to emeralds - which have a better chance of being worth something if you find one.
http://www.internetstones.com/carolina-queen-emerald-18-8-71-north-american-emerald-mine-naem-james-k-hill.html
When I was a kid we lived a mile or two from the most cantankerous old farmer that has ever plowed a field. The word mean was invented for him I think. I'm not stretching that by much, if at all. It was common knowledge among the kids around there that he'd put a load of rock salt in your ass with no provocation past stepping across his boundary line. And that was just the mild stuff. I could write a book about that man.
Anyway, he grew corn and tobacco atop what had to be either a Cherokee burial ground or was once the site of an indian village. I'd be PC here and say native american but I got enough Cherokee in me I think to not sweat it much. And I was big on arrowheads, spearheads, all that stuff... only you had to wait until the crops were big enough to where you could crawl down the rows without him seeing you. On up past that was a place that always had odd things sticking out of the ground. I got to digging one day and discovered it to be an old trash pit from lord knows how long ago.
Upshot of it was, when it comes to childhood treasures, I had one of those.. dunno what you call them, cedar boxes that go at the end of a bed where folks used to put blankets... full of corrundum, artifacts, pottery, just about every type of chipped stone work you could imagine from axe heads to spearheads to arrowheads to those little scrapers they used to strip hides. Tossed in there with all that stuff was a ink well - dunno why anyone threw it away, it wasn't broken, an old powder horn, buttons, bits and pieces of stuff from a century or two ago at least.
My mom hated that box. She and my father were both Felix Unger types.. and it was just full of dirty things. I left home, and didn't come back for almost 10 years. Sometime later, I got to thinking about that box and asked her what happened to it. This distasteful look came across her face and she said, well it disappeared when we moved. Knowing them, disappeared meant Pop hauled it out to the woods, dumped it out and burned the box.
I still get that pack rat feeling around things like that and rocks though. So maybe I'll make up a box for my kids to go through some day. Already got one full of magazines and newspapers for them to dig through. Kind of wonder how long it will take them to realize dad has a story in every one of them.
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--'Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform' - Mark Twain
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RE: Unemployed heading to California with gold fever...... - 
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