20 Forgotten Depression-Era Tricks Men Used to Hunt for Gold That Are Illegal Today

Subscribe to the channel: ‪@ForgottenDepressionEraSkills‬ In the winter of nineteen thirty three, a young cowhand named David Lavender climbed up to the Camp Bird Mine above Ouray, Colorado, and signed on underground for five dollars a day. He had punched cattle for thirty dollars a month, and in the third winter of the Great Depression five dollars a day was a kind of miracle. Across the high country a strange thing was happening that the histories forgot. While a quarter of the country stood in breadlines and banks failed at sixteen a business day, the gold camps were booming. Autos crawled up the canyons with pans and shovels lashed to the bundles, whole families riding toward the diggings, and one mine up Mosquito Gulch alone worked a hundred and seventy men. The country was broke, and the one thing whose price the government was about to more than double was gold. The men who answered that call were not fools. Most carried a little vial of silver liquid they called quicksilver, and a hundred old tricks for coaxing color out of cold ground. Almost every one of those tricks would land you in a courtroom today. One of them, the trick we reach at number twelve, could kill a man at his own kitchen stove without his ever spending a flake of the gold. And by number two, you will hear how scientists in our own century proved that what these men poured into the rivers is still down there, ninety years on. This is the story of how an entire trade became a crime. Let us start the long climb down, at number twenty.