"You'd not think that a bunch of coyotes and a flock of sheep would ever discover one of the best placers in the far west," said the mining broker. "But they did."
"You see, it is this way. Cattle are very poor eaters of grass, leaving it long and ragged. Horses can follow cattle and get enough to eat out of the short grass the cattle would starve on. And sheep crop the very closest of all, eating the grass right down to the roots."
"Well, sir, there was a Mexican herder - Pedro Cortina - I think his name was - and he use to take his sheep to the big country in the mountains of California, where there was the very finest grass. His flock grew and prospered, and then the cattlemen wanted the valley. They tried to drive Cortina away, but couldn't. Finally they decided that a good sheepman could only be made the same way a good Indian could be made., so they raided the big valley one day and killed Cortina and killed off all the sheep they could find, leaving them there on the ground."
As soon as the grass was grown the cattlemen turned in their herds, and the cowboys camped in the valley to tend the cattle. One of the cowboys kicked a skull one day and a strange gleaam caught his eye on the jawbone of the sheep. He stopped and looked at it closely. Every tooth had a thick rim of gold around it, crammed tightly between the sharp little cropping teeth at the front jaw. The gold was a solid mass, soldering all the rings together, as it were.
"This man got the gold fever and started from skull to skull, picking the gold out with the sharp point of his knife blade till he had collected quite a pile of dust and little nuggets of fine gold. Then he began to wonder where the gold came from.
He began to see the light after a few days of thinking and decided that the sheep had cropped up dirt from the grass roots and that the pure gold particles had stuck together under the pressure of chewing the cropped grass and had worked up just under the gums of the animals' mouth, where it was more or less protected against being worn off by the grit from other grazing done by the flock." "Pure gold, you know," said the broker, "is perfectly soft, like lead, and it doesn't corrode. A very slight presure will weld pure gold particles together fiarly strongly. The Mexican's sheep had been doing a little mining without knowing it."
The upshot of the whole affair was that the cattle watcher and his assistant tried panning out along the little stream that ran down the valley and they struck the very finest of pay dirt, cleaning up $100 to $250 a day.
"One of them wandered out to the nearest town for a drink with his dust. He talked a little too much, and his dust excited suspicion, so a couple of men trailed him back to the valley in the mountains. A regular stampede started for the Eldorado, and in about five days the peaceful valley was alive with miners, and their tents dotted it from one end to the other. This all took place some years ago, and the placer is worked out now."----New York Press---Aug. 1921