picture in your mind a dead broke single blanket jackass prospectoridly chipping away at quartz ledges in the highArizonadesert and viewing the chips thru a magnifying glass hoping to make a strike and view the deep yellow native gold and the exhilaration that oneexperienceswhen you have discovered that ledge and the anticipation when you break off more pieces in the hope they contain that contagious yellow metal.......here from mother earth is a piece of that vein that contains native gold.....you can see the gold in some of the above photos but you may need a jewelers loupe or magnifying glass to view the gold in the ore unless your eyes are really good.....you feel that thrill that oneexperienceswhen viewing native gold closeup and perhaps there is more inside......perhaps not, its your choice to break this ore down further or not to find out .......happy trails ............ this ore weighs4.9 oz total weight and i viewed 6 spots of gold in this specimen for more information about this area please read below ......... check out my other items at stores ...... eclectic-store-e
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Historic Lost Basin/King Tut Placers
\"...the gold samples held by theUSGS from the Lost Dutchman Mine in the Superstition Mountains near Phoenix,Arizona, were identified as being from Lost Basin and they assumed that theDutchman had obtained the gold samples from Indians at Lost Basin andendeavored to hide this source by fabricating the Superstition Mountainstory.\"
W.E. Dunlop also found the King Tut Placers in 1931.\"Here, a gravel-floored plain, from 3,000 to 4,000 feet above sea level,rises southwestward between Grapevine Wash and the base of a low northwardtrending ridge locally called the Lost Basin Range,\" according to theArizona Bureau of Mines\' publication, Gold Placers and Placering Arizona,Bulletin 168. The richer gold-bearing gravels occur within an area some eightmiles long by an undetermined width and are mostly composed of slab-shapedschist pebbles. These deposits are generally less than two feet thick and restupon caliche-cemented gravels. The gold found at the King Tut Placers occurspartly as fine material and partly as flat, rugged nuggets that are known torange up to one-sixteenth of an ounce in weight.
\"The King Tut Placers probably originated from erosion of a group ofgold-bearing quartz veins in the Lost Basin Range. The ruggedness of the gold nuggets, many of which carryattached quartz, indicates a local derivation,\" according to the sourcecited above. Lode gold deposits were discovered and worked in the Lost Basin Range in 1886 and in the Gold Basin area in the 1870\'s.
In the mid sixties, an entrepreneur, Warren Mallory,spent two years with a geologist exploring the Lost Basin area and recorded placer claims under the name of ApacheOro Co (later transferred to American Heavy Minerals Inc., a Wyoming corporation). During the first few years after recordingthe claims, Warren Mallory attracted the interest of the U.S. GeologicalSurvey, Department of Interior, who spent several million dollars on ageological and mineral study of the area, producing in 1987 a report publishedas USGS Professional Paper # 1361 entitled \"Geology and GoldMineralization of the Gold Basin-Lost Basin Mining Districts, Mohave County,Arizona\".
Acknowledgement to Warren Mallory is given on page 101under the statement \"Warren Mallory, president of Apache Oro Co. collectedspecimens with visible gold from many veins and generously donated them to us.He also gave us gold from the King Tut mines, Without his interest and generoussupport, this work would not have been possible\" The Chief Chemist ofthe USGS (J. Antweiler), who was a co-author of the report, disclosed to Mr.Mallory that gold has a signature (like a fingerprint) that identifies it to aspecific area. He stated that the gold samples held by the USGS from the LostDutchman Mine in the Superstition Mountains near Phoenix, Arizona, wereidentified as being from Lost Basin and they assumed that the Dutchman hadobtained the gold samples from Indians at Lost Basin and endeavored to hidethis source by fabricating the Superstition Mountain story.
The King Tut Mine and the Lost Basin Placers are locatedsouth of Meadview, Arizona in Mohave County.
a quick note...i have prospected and mined in both lost basin and gold basin and in my 30+ years of mining in both districts it has been my observations that lost basin is essentially placer mining with only a couple of hard rock mines and that gold basin is mostly hardrock lode mines with the exception of a placer mining area located just before the national park boundary.. one can check the many references as to the source of the dutchmans gold by a quick computer search that will yield surprising results
