theboondork's RV blog

Tombstone folks

3/19/2022

Clicking the pics brings back memories of the way it was.

There were a lot of motorcycle clubs in Tombstone this weekend, and all of them represented some kind of a Veterans group.

One of these days, I need to go up in the mountains and find my Tombstone property again. It's been years since I was up there, and the mining area where the properties are located has a lot of dirt roads and Jeep trails winding through it going in different directions, so it always takes a little time for me to poke around and find the right trail, none of which by the way are marked.

To make sure that my family could find the property if something happened to me, I made a video of me driving from the Boot Hill Cemetery here in Tombstone, which everyone is familiar with, out to the property. So if all else fails, I could check that video and figure out which way to go.

I have two pieces of property left here in Tombstone, one is the 16-acre Sidewheel mine, and the other is the 4 acre Huguenot mine. These are both patented mining claims, which means that, unlike regular mining claims where you don't actually own the property, you just have mineral rights to it. A patented mining claim is deeded land, and you have ownership of the property and the minerals located underneath, including Extralateral Rights.

These were paying mines back in the 1800s, but I just bought them for recreational purposes and have no desire to have a stope cave in on me while fooling around in a 100-year-old hole in the ground.

But now that I'm old, there's no reason for me to have land lying around that I'm not using and my family probably couldn't even find. So I'm going to sell it the first chance I get, which I can't do now because I don't even have the paperwork with me, but next winter maybe I'll get more serious about it if I can work up enough enthusiasm and ambition to overcome my malingering and procrastination.

Theboondork

This Tombstone cowboy has his Western costume historically accurate right down to the pink cell phone that Wyatt Earp refused to go to the OK corral without... Wyatt's exact words were, "I would leave my .45 right here on the table, before I would go to the OK corral without a selfie".

Parasols were very popular with military men back in the day.

2 Comments

Judith

3/20/2022 07:55:20 pm

Well, even if you don't get around to selling it, the family might have fun tracking down dad's mines. Ha. You never know....

Tom

3/20/2022 08:14:34 pm

You might be right Judith. And every mining town I've ever been to tells the same story. The mines never run out of the gold or silver the miners had to quit mining it for some reason or another.

In Cripple Creek, Colorado the reason the miners quit mining was World War II. The government needed brass, and copper, to make ammunition, so they put all the gold miners in the copper mines. Then after the war, with no maintenance, the mines were in bad shape, filled up with water, and it wasn't worth going back into them again.

Similarly, in Tombstone Arizona, the mines never ran out of silver, the mines just got too deep and the expense of keeping the water out of them, since they had gone through the aquifer, cost more than the silver was worth.

And another reason for not hard rock mining that actually does apply to all mines is the government came up with more and more regulations, and OSHA came up with more and more costs for safety, so hard rock mining just became too expensive under most conditions.

But there's always that teeny tiny chance that one of your played out mines might have the mother load just a few more feet down they could keep your relatives digging for generations.

Tom

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Tombstone folks

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