"That's a sign of good luck," reasoned he, and he fell to digging where had lain the horn. He struck it rich, named his claim the "Deer's Horn," sold out for forty thousand dollars—and got cheated.
Even the most experienced prospector believes in luck. They believe that experience counts for little if a man is not naturally lucky. They still refer to the late multi-millionaire Stratton as an example of the lucky man. He found his famous Independence mine where hundreds of experienced prospectors had repeatedly looked over the ground. They tell how the cows once cropped the grasses over the richest mines of Cripple Creek, while their owners cursed their luck for not being able to strike pay. No amount of hard luck, however, will convince the prospector that his good luck is not waiting just ahead, so he totes his pick and pan over mountain and plain, out into the heart of the desert, up and down the face of the earth, till he stakes his final claim—six feet of earth—where the lucky and unlucky are on an equal footing.
Many rich strikes of gold have been made in the Colorado and Mojave deserts. The possibilities of these deserts are not exhausted, however. Prof. G. E. Bailey of San Francisco, who was one of a party of Government surveyors who recently made an exhaustive study of the Mojave Desert, says:
"We have heard a great deal about Alaska as a gold-producer, but the Mojave Desert is now more talked about in the financial centers of the East than Alaska, and the day is not far off when there will be a greater rush to this desert than ever there was to the northern zone.
"Take the desert as a mineral-bearing region, and we have not begun to discover its vast wealth. There are gold-fields here which will astonish the world. Every little while some prospector brings in float rock, sparkling with the precious metal which has been broken from a ledge as rich, but that ledge has been hunted for in vain. The day will come when these rich ledges will be located and contribute to the world's wealth of gold."
Speaking of the recent placer strike near the town of Needles he says:
"The real wealth of the ground has not been determined, but gold, coarse gold and nuggets of good size, have been discovered. The real story of the strike is about like this:
"'The Clark road is building down a cañon between Needles and Goff, and the men had occasion to drive several piles. One of the piles was split and was withdrawn, when several nuggets were found imbedded in the pine. Word of the strike was sent quietly to San Francisco, and several well-known men from there came down and located. I believe the field is to develop into a permanent one, and may yet grow to large proportions.'"
The Randsburg district was discovered in 1894, and it has developed into an extensive gold-producing district of which Randsburg and Johannesburg are the chief towns. That field has yielded millions of dollars of gold and is yet in an early stage of development.