The Boy With the U.S. Miners

by Francis Rolt-Wheeler

Gold!

Many years had passed since Owens had felt this auriferous fever, many years since his heart had beat impetuously as in the wild days of the camps of his youth, but the word had rung again in his ears as of old. The subtle poison of the lure was in his veins once more. He could not sleep for thinking of the old prospector lying almost at the point of death in his own mine hospital, and, perhaps, dying with the secret of millions, untold.

He reasoned with himself for his foolishness. Over and over again he reminded himself that he was settled for life as a colliery-owner, and that coal mines bring far more wealth than gold mines have ever done. The spell was stronger than his reason. Night after night he sat late in his library, reading anew the lore of gold that he had once known so well, and dreaming avid visions over the pages.

The records of human daring do not reach so far back in the dawn of history as to show a time when gold was not a goal. In the earliest laws as yet known—the Laws of Menes in Egypt, B. C. 3000—both gold and silver were sought and used as standards of value in the royal and priestly treasuries. Breastplates and ornaments of gold were buried with the mummies of kings and nobles of Egypt and Mycenae.

There was gold in Chaldea and Armenia. The fable of Tantalus, who kept unlawful possession of a golden dog which had been stolen from Zeus, the great All-Father, was a legend of the gold placer deposits near Mt. Sipylus, north of Smyrna. The earliest records show a knowledge of gold in the Caucasus, Ural, and Himalaya Mts.

The Phœnicians, most adventurous of all the early races, went on long expeditions to distant lands in search of gold. Cadmus, the Phœnician, in B. C. 1594, sent miners to Thrace and established a regular gold-trade thence. As a curious forecast of what was to happen on the other side of the world, tens of centuries later, the ancient historian Strabo tells of a wagon-wheel uncovering a nugget of gold near Mt. Pangeus, not far from the present Bulgarian frontier.

One of the oldest of all the tales of high adventure was the Quest of the Golden Fleece, and the fifty heroes who set out on that quest in the oared ship Argo—and hence called the Argonauts—have given their name to gold-seekers for hundreds of generations. Few tales in all the world are so wonderful as the old Greek legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece, a quest of daring, of magic, and of peril.

The Golden Fleece, itself, was a thing of mystery. Its origin harks back to the earliest days of the Age of Fable. Thus, in its briefest form, runs the tale:

In a minor kingdom of what is now Northern Greece, there lived a king, Athamas, son of the god of the sea, who had married Nephele, the goddess of the clouds. But Athamas proved faithless and fell in love with Ino, grand-daughter of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. The cloud-goddess, indignant at this neglect, disappeared, leaving behind her two children, Phrixus and Helle.

It was not long before the stepmother conceived a violent hatred for the children of the first wife. Counting on the spell of her beauty, she tried to persuade Athamas to get rid of them, but the king refused. Then Ino fell to base plotting. She brought about a famine in the land by secretly heating the grains of wheat before they were sown and thus preventing their growth; then, by a false oracle, she persuaded the king that the gods were angry and would only be appeased if he offered his eldest-born, Phrixus, as a sacrifice. For the sake of his country, the king agreed.