That the U. S. had a great new gold vein in its lap was the fond hope of the West last week.* Whatever it was, the Jumbo Mine, in the Awakening district of Nevada's Slumbering Hills made headlines from San Francisco to Manhattan. Discoverers were two old prospectors, "Red" Staggs and Clyde Taylor, who spied the yellow flecks on the frozen ground of this sagebrush desert on Jan. 29, 1935. Three months later, in need of cash, they sold their find to George Austin, grizzled, 63-year-old keeper of the general store, hotel and filling station at Jungo, a tiny hamlet on the Western Pacific R. R., 36 miles southwest of Jumbo Mine. Price was $10,000, $500 down.
George Austin could not find a Nevada mining man to put up the $500 cash for a third interest and he himself did not want to mortgage the house he owned in Reno. Finally he borrowed $1,000 without security from a generous friend, made the down payment and bought equipment. Crudely he dug out three sacks of ore, trekked them out by packhorse and sent them to the San Francisco Mint. They were worth $84.45. His ore assayed at the bonanza rate of $1,495 gold and 20 oz. of silver per ton. If the Jumbo vein held out, George Austin was a very rich man.
For a while he kept the secret in the family. His brother Jesse staked two claims adjoining Jumbo on the north. George's two sons, Kenneth, 24, University of Nevada graduate, and Wilfred, 20, University of Nevada sophomore, staked claims on the remaining sides of Jumbo. The four thereupon signed a 50-year agreement not to sell their claims.
Starting first on the original strike, they dug shallow shafts and open cuts over an area 800 ft. by 400 ft., found gold wherever they dug. Working with a primitive "coffee grinder" mill, they began turning out $500 worth of gold a day, paid off the two prospectors within a year and up to last week had taken $80,000 in gold out of the earth. Last week the dazzling story of the Jumbo strike spread across the country on the authority of no less a mining expert than Herbert Hoover.
The country's only living ex-President and a San Francisco oilman named R. W. Hanna visited Jumbo last fortnight, "purely out of geological curiosity." Much impressed, Mr. Hoover advised Austin to hold on to Jumbo. When Austin offered to pay for this advice, Mr. Hoover told him: "That kind of advice is free." Oilman Hanna, however, bought five claims in the Slumbering Hills around Jumbo.
Last week Jungo citizens were telling all-comers of a cash offer made by Mr. Hoover; of $1,000,000 for a half-interest offered by John J. Raskob, who arrived at s Jungo in a private railroad car; of $3,-' 500,000 offered by Consolidated Goldfields of South Africa, Ltd. Against these fabulous bids were two authentic offers of $250,000 cash. In addition to Mr. Hanna's claims, Nevada's one U. S. Representative James G. Scrugham (pronounced "Screw-gum"), onetime dean of the University of Nevada's Engineering College, was so im-pressed by Jumbo that he had bought an option on a nearby claim and was camping in the neighborhood.