December 3, 2002
GOLDEN OPPORTUNITIES
Many people seem to continue to think that becoming wealthy is done simply by going into some forlorn, rock strewn hill country and picking up solid nuggets of pure gold in shapes ranging from the size of peanuts to pineapples. That's the way it seems to work in the movies but the Hollywood versions and those that occur in actual happenings vary a great deal.
So it is in gathering other forms of wealth, too, it appears. Few investors chance upon a single stock, which, once purchased, becomes a money machine spewing out waves of dollars with all associated bells and whistles build-in. It too depends on thoughtful planning, investigation, and detailed analysis of both good and bad potentials. It is a slow, involved process. We are know that, but we still dream of sudden wealth coming our way; even try to make it happen now and then by lottery ticket purchases or risky stock ventures.
“Finding” gold is one thing, but processing it for use in the market is quite another matter entirely. Of course, there have been recorded instances where lucky individuals have come across gold in more or less a pristine state, either in flakes or veins of the precious metal, or more dramatically glistening lumps in the placer streams washed free of contaminants and ready to display. Most gold, and wealth, in general, demands more work once it is found
One common process has been to pulverize a quantity of soil or rock and then to treat the resulting powder with a chemical additive to bring out the precious metal. Many chemicals were tired after the specimen had been put through the stamp mill. It was known, at that time, that sulphuric acid applied to copper dust would bring out copper. After much testing mercury was used to leach out sixty per-cent of the gold contained in a specimen. Then, in 1879, a group of scientists in Scotland discovered that the use of cyanide instead which leached out ninety-seven per-cent of the gold. This process became standard procedure in the United States in 1895.
This, understandably, changed the entire gold industry. It made the re-processing of mountains of old slag piles profitable and there were, for a time, mountains of such slag available. At this time, many people bought stock in gold mines when “had been reopened” to become rich and some of such stock certificates are still sitting in desk drawers to this day – waiting.
By 1969, however, rising labor costs and the near exhaustion of deposits threatened conventional gold mining with extinction. At that time, the U.S. Bureau of Mines proposed using cyanide on large, open air piles of material. This method literally soaked the huge piles of debris with cyanide and gathered the resulting run-off down stream in ponds, where, when treated with carbon, it surrendered all of its gold content. This process made it possible to bring gold out of material where it was not visible to the eye, and the mountains of processed materials were re-done once more. It proved to be profitable as long as .08 of an ounce of gold could be found per ton.
The cyanide method has, of course, been assailed in recent years by environmentalists. Much of this came about because injudicious use of many such workings imperiled underground water sources, killed birds by the thousands, and created large fields of toxic waste containing copper, iron, mercury, zinc, cadmium, selenium and other such materials. They are now seen as the toxic clean-up sites of our new century.
Gold, gotten, you see; like wealth in other forms, is not always profitable. Eventually, someone has to pay for any excessive use or mis-use thereof. Holdings can corrupt entire families causing utter ruin downstream as the runoff seeps into the basic element of good living.
A.L.M. December 2, 2002 [c647wds]
