Not Just a Box of Rocks

In one of my recent books, a young man is rescued by the ever-present foil of the wild west an old prospector. In The Travels of Titus Old Jed is mining silver in the heart of Nevada and along with his trusty donkey, the prospectors best friend, he brings with him a load of know-how and deserts wisdom.

In movies and on TV we always see the prospectors traipsing across the desert leading his donkey loaded down with a variety of different gear as he searches for the mother load. So what did he do once he found some 'color' and needed to get it back to town to make a profit?

First, the Old Timer needed to get the ore out of a dig using a pick, shovel, and hard work.  Watching carefully for any smattering of color in the rock he would dig and hack until he had a good pile of ore ready to be processed.

Ore had to be processed at least to some extent before it could be brought to the assayer's office for evaluation and payment. Even with his trusty donkey to do the heavy lifting, a prospector couldn't simply load up Instead he would build an Arrasta.

a box of rocks and take them to town.

An Arrasta is a device that is powered by none other than that trusty companion the prospector's donkey and did the first part of processing and crushing the ore so that the Old Timer could simply carry out the silver or other precious metal instead of heavy rocks. The Arrastra was a simple structure of wood, rope, and rock that turned on a pivot allowing a donkey to drag heavy stones around a middle structure dragging them over the ore and crushing it into smaller more manageable pieces or even to powder that could be sifted and washed so that you would only have the metal.

Not only did the miner or prospector use his donkey as the power behind this device he used what was handy to build the Arrastra optimizing his potential for striking it rich.  There were also other ways that prospectors could pan for color but in the dry, arid high desert many were not practical.  I found this particular Arrastra in Arizona at the Superstition Mountain and Lost Dutchman Mine near Apache Junction. It was a great place to visit and learn such amazing things about life in the wild west.