A poor me story

I have been with this prospect —having been hired to stake the original claims, by skis and snowshoes, in minus 20 to 40 below weather, camping out for a month in a single wall tent— since the beginning. By the time Homestake Canada put up $250,000 for the right of first refusal, I had earned a 10% interest, and was paid by Homestake Canada to run the camp and a crew of 27 staking, and surface trenching to expose un-weathered material for chip assaying.

What went wrong? Greed. Of course Homestake was turned down, as was the offer of $5 million ($1 million in cash, $4 million in Seattle real property), and none of the stockholders in control wanted to dilute their position by funding William Sharp’s drill program, or the approved U.S. Office of Mineral Exploration program.

Over the years — with almost nothing being accomplished— the officers of this corporation had paid themselves stock for a “job well done” to the point my 10% payday in 1970 had dwindled from half-a-million dollars, to something as .000001%.

I acquired the ground in my name after the federal claims were foolishly let go by management not paying attention to BLM regulations, and the fact that the State of Alaska had asked for three years running that the claims be transferred to state regulation.

I missed the false run-up in silver caused by the manipulations by the Hunt brothers, and the resulting silver depression by signing options that kept me going.

Finally, after a number of out of pocket $25,000 years, fighting off the “You too can buy real property with no money down,” crowd, I fell for the logic that as the prospect had been short-changed in the prove/disprove process, I should bet the spreadsheet value ($3 million spent on development since 1968), in matching the $3 million spent on drilling to block out the mass reserves needed to make the remote property (the only negative any geologist has ever had to say about the possibilities) economic!

I learned this business from underground up.Here I am as a minor miner in 1955.

This county bumpkin actually fell for the corporate shell game, three times! What hurts even more was that at age 60, when I still could have fun shouldering a backpack to climb up through the “Rocks from Hell,” to the beauty of the upper meadow, AG was still in a “silver users engineered” slump. But, I was used to waiting for something to come along.

The first of these “joint (was that what they were smoking?) ventures was with an Australian company with American funding, via a payroll check cashing franchise network, that wanted to match the value of my property with a Wickenburg, Arizona, disaster. I recovered from this by just saying, “No” to “lettered” stock certificates!

It gets worse. Just one year later in the run-up of the market, I went along again with an American mining company out of Indianapolis, Indiana, that also had interest in Wickenburg —which I later learned by driving through was a fancy golf resort community built on patented mining claims.  I thought at the time I had saved this stock guru upon our meeting for signing, through my knowledge of what the difference between a mine, and a hole in the ground, his whole company.

Golly gee, imagine my naive surprise that our agreed upon annual “good faith” payment of $100,000, paid upon signing, and more than covered out on an increase in a raise in spreadsheet silver values, was the reason for defaulting the contract on the first anniversary of signing what a layman might call a “sweat equity” agreement.  After defaulting the contract, I guess I still have ownership some shares in a Las Vegas online gambling web site worth less than a penny.

As I had fallen twice for the “restricted stock” ploy, you might be surprised I signed yet a third such “joint venture.” This time the president was a real mining engineer, who owned his own drill rig, and had loads of experience in the North.  Out of desperation, needing to pay off the previous seasons debt, I was forced to let it go for a “good faith” payment of only $25,000 (plus stock) for an option to acquire 75% for $2.5 million. That was when my 800,000 “good faith” ounces of silver were worth (spot price) $12.50 per.