Philty's Gold Mine by author Jeff Bailey

The first few pages of

Philty’s Gold Mine

By Jeff Bailey

It was the fall of nineteen sixty-five at the sleepy crack of dawn and I was sitting on the front porch of our family’s house in suburban Sacramento, California, waiting for my Uncle Lloyd to pick me up. It was cool but comfortable and the houses on our street weren’t awake, yet. I had returned early from a family vacation in Southern California the previous night. I was due to start my freshman year at college the next day, but my uncle had asked me to return early and accompany him on a one-day search for a lost gold mine in the high Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Most of our family considered Uncle Lloyd to be a worthless ne’er-do-well who would probably never amount to anything. He was always chasing after some foolhardy treasure or another. He had an endless supply of fantastic stories of lost wealth and buried riches that he was going to find, on each and every trip. However, a few members of the family, me included, believed that Uncle Lloyd was an adventurer and treasure hunter of the highest order. I knew that someday he would write books on his adventures. I would have followed him on just about any quest. How could I not? I would never forgive myself if I had opted not to go with him on one of his treasure hunts where he actually found something. On that chilly fall day, I was as excited as a drop of cold gold in a hot smelting pot.

When I saw Uncle Lloyd’s Jeep turn the corner at the end of the block, I walked to the end of our driveway. All I carried was a heavy coat and a pair of hiking boots. Uncle Lloyd had told me to be ready because, with only one day, he was in a hurry. I was surprised that he actually stopped at the end of our driveway to let me get in the jeep. Knowing him as I did, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had expected me to jump in as he drove by.

The open jeep had a canvas top but no doors. As soon as my butt was in the jeep’s seat, he was rolling again. I stole a quick glance at him and once again couldn’t help but notice his extreme good looks. He was six foot four, lean, and handsome with wavy black hair, high cheekbones, and a strong jaw. His partial American Indian heritage showed in his chiseled face. If he had wanted to settle down with a family, he would have been quite the catch. As it was, he was just my wild, treasure-happy, odd uncle.

“You ready for this?” he shouted over the increasing roar of the Jeep.

“Yeah,” I shouted back and smiled.

“In the back seat, the stack of binders, get the one on the top and open it to the marked page,” he instructed as he shifted gears again. “That’s what we’re after, today.” I recognized the stack of binders. There were a dozen of them, hard covered and at least four inches thick. They contained hundreds of copies of treasure stories, newspaper articles about lost mines, and descriptions of valuable lost objects. One whole book was nothing but coins and stamps. He knew every painting, jade vase, baseball card, and antique chair contained in his library. I remember one afternoon when I was in elementary school, I accompanied him into a small antique/junk store in the Mojave Desert. He spent two hours walking around looking at everything in the store, picking up brik-a-brak, and asking questions. In the end, he bought two standing liberty dimes and a little green perfume bottle. When we got back to his jeep, he pulled out his binders and showed me the page with the dimes on it. He could make over ten dollars on each. The perfume bottle might bring as much as ten times what he paid. He was as excited as a kid who just found a free candy store. On the way out of Mojave, we stopped at a church and he bought the contents of the previous week’s tithings for five dollars more than it was worth. He didn’t find anything of value in the offerings, but told me that many times he will find a coin or an old bill that someone in the small town found tucked in a book or under a piece of furniture and dropped in the offering plate. Another of his habits was to buy bags of parking meter money in little towns: genius. For me, at the time, hero worship came easily.

I pulled the top binder into the front seat and opened it to the marked page. A copy of an 1880’s newspaper obit about a man named Philty was taped to the page. Philty had disappeared and was presumed dead. Judging from the number of misspellings in the obit, I doubted if the spelling of the name was correct. The important thing was that Philty had died. Uncle Lloyd had mounted a copy of a color piece from an East Coast newspaper about a mountain man named Philty who lived out in California. It seems that Philty lived back and forth between two very tiny (only three or four buildings each) gold mining camps a mile apart on a small creek in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Now, Philty always had a good supply of gold but never seemed to work for it. If Philty ran out of gold while in one camp, he would walk to the other camp. The interesting thing was that Philty always had a pouch full of gold when he reached the other camp. A few days later, when Philty was broke again, he would trek back to the first gold camp and arrive with a pouch full of gold, again. The author of the article concluded that Philty must have had a secret gold mine somewhere between the two gold camps.