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Minnie’s goldmine
By Minnie Stoumbaugh

Well, we didn’t start out digging a hole, but rather a tunnel, but that was for sure an exercise in futility. You know how it is when kids are out of school in the summer? I don’t remember any of us ever complaining that we were bored, as I sometimes hear kids say today. Maybe because we wouldn’t appreciate the chore that Mom would come up with if we so dared. Since there were seven of us Smith kids, entertaining ourselves was easy. What one didn’t think of, another did. During the time that I remember, there were only five of us at home, me being the youngest of three boys and two girls.

For the most part, life just continued to happen, and we went with the flow. However, we may have even been guilty of muddying up the flow on occasion. Like the time we decided to dig for water. We had city water and had moved the outhouse from the back yard and now had a bathroom in the house. So it seems the only need of digging a hole was for something to do.

Dad taught us how to “witch,” or dowse, for water. When the boys felt a strong, downward pull on the “stem” of our forked stick, we thought there surely must be an underground stream! Besides, we were near the east side of our house, and this was in line with where water sometimes came into our dirt-floor basement when it was especially rainy.

We all took our turn to dig and it was no small chore as the soil was more clay than regular dirt. Not to worry, we had a goal and were in pursuit. We made sure the walls of our pit were neatly trimmed and a large enough rectangle to accommodate the length of the shovel handle as we went deeper.

It took a few days, and some of the neighbor kids joined us in this venture. They couldn’t dig a hole like that on their own property, and they were enjoying it as much as we were, each of us taking a turn. Dad’s response to this sort of thing was, “Let them work while they will.”

Eventually, because of the depth we dug, it was necessary to have someone on top to pull up the rope on the handle of a bucket full of dirt. After dumping, drop the bucket down again for a refill. And we needed someone to help us out of the hole when we gave up our turn. Helpers would lower our homemade wooden ladder, kept close by for an easy exit.

About six feet down, we found running water!

A typical piece of pyrite. Photo from Wikimedia by Rob Lavinsky, iRocks.com

But that’s not all. We also found a good deal of mica. You may know, it takes an educated eye to tell the difference between fool’s gold and the real thing. We Smith kids were enjoying the pretty rocks, the likes of which we had seen before, but the neighbor kids began to get all excited thinking that we had found gold!

So we asked Dad’s opinion. He immediately identified it as pyrite and said that we should settle down. But the neighbor kids wanted to go home and tell their families! Dad told them not to do that because people would get into an uproar over nothing.

Within an hour the first real estate agent was knocking at our door, and others followed over the next few days. Brothers Floyd and Gene rather chided Dad saying that he was missing a great opportunity. Salesmen were offering us BIG money for our little corner of the world. They tried to tempt us by saying, “You could leave here and get a much bigger and nicer home!”

But Dad made it abundantly clear, kindly, firmly, that he was not going to take advantage of people’s ignorance just to get money. “We have a good home, and we should be content with it,” he having built it in 1937, about ten years earlier. And he told us, “It would be wrong to rob people to promote ourselves.”

Eventually, we refilled the hole and used the space for a cabin-style tent – for cooler summer sleeping than in our hot upstairs. Of course, no one had air conditioning then.

If you want to know where that hole was, go to West Slope and the Lexus Dealership. They have our old address, 8840 SW Canyon Road. Our dig was just a bit west of their office.

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