PAT, THE MINER

In the early 80s, I was hired by a natural resources company as a Senior V.P. and Chief Financial Officer. Among my duties, I was responsible for setting up and managing their Houston office. We had oil and gas wells in Texas and Louisiana; a galena, flourspar, and barite mine in New Mexico (near Socorro on the north end of the White Sands Missile Range); gold and silver mines in the Mojave Desert of Arizona; and a gold mine in Placerville, California. It was a small company with only 40 or 50 fulltime employees scattered over all the projects, but there was a lot going on. It was during this time that I fell in love with the high mountain desert. I never before or since saw as many stars as the desert sky holds at night. I traveled quite a bit, going to the mines every six weeks or so. On my first trip after joining the company, I went to a couple of our mines in Arizona and made my first visit to Oatman, Arizona. Oatman is located on old Route 66 southeast of Kingman, Arizona, and not far from Needles, California. Over 100 years ago, it was a mining tent camp that quickly grew into a gold-mining center in 1915 when a couple of miners struck a ten-million-dollar gold find, and that’s when gold cost $20 per ounce. The boom was short lived, and most of the town burned down within three years of the find. When Route 66 became Interstate

40, Oatman almost died. When I was there it was an official “Ghost Town” with a population of 200 people. I’ve always wondered how a ghost town can have a population, but that’s what the sign said. Anyway, I made that first trip in August when the temperature was about 140 degrees in the shade, first thing in the morning. Even the lizards weren’t moving. The porpose of the trip was to set up a bank account so the mine superintendent could pay the miners. When I finally found the mine (no personal GPS existed yet), the super was not there, even though he knew I was coming. I eventually got one of the men to tell me where he lived, and when I found him, he was dead drunk at 11 o’clock in the morning. I wasn’t about to hand over $25,000 to a drunk, so I went back into Oatman to call the President of the company. The only phone was in a booth on the street. I don’t have to tell you how hot it was, and on top of that, a wild donkey walked up and stuck his head in there with me. When I spoke to my boss in Houston and he could finally hear me over the HEE-HAW of the donkey echoing in the phone booth, I told him what I had found and asked what he wanted me to do. His answer was, “I’m on my way to my ranch. You just do what you think is right. Click.” Back at the mine, I fired the superintendent and started trying to decide who to put in his place. I called a meeting of all the miners and it was a joke. Those miners absolutely would not talk to me, a woman. I would ask a question and they would answer my husband, Jack, who had only come along as my driver. He knew nothing about the buxiness. They would ask him a question and I would answer, and so our meeting went. I think I might have been found at the bottom of a mineshaft if Jack Cole had not been with me. That was one motley crew, and they did not take kindly to a woman telling them what to do. I must have chosen the right man as the new super, because later that afternoon, we were wined and dined at the Oatman Hotel where Clark Gable and Carol Lombard spent their wedding night back in 1939. Because the new superintendant kept buying me drinks, I staggered to my room drunk as I had ever been in my life. The Bingham, New Mexico mine not far from Socorro, was a treasure trove of minerals. I think something like 58 different minerals had been identified on that property. Every

place you looked there was a gorgeous rock, and down in the mines, the walls of fluorspar glittered like diamonds in the beam of my miner’s headlamp. Once, I took our banker and his wife out to that mine to see the huge mill we were building on the property. On the way back north, we stopped in Albuquerque to pick my husband up at the airport and go on to Santa Fe (one of my favorite cities) for the weekend. We decided to take the old road north instead of the interstate, and the guys wanted to stop and get some beer, so we pulled over in some dusty town and they went into a bar to buy beer. In a very few short minutes, they came out back-to-back looking over their shoulders. It seems lowlanders weren’t welcome, even if they were two big old boys. At one point, the company was negotiating for the rights to mine the strategic mineral, tantalum in the Amazon jungle of Brazil. It was my job to project all the startup costs, including moving crews and equipment into the jungle where no roads existed. I began interviewing helicopter pilots as the only way to set up the infrastructure required was with huge helicopters. For months I worked on the numbers, figuring every conceivable cost, down to the last nut and bolt. The numbers had been massaged over and over, and we were ready to secure the funding, when the international lawyers I had hired ran into major oppostion and the project was never completed. Darn it. I had my bags packed for Brazil. My company leased over a thousand mineral acres under the town of Placerville, California. The property belonged to the Placerville Gold Mining Company, which had been owned by Randolph Scott and Reginald Owen, an early British character actor. It was still owned by Owen’s widow, a White Russian concert pianist who had studied under Tchaikovsky when she was a young girl in Russia. By the time I met her, she was in her 90s and still played like an angel. The company’s acreage included all the old mines under the town dating back to the 1850s when Placerville was named Hangtown. The fact that the company had been maintained all those years with annual surveys kept in a timely fashion was remarkable. Researching the history of all those old mines was one of the most exciting things I ever did. One interesting fact I learned is that most of the bigger and more productive mines in early California were owned by English consortia. We began core drilling all over the town looking for the gold veins. When the mines were closed in the 1800s, gold was $20 per ounce, but it was $600 per ounce in the 1980s. There was still a lot of gold in the ground that had not been profitable to mine when the mines were closed, but reopening underground minds is a real undertaking and very expensive. First, we were in San Andreas Fault territory, and second, the mines were all flooded. In order to generate cash flow, we wanted to do some open pit mining about a mile outside of Placerville. Seems I did something you’re not supposed to be able to do in California: I got all the permits necessary to begin mining in only six months. I bought all the equipment and we started mining within nine months. I spent a lot of time and money on wine and dine, but I got it done. We were rockin’ and rollin’. Our break-even was $350/ounce, but we didn’t quite get there. The price just kept diving down below $300/oz. With that, My glory days as a miner ended, but it sure was fun while it lasted.