Gold (10 page)

And why not? Prices would stop rising. The tax on imports was sugarcoated by the cancellation of a federal tax on buying an American car. Money straight into the voters' pockets, and good for the country too! Everything announced that night was bathed in a patriotic light. Nixon had worried that closing the gold window would signal Americans that their government was bankrupt, so he played it as a defense of the home currency against foreign speculators. When the TV lights clicked off in the Oval Office at the end of the address, the United States dollar had changed from a drawing right on gold to a paper note whose value would thereafter be a matter of opinion. But what had gold become?

Gold metamorphosed. It shape-changed in the human mind. No longer hard currency, or even its relation, gold became the phantom money of the imagination—shadow money. The shapes projected were the shapes of our emotions.
“When you wake up in the morning, do you care about the price of gold?” the Texas gold bug Ron Paul asked Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, four decades after the Nixon Shock.

“I pay attention to the price of gold,” Bernanke said, “but I think it reflects a lot of things. It reflects global uncertainties. I think the reason people hold gold is as a protection against what we call tail risk—really, really bad outcomes.”

One of the greatest goldfields in the world, Nevada's Carlin Trend, was discovered when gold was still $35 an ounce, and then rediscovered when the price had been cut loose. The story of those discoveries in the low mountains of northern Nevada describes the transition from the old gold world to the new. On the Carlin Trend a great tycoon built the biggest gold mining company in the world. Yet
the story didn't start with him. It started in another age, when time moved at a more dignified pace. It unfolded among the piñon groves and the empty hills with a kind of purity of purpose, moved less by material reward than by the desire for scientific truth. It uncovered an ocean of gold.

While I was working in the field, cresting the ridge was always important to me, for then I could take a breather, and look ahead across the valley.

—Ralph Roberts,
A Passion for Gold

R
ALPH
R
OBERTS FOUND THE RABBIT
hole into Wonderland. The greatest goldfield in America lay hidden under a thick cap of rock, and Roberts found a place where a hole in the cap allowed him to look through. By the time he made his discovery, he knew the mountains well. He had wandered for years through the Tuscarora and Shoshone, the Sonoma and the Diamond and the Antler ranges. They kindled his excitement. To a geologist, the features of a landscape are like jumbled parts of speech, to be construed into the sentences of geologic time. It is all just heaped-up rocks and sand until it is fitted into a comprehensive theory, the story of what put it there.

The reader finds in Roberts's account of his life the deep pleasure of inquiry, and also of freedom.
“On those trips into the mountains I
was accompanied only by a few sparrows, meadowlarks, and shrikes, who actually flew alongside me when I was near their nest.” He saw mule deer and antelope and golden eagles. “Marmots announced my approach with piercing whistles, and voles darted from underfoot. I seldom saw another person, except at ranches in the foothills, and that was good because I didn't want company while learning the secrets of the rocks.”

To walk into the hills that Roberts explored is to enter an enormous, sealike silence of mauve and ocher slopes. The ground is speckled with the tough little plants of the western desert. In the spare hills, the planetary history opens to inspection.

R
OBERTS WAS A TWENTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD DOCTORAL
candidate at Yale University when he joined a United States Geological Survey exploration team in north-central Nevada in 1939.
He stepped off the bus in Winnemucca into the furnace of July, and within days was puzzling over the events of half a billion years ago. The expedition's task was to untangle the geology of the Sonoma range. As he tackled the exploration, Roberts caught a lucky break.
There was a working gold mine in the heart of Willow Creek, where he was based. The mine would provide him with a window into the structure he was trying to unravel.

Mining in Nevada had a long pedigree. About 13,000 years ago, Indians of the Clovis culture mined deposits of obsidian, opalite, chalcedony, agate, jasper, and quartz. They made spear points and arrowheads and tools for scraping hides. From about AD 300 to 1200 the Anasazi people mined turquoise near present-day Boulder City. Spanish explorers may have crossed the southern tip of the state
in 1776 looking for gold, silver, and turquoise. Native Americans probably knew about gold in the Sierra. There are reports that they showed whites where to look.

The first discovery on record came in 1849, when a party of Mormons heading for the California gold rush camped at Carson River to wait for the snow to melt from the mountain passes. They panned the streams, and recovered gold. They moved on westward in the spring, but Gold Canyon, as the site became known, attracted other placer miners. By 1857 successive waves of prospectors had pushed upstream, always finding gold. A second discovery, to the north in Six-Mile Canyon, brought more searchers into the foothills. Finally in 1859 they hit on where the gold was coming from—a rich gold-and-silver deposit near Virginia City, the famous Comstock Lode. Soon the passes were swarming with men leaving California for the new bonanza. Prospectors poured into the state and fanned out through the mountains. They found placer gold in the streams near Battle Mountain and Winnemucca. In the clefts and watercourses of the hills that Roberts was exploring, you can still see sluices and stone dams and the collapsed entrances of adits. The gold mine at Willow Creek that Ralph Roberts wanted to explore dated from that teeming gold camp.

The mine belonged to Wallace Calder, a Winnemucca dentist. Calder told Roberts he'd recovered large nuggets from a fault zone in the mine, and Roberts arranged a visit. Calder showed him where the nuggets came from. Examining the rocks close up, Roberts saw that they were oceanic rocks, much older than the rocks they sat on. In the normal course of geological formation, new rock comes up from the mantle in molten form, and is deposited on top of older rock. Here, those relative positions were reversed.
To explain what had happened, Roberts hypothesized a thick shelf of older oceanic
rocks thrusting up onto the younger limestone at what had been the western edge of the continent. By the end of the summer, although he was years away from forming a theory about the region's gold, two pieces of that theory were now in place in his mind: first, older ocean rocks had been pushed up onto younger rocks at the ancient seashore; and second, that gold occurred within and below the zone where that thrust occurred.

Today, geologists recognize the thrust as the product of a tectonic collision, where two of the earth's crustal plates mashed against each other in the geologic past. But the plate theory did not emerge until the 1950s.
In 1939, when Roberts began his explorations, the most important guide to the regional geology was a nineteenth-century report called the Fortieth Parallel Survey. Commissioned by the secretary of war and published in 1877 and 1878, the survey was an eight-volume natural history of parts of Nevada, Idaho, and Wyoming.
The writers described huge tables of Triassic rock and mountainsides alive with “minute brilliant-black crystals of tourmaline” and “small brown iron garnets, not much bigger than a pinhead.” Field geologists have an unquenchable appetite for such details. Diamond hunters obsess over garnets, which can point the way to diamond pipes. Roberts's interest was the larger structures of the region, and one day the camp cook dropped him off at an abandoned silver mine.
He struck out along the Antler range in his happiest state—alone.

Earlier geologists had identified the range that Roberts followed as 300-million-year-old limestone. Limestone is composed of the skeletal remains of tiny animals from the shallow seas, in this case, seas that had once lapped at the continental shore in present-day Nevada. The limestone takes its pale color from the minute skeletons that make it up.
When the ocean plate and continental plate
collided, according to Dean Heitt, a Newmont Mining Corporation geologist who has written a history of the Carlin Trend, “the darker, older rocks from the deep ocean, such as cherts and shales, pushed up onto the younger, light-gray limestone, covering it.” When Roberts set out to understand the regional geology, finding a theory to explain how the older rocks had ended up on top of the younger rocks was part of the exercise.
“As I approached the western margin of the range,” he wrote, the “limestone pinched out,” and older rocks appeared on the ridge he was traversing. “I could see a few fragments of limestone on the ridge, but the massive unit that I had followed earlier was gone.”

Roberts did not know it, but he had crossed what he would come to call a “window”—a place where the older, darker rock had worn away and revealed the younger limestone underneath. At that break in the older rocks that had been thrust up from the deep ocean, Roberts located an opening into the richest gold-bearing rocks in America. He was “seeing through” the cap of older rock that concealed the limestone. In the Willow Creek mine he had already seen a hint of what he would later understand more fully—that gold lay in the limestone layer below the older rocks. He had come across a place where an explorer could reach in and rummage for gold without having to penetrate the barrier of older, harder rock. That Roberts did not see this shortcut right away is because he hadn't started looking for it.

Roberts's work was interrupted by World War II. He joined the wartime search for strategic minerals, and was posted to Central America. He did not return to Nevada until 1954, when he took over a unit mapping the geology of Eureka County. That appointment set him on the path to his discovery.

In Roberts's autobiography, written when he was ninety-one, an
unselfconscious brio lightens the pages. The reader cannot help but feel that here was Fortune's darling, a man delighted by the life he found in front of him.

R
ALPH
J
ACKSON
R
OBERTS WAS BORN
in 1911 in Rosalia, Washington. Both parents came from nearby wheat farming families. As Roberts tells it, his father got tired of slinging 120-pound sacks of grain, and left the farm to become a druggist. He tired of that too, when the long hours of keeping a small-town pharmacy wore him down, and he took to selling Edison record players. Finally he bought a candy store in Omak, eastern Washington, a town in the Okanogan Valley. While he made “incomparable peanut brittle, nougats, pinoche, divinity, caramels, butterscotch, taffy, and fudge,” his son took over the soda fountain.

For a future geologist, Roberts was lucky with his teachers. One was a first-rate chemist and another ran a thulite mine. Thulite—sometimes called rosaline for its blazing pink color—is a crystalline mineral cut into slabs for use as decorative facing. Roberts helped to quarry it. He also made forays into the surrounding hills to look for gold with “Dad” Hayes, a handyman who had lost the fortune he'd panned from Alaskan gold creeks.

Roberts picked up mining lore from his family too. One of his mother's uncles had a silver mine in Colorado, and uncles and cousins on his father's side had filled him with tales of their mining exploits.
Even the Roberts Mountains of north-central Nevada, his exploration ground, had been named for a distant relation.

Roberts's account hurtles along. Dancing lessons in wartime Washington occupy the same chapter as the development of the
cordilleran geosyncline 380 million years ago. In the same six pages he meets his future wife, a classmate's girlfriend.
“Our eyes met and held for a long moment. She was wearing Warren's ring, but her greeting to him seemed restrained. . . . I do not remember much about that visit, except that I was drawn to Arleda. Since she was Warren's girl, I tried not to let my feelings show, but I suspect that she knew I found her attractive, and I sensed that she was interested in me.”

He sensed right. Two years later Arleda wrote him out of the blue to say that she had returned her engagement ring and would like to see Roberts again. He took her to dinner and proposed before they reached dessert. They had a long, eventful, happy marriage. A photograph from 1954 shows her smiling in the sun with their three children in front of the forty-two-foot trailer where they lived when Roberts set out to map the geology of Eureka County, and made his great discovery.

Roberts mapped northward through the Cortez, Shoshone, and Tuscarora ranges.
He saw that the feature called the Roberts Mountains thrust presented a continuous geological relationship—deep-ocean rocks pushed up over shallow-water limestone. He believed that the thrust was a regional feature, not a local one. He had uncovered the basic geology of what is now called the Carlin Trend. He had taken a giant step toward unmasking the deposit, although another crucial step remained: realizing it was there. Certainly there was historic evidence of gold from early placer mining, and the Willow Creek mine had yielded nuggets. But such occurrences don't by themselves suggest a single massive source. Yet as Roberts was coming to understand the geology of the thrust, another man was scrutinizing local gold production, and realizing that some of the gold was coming from ore unlike any other he had seen. One characteristic distinguished it. The gold was invisible.

William Vanderburg, an engineer with the U.S. Bureau of Mines, had been making reconnaissance surveys of Nevada since the 1930s. He had regularly visited the mines and described deposits. He had been struck by the observation that at some gold mines the particles were so fine they could not be recovered by panning. The mines were recovering gold, but when Vanderburg panned a sample of the ore he got nothing. It was “impossible to distinguish between ore and waste except by assay,” he wrote, “and gold is present in such a state that it is impossible to obtain a single color [visible gold] by panning.” At one point there must have been visible gold, or there would have been no mining. At some point, then, the miners had used up that original reserve of ore, but found that the recovery mill was still producing gold even when they moved beyond the original deposit and started feeding in rock that did not have visible gold. They kept getting gold, so they kept mining.