“Where the River is Windin’, Big Nuggets They’re Findin’.“
Atlin 1981. In, 1981 the price of gold shot through the roof. The unusually high price was creating a lot of excitement. The town was buzzing, and the bar at the Atlin Inn was the centre of it all. I was playing in said bar one afternoon. It was a joyful affair, and the customers were encouraging that joy by buying round after round of drinks for the band.
One of the favorite ploys to support musical mirth in the North at the time was to ‘six pack the band’ – a request that involved the bartender hauling a huge tray of drinks over to the bandstand and lining up six of ‘whatever he’s drinkin’ in front of each player.
Joe Florence, the owner of the establishment, would stand with his hands on his hips, laugh that big old belly laugh of his, and watch the musicians gape at the lineup of shot glasses. It’s hard to shock a musician in a bar, but it can be done.
The bar itself was a long rustic piece of work, with well worn stools and a functional, if not decorative, back bar. It was the hub of all kinds of activity. Many a beer had ‘slud’ down its length along with the odd patron. One occasion in particular was memorable – the day Bill Boyko, local miner and dog runner, took advantage of a leak in the roof to strip down and take a bare-assed shower on the bar underneath the spray to the applause of all.
This particular afternoon, though, something else was up. John Harvey, a local miner, was sitting with a bunch of pals and they were laughing up a storm. Every now and then, something would get passed down the bar and the laughter would start up again.
On closer inspection, this something turned out to be a hamburger bun … but not just any hamburger bun … this bun contained a 31 oz gold nugget shaped exactly like a hamburger patty. It had been found earlier in the day.
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John was working his placer claim on McKee Creek. One of the processes used in this type of operation is sluicing. Dirt and rock are dumped into a sluice box and washed through its length, and the gold is separated. The whole business depends on the fact that gold, being the heaviest item in the load, will reliably drop to the bottom and get caught up on the riffles lining the box.
Heavy equipment is a wonderful thing. While it may rattle your bones, and you may feel like a sailor stepping onto solid ground after a month at sea when you finish your shift, the loader is far superior to the hand shovel when it comes to feeding gold bearing dirt into a sluice box. Needless to say, it’s also a hundred times as efficient. This efficiency was the reason John was currently working old tailings – the idea being that the old inefficient mining methods were sure to leave gold behind, and modern technology was just the thing to find it. But this is not about modern technology. This is a story about luck, and simply paying attention.
It was lunch time and they’d shut off the pumps. The flow ground to a halt, the water and the load disappeared out of the box. Just before leaving, John’s helper took a quick peek in the sluice box and lo and behold – a huge nugget was balanced at the very end of the box – just sitting there – ready to fall into the tailings pile. Had she not checked, there was a very good chance that once the pumps started up again, the slurry of gravel and rocks would have carried the thing away, to be lost forever with the tailings.
She called out and John came running back. He took a look at the thing, picked it up, shook his head, and started laughing. The nugget was the size of his hand.
“Yahoo!” he yelled, “Let’s go down to the bar!” And they did – for an entire week.
•••
After all was said and done, they figure this same nugget must have washed through a similar sluice box back in the day. Somehow it was missed. and it ended up in the tailings that John Harvey decided to push around that very morning. Now it was parading around the Atlin Inn Bar dressed up as a hamburger. Fame at last. Until they cashed it in that is.