Gold nuggets and Agenda 21

By Jean N. Perlot

When I was about 12 my best friend’s father took Steve and I camping on a small river in the mountains of Oregon near where we lived.  Steve and I were going to fish the weekend away, while his father brought a gold dredge to work some of the holes in the bedrock of the stream.  That was my first exposure to any kind of gold mining.  I don’t recall if he found anything or not, but I do remember the hard work he did and remember thinking “Ah, this must be the life, playing in a creek and making money”.  Steve’s dad passed away shortly after that, and it would be many years before I would dip my pan in the water again.

I didn’t follow politics very much other than the usual Presidential election or some local election where I had a personal interest.  I had no idea what Agenda 21 was, that we could have Communists in our own Government or that environmentalists were in collusion with those who wanted to convert our country into something it was never meant to be.  I didn’t know what Fascism was, didn’t know who Nancy Pelosi was or that virtually every single aspect of our lives are controlled or influenced one way or the other by politicians.  I think most people were that way.  I went about my life not worrying about whether I would lose the freedoms granted to me by the most extraordinary document ever created, the Constitution.

Then the Presidential election between John McCain and Barack Hussein Obama came along.  As a man who spent 20 years as a professional interrogator, the very first time I saw Barack Obama on TV, I sensed a level of dishonesty, of deception and that started my quest for the truth, to speak out and to inform anyone who would listen to what the real truth was.

After over two decades of putting people behind bars for “errors in judgment”, I became a gold miner and an owner of gold claims and gold mines.  I found myself in California, in the heart of an area called “The Mother Lode”.  A few short miles from the famous place where, back in 1848 a man named James Marshall was working in the American River preparing a sawmill when he saw what he recognized as gold in the water where he was working.  Sutters Mill and Coloma CA soon became the destination for many men and women seeking to make their fortune and started the largest gold rush in world history.   I wanted to get away from people that thought society and businesses owed them but did not want to work for their wages (sound familiar?).  I wanted to quit wearing a darn tie.  I wanted the clear air, clean streams and the hard physical labor that mining would provide and the rewards that came along with it.  The picture you see above was obtained in under two hours of work, so yes there is gold in those hills, in fact our very own Government Geologists state that 80% of the gold is still in the ground.  I intended to find it.

The best method to mine gold in California was to dredge.  A dredge is a small flotation unit with a gas powered pump that creates suction, draws up the gravels from the stream beds and washes those across a sluice box, which then concentrates and collects the gold for you.  Dredges have been around for a few decades and allow a miner to move up to 20 to 50 times the material as a person could with a pick, shovel and hand-held sluice, not to mention that it didn’t require such intense physical labor.  Dredging also removes harmful mercury from the river the “old timers back in the late 1800’s used” which is another complaint they have used in the past about miners.  Miners today do not use mercury.  I purchased 5 dredges of varying sizes, some portable and small, some very, very large that you can paddle down rivers like a boat.

Proline Gold Dredge

Once the Progressives in Government found out it was easier for folks to obtain gold using dredges, they immediately came under attack.  Their first attack came in the mid 90’s when they claimed dredging killed salmon (anadramous fish) and convinced the Politicians in Sacramento to force the DFG (Department of Fish and Game) to conduct a study to determine the damage dredges do to anadramous fish and their spawning grounds.  First, one must know that over 80% of the rivers, creeks and streams where mining occurs in CA do not have any form of anadramous fish.  This study of course was performed with your tax dollars.

After an extensive and multi-year process, the results showed that dredges did not harm anadramous fish at all, in fact, dredging helped salmon habitat by removing the mercury from the streams making them much cleaner and by breaking up the concretized gravels that become so compacted over time fish cannot use them as gravel spawning beds.  So what did the Progressives do?  Activate the Radical Environmentalists.  Red toed frogs were found on gold claims and gold bearing streams.  Rare salamanders were found where the frogs weren’t.  They would claim they were nearly extinct, had to be protected and the rivers and streams needed to be shut down from those Mother Nature killing miners.  If this sounds familiar, see California DELTA SMELT.  This too, was unsuccessful for the most part.  We were still able to dredge and mine.

It was shortly after this time that I found myself in California, down in a canyon working underwater stuffing little nuggets in my gloves after cleaning out a big crack loaded with gold.  I was making good money.  Some days between my partner and I, we could pull a few nice ounces each day.  Christmas and birthdays were filled with nugget jewelry and everyone was happy.  I’d lost 20 lbs and was beginning to think I could make a weight loss video called “7 minute gold miner abs”, well maybe not.