Story taken from an article in the Lapidary Journal, July 1976, written by Mary French Catlin

  The world came to California because of James Marshall's discovery of gold in the tail-race of Sutter's mill on the American River in the remote Sierra Mountains, January 24, 1848.  It was said by a contemporary writer that all nationalities were there except the Russians and Japanese.  A lesser gold rush was started when George I. Holmes found gold on barren Soledad Mountain in the great Mojave desert of California 85 years later; especially after banner headlines over an 8-column article in the December 4, 1934 "Los Angeles Times" proclaimed: HUGE GOLD STRIKE REPORTED.
  Gold-seekers swarmed to the area from Los Angeles, followed by mining moguls from South Africa and elsewhere. The Mojave boomed, and suddenly George Holmes was rich and famous.
  Like Marshall, Holmes tried to keep his find a secret, "But try and do it," his widow, Sue Holmes recalled in a kitchen interview that lasted for three days as we pored over scrapbooks and court records of the past on her red-checkered cloth covered breakfast table.  The man who emerged was a remarkable and in many ways a contradictory person.  He was successful and admired, and adapted well to the fierce sun of publicity, yet he retained to the end many of the attributes of his simple rearing.
  George Isbell Holmes was born November 5, 1903 in Lansing, Michigan, the son of Marvin Asa (who was always called M. A) and Calina Isbell Holmes.  The father was an automobile man, a stockcar racer.
  There's mining in Michigan - copper, iron, gypsum, coal, even some gold.  As a small boy George was intensely interested in mining, especially gold.  There had been a grandfather who came to California during forty-niner days but he hadn't found any of the yellow metal.  He was lucky, at that. The companion who went with him died in the goldfields.
  When George was seven the Holmes family - father, mother, two boys, two girls - moved to Stop Six, Texas, near Fort Worth, to benefit M. A's health.  He had a lung complaint diagnosed as "consumption" (tuberculosis) but years later it was established that M. A. actually had streptococcus of the lungs; he died of this.  George was unabashedly close to his father, so it isn't surprising that M. A was always George's partner in any business enterprise he started.  But George's mother was also a forceful personality in her own right.  Calina Holmes drove one of the stock cars M. A. brought from
Michigan all the way to Texas.  She wanted to prove that women can drive as well as men.  This was about 1915, when roads and cars were in many ways unpredictable.
  In 1920 the close-knit family came by automobile to California.  Their fully-loaded Maxwell was straight out of the Beverly Hillbillies, with washtub fastened to each side, and a round kitchen table
stuck somewhere.  This was the table at which Sue Holmes and I conned momentoes of the Holmes' saga.  The elder Holmes' destination was Los Angeles, and this was their home for the rest of their
lives.
  George attended the University of California in Los Angeles, taking geology and related subjects toward a degree in mining engineering, but he ran out of money and had to drop out in 1922.  So George Holmes acquired his wide knowledge of gold mining the hard way.
  In 1923 he worked at the Big Butte Mine in Randsburg.  Two years later he joined the gold rush to Gilbert, Nevada, where he prospected and leased.  He left there flat broke and discouraged.  But he
was learning.
  In 1926 Holmes worked at the Argonaut, near Jackson, California.  One of the major gold mines of the nation, the Argonaut was started in 1850 as the Pioneer.  Before closing in 1942 this deep mine had produced $25.2 million in gold. (Gold Districts of California, California Division of Mines and Geology, by William B. Clark.)  The Argonaut is chiefly remembered in the gold country for the
disastrous fire in 1922 that started on the 3350-foot level, and trapped an entire shift of miners on the 4650 and 4800 foot levels, causing 47 deaths.
  George Holmes moved on.  In 1927 and 1928 he worked at the very productive North Star, a quartz mine in the famous Grass Valley area.  Holmes was learning his craft of mining well; here he contracted and sunk the winze (downward slant) from 8600 to the 9000 foot level.
  Next, in 1929, we find him working at Miami, Globe, and Jerome, Arizona.  During the year of 1929 he worked also at the Elephant-Eagle Mine near Mojave.  Holmes went north again to Grass Valley in 1930.  What were his thoughts in that belt-tightening period at Gilbert?  When the years passed and he moved from one back-straining, dangerous mining job to another?  Did promotion seem slow in the College of Hard Knocks?  Were there gnawing fears that his dream of finding gold would remain just that?
  Events suggest that whatever his doubts, he doggedly held to his course.  In 1931 George Holmes returned to Mojave, then leased the Elephant-Eagle Mine until the fall of 1933, when he discovered the float and outcrop of the Silver Queen.
  Holmes had gone up a draw on the north face of Soledad Mountain, 4 1/2 miles south of Mojave, on Sunday afternoon, September 17, 1933, to investigate some unpatented public land he had heard
might run $12 to $14 a ton in ores.  Near the top he observed a large boulder that held his interest and called for a closer look.  Argentite - a sulphide - in a ground mass of bird's-eye porphyry
(igneous rock of porphyritic texture) the stone was grayish-white flecked with black and resembled quartz.  A few whacks with his rock hammer showed rhyolite porphyry and veins of gold and silver.
  "Very heavy," George described it later.  "This piece weighed about 300 pounds before I sawed parts of it off."  Yet the boulder had probably been sitting there on the mountainside for centuries, undiscovered and unrecognized.  The "piece" (a chunk of the discovery rock) weighing about 20-25 pounds, was sitting on a coffee table in Sue's living room.  We examined it; it looked quite ordinary.
  George Holmes had high-graded portions of the boulder that he carried home from the mountain by pounding pieces to dust in a mortar, then panning this dust in a kitchen skillet. His excitement grew. 
He estimated the gold ran $1,800 a ton.
  "A prospector has to know what ore looks like . . . and what it's worth right now.  There's no time to wait for assays.  I don't suppose I ever missed the value of a car load of ore by over $5 a ton."
  Martin C. Engel, who had done the first assay was queried, and replied, "As I remember the first assay on George's rock it did not run so very high, around a hundred dollars - about $50 in silver
and $50 in gold."  Holmes had been so hard up he asked Engel to do the assay on credit, and Engel, who wasn't exactly flush himself, had waited a few days until he ran into George and gave him results
of the assay verbally rather than spend three cents on a stamp.
  Holmes located the vein from which the rich float (a fragment of gold-bearing rock that has broken off a ledge) had come.  It wasn't too difficult, he said.  "I only trenched about 15 feet before I ran on to it, 6 feet under the overburden."  Besides being experienced and knowledgeable about the various steps of gold-mining, her husband had been intuitive in locating ore, Sue Holmes explained.
  George didn't have the money to develop his mine, which is why he called on Bruce Minard and Virgil Dew to dig ditches and do other labor for a share in the mine.  Minard was a local prospector
who was tubercular.  Virgil Dew had been a truck driver, but was fired for drunkenness.  Holmes had befriended Bruce and taken care of him when he was bedridden by tuberculosis.  On his feet again, Bruce Minard had a lease on the Elephant Mine and Virgil Dew was working for him at the time of the discovery and location of the Silver Queen Mining Claim by George Holmes.
  For their exploratory labor - all work was done under the direction of George Holmes, Minard admitted later - he cut them in on a quarter interest each in the Silver Queen.  M.A., George's father, also got a quarter-interest.  M. A. and George Holmes provided grub and supplies during the time they were prospecting on the claim.
  The Silver Queen Mining Claim was posted on September 25, 1933 as being located on that day, with the following names in this order as Locators:
    M. A. Holmes
    V. B. Dew
    Bruce Minard
    George Holmes
"George always liked to carry someone along with him," Sue commented.
  Dew and Minard had no money.  Soon there were conversations between these locators as to how to get the financing for machinery and a road.  M. A. was putting up sums of money for the mine from time to time, so M. A. and George went further and agreed to raise all the money for developing the Silver Queen.  ("He thought he'd found a silver mine but it turned out to be a gold mine," said Sue.)
  On October 23, 1933 the two partners, Dew and Minard, agreed to deed to George Holmes and M. A. Holmes 20 percent of their respective interest.  In return, all money and machinery, including the expenses of a surveyor to survey the Silver Queen Mining Claim, was to be repaid out of the first shipments of ore by the Holmes.
  If the claim proved to be a producing mine, M.· A. Holmes and George Holmes were to be repaid from the proceeds of the mine for all money and equipment that they furnished to develop it; but if
it did not prove to be a producing mine, all of the money and equipment they had furnished would be their personal loss, and they would have no claim upon Virgil Dew or Bruce Minard.
  Further negotiations, witnessed by Mr. Dew and Mr. Minard, established that construction of this road would be financed, for the most part, by means of a lease on a portion of the property.  A lease was signed with R. W. Ross to this effect under the date of October 26, 1933.
  After about 10 feet the rich vein of gold appeared to run out.  "George told them (Dew and Minard) the diggings would get better later," said Sue.  "But they wouldn't believe him."
  "Sometime later, which was sometime in December 1933, I think," Bruce Minard recounted some years later, "I sold the remaining interest that I had in the mine for $500, and I had to offer it at that price to several different parties before I was able to secure a buyer."
  Virgil Dew was more shrewd, he sold his remaining 5 percent interest in the Silver Queen for $1,000.   Those who bought --- C. W. (Cy) Townsend and the group he brought in under the name of the Townsend Interest were paid substantial sums steadily for years and were well-satisfied with their investment.
  George I. Holmes and his father quietly developed the gold mine.  After George had mined ore with a pick and shovel, then carried 30 sacks of high-graded ore a mile and a half down the mountain on his back, shipped it to the smelter at Selbyville and received $2,000 for it, he arranged for a rough road to be built up to the mine.
  In a letter to magazine writer Don Reed dated May 7, 1952, Holmes recalled the early days.  "I took the first two car loads of ore from the Silver Queen single-jack and windlass, after which I hired two
men.  When in 1934 I shipped 300 car loads for an assay worth $600,000 I was working 50 men. At the time I sold to Consolidated Goldfields of South Africa I had done 2000 feet of work and had
blocked out 100,000 tons of ore with an assay of $2,800,000 or $28 per ton."
  As he had predicted, the rich vein reappeared.  "George and his new partner, Cy Townsend, got along quite well,"  Martin Engel reminisced.  "Cy was a worker.  Cy was a good friend of mine, and he
brought a lot of assays to my office.  Cy owned the Union Gas station in Mojave.  I remember one time Cy sent a sample to my office - maybe three pounds - he had it in a big mailing envelope and had it marked 'Mart, what in the hell is this black stuff?'  It was a black, soft ore.  I had a hunch what it was, and did not put it in the machine to grind but ground it on a bucking board by hand.
  "It assayed $27,000 in gold and 6000 ounces of silver.  It was about the richest ore I had ever assayed.  I mailed it to Cy and he was in my office the next morning before daylight to see about the assay.  As far as I can remember that was the start of the Queen as Cy and Holmes took out a few hundred pounds of this ore and used it to sweeten up a few tons of other ore and shipped it to Selby. From that day on the boys were on their way.  I ran many assays for both Cy and Holmes, but, the ore never assayed as good as that one sample of hi-grade.  The ore as a genera lrule did not run so high, but there was so much of it."
  Six hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money during the depression.  This sum paid to George Holmes did not go unnoticed, locally or in Los Angeles.  After the "L. A. Times" had splashed their
headline regarding the gold find across the newspaper, the world knew.
  Also contributing to the Mojave gold fever was the "Los Angeles Herald & Express" story in the Dec. 5, 1934 issue, which included this descriptive passage
  "The most exciting gold rush since the days of '49 is on today in the Mojave desert 100 miles from Los Angeles.  Following the rich strike at the Silver Queen Mine, scores of old-time prospectors and
modern mining engineers with costly equipment are rushing to the area, which experts say will see the greatest mining development in the history of the west."
  To give them credit, newspapers of the area made a genuine effort to play down the role of the amateur.  Reporters stressed that all of this land was not free for the taking, and differentiated between the three kinds of land in the vicinity of the gold strike - government land which could be
had for the filing; railroad land and other privately owned land, both of which must be bought.
  The 18-acre claim on which Holmes located the Silver Queen fell into yet another category - the lapsed title claim.  This claim had been held by a man named Radovich for 28 years.  He died, and his executors neglected to file the necessary notice to keep the claim in his estate.  Holmes relocated the claim, paid the $1 filing fee, and the land was his to develop.
  The Silver Queen, discovered and developed by an experienced mining man, was the subject of a pertinent "Los Angeles Times" editorial (Dec. 5, 1934) excerpted below:
  "The discovery near Mojave . . . is nothing for the amateur gold-hunter to get excited about. . . . The difference is the difference between 'free gold' and 'gold in ore.'  The former can be recovered with nothing more complicated than a gold pan and shovel . . . Locating and realizing on profitable claims of gold bearing rock such as that of Soledad Mountain. . . require expert knowledge of mineralogy in the first place and large capital for mining and ore-reduction in the second."
  Nevertheless, depression-weary people largely ignored these sober words of reason and came by the hundreds from Los Angeles and other places.  Hotels were soon filled.  Many slept in cars.  Some
people simply spread blankets on the ground or set up cots out in the open,
  Small campfires dotted the desert and some fires were maintained all night long as prospectors too excited to sleep sat up through the night discussing the strike at Middle Butte (a rhyolite outcropping similar to the Silver Queen) or Pine Tree Canyon, (Twenty miles from Mojave, this one just didn't work out).  People roasted at noon, shivered after dark, but this didn't seem to matter.  The spirit of
wonderful optimism was a heady elixir.
  Since Mojave is not far from Los Angeles, sightseers by the hundreds would drive out on Sunday to see the scene of all the gold excitement, and bumper nudged bumper on the Silver Queen road,  The lure was great.  Soledad was described  by some as a mountain of gold, which in a way it was, although actually the mountain was veined with gold that was almost invisibly spread through tons of rock,
  Despite the newspapers' words of caution, these Sunday drivers were convinced that all of the rocks contained valuable ore.  They were snatching up rocks, just any old rock, to take back as souvenirs or booty,
  One day two ladies and a little boy were loading rocks into their car when George Holmes happened along and said mildly, "Lady, that rock isn't any good,"
  "You just mind your own business!" she retorted tartly.  "This is my gold rock,"
  The mine operators soon had to put up "No Trespassing" signs and post a guard to keep the curious public from encroaching on private property, carrying off whatever souvenirs they considered appropriate,
  The world's mining experts were also aware of the new gold strike in California and were congregated at the tiny, and then rather grubby, desert town of Mojave,  They made quite a cosmopolitan representation - Senator Tasker L Oddie of Nevada, co-discoverer with Jim Butler of
Tonopah; J, T. Boyd, gold engineer from Mexico, Charles Herron from South Africa, Carl Lindbergh from India.  Consolidated Goldfields of South Africa had 15 men in Mojave.
  The Pittman-Wingfield-Trent combine had already bought an interest in the Elephant-Eagle mine belonging to Jess Knight and his son, Goodwin J. Knight (later to become Governor of California),
paying a reported $500,000.  Roy Hardy, the engineer working for Senator Key Pittman of Nevada and associates George Wingfield and Walter Trent, was as talkative and volatile as a school-boy describing the Queen.
  "It's 1000 feet of continuous $30 to $40 and more a 'ton ore. It's from 15 to 50 feet wide. It has a known depth of 350 feet and the bottom hasn't been touched!"  Senator Pittman confirmed this
glowing picture, "It's the largest single body of ore I ever saw."
  In the end, as the editorialist in the "Los Angeles Times" foresaw, and George Holmes realized from the beginning, negotiations for the Queen turned out to be a struggle between big money men, and for valid reasons.  Such an operation required expert knowledge of geology and mineralogy,
extensive deep diamond-drilling through great masses of rock to locate the ore, and tremendous blasting to dislodge it.  Expensive machinery was required to refine the gold.
  Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa (founded by Cecil Rhodes, "uncrowned king of Africa") won the battle of the Titans.  The Holmes company sold their Silver Queen Mine, Silver Queen
Extension and the Santa Ana Wedge to Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa for $3.15 million plus royalties on January 11, 1935. They renamed the mine the Golden Queen.
  The Golden Queen Mine was big business from the beginning.  A 2500-foot tunnel was cut into the mountain, and the company struck a vein in three feet that was 14 feet wide.  Another vein was a
fabulous 30-50 feet in width.  The rich ore helped to "sweeten" low-grade ore and bring up the average.
  A 300-ton mill was erected that later was increased to 500-ton capacity, a portion being allocated to custom milling.  With mining and milling costs under $6 a ton and mill heads (ore values) just under $10, nearly all of a vein could be mined at a profit .
  By mid-1937, 300 tons of ore were being produced. In output it ranked second to the Yellow Aster among the gold mines of Kern County (California Division of Mines and Geology, Report on
Minerals of Kern County, 1962).
  The Golden Queen Mining Company acquired claims totaling about 300 acres, embracing most of the northwest slope of Soledad Mountain.  In 1940 the Golden Queen included besides the Silver Queen, the Queen Esther, Echo, Gray Eagle, Soledad Extension and Starlight.  In the years
before the United States Government stopped gold mining with their Limitation Order L-208 of the War Production Board (October 8, 1942) the Golden Queen produced over $10 million in gold.
  The discovery and operations of the Golden Queen stimulated mining activity throughout the Mojave district; hundreds of men were given work as a result.
  George Holmes was a many-faceted individualist.  Before he died July 6, 1966 of silicosis (a pulmonary disease caused by prolonged inhalation of rock dust) he was involved in various business enterprises: lead, vanadium and wolframite mining as well as another gold mine (the Padre-Madre); Tom's Place, a recreational community north of Bishop; the General Plant Protection Company (a guard service); a shopping center and business complex at Yuma, Arizona; horse racing.
  Gold was his lodestar, however.   He was drilling a promising spot in the Chocolate Mountains four months before he was hospitalized.  "There's nothing like prospecting," Holmes said.  "Or mining.  Ore is 'clean money' when it comes fresh from the ground."
  Turned back to George Holmes according to the original agreement, the Golden Queen was not reactivated due to the sharp rise in cost of materials and wages during postwar years.  "The gold is still in the ground," George stated in a newspaper interview.  "As much as has ever been mined."  But the price of gold had been frozen by the U. S. Government at $35 an ounce for over 30 years while
mining' costs had zoomed upward.  As Holmes said, it was a matter of simple economics.
  Could his mine be profitably operated again? In the "Los Angeles Times" (April 22, 1963) George Holmes had answered in the affirmative, providing the price of gold was doubled.
  By that time the Queen was nothing but a glory hole.  A fire that broke out in November 1961 had burned until the following January, destroying most of the mine's interior timbering.  There were no
dumps; George Holmes had shipped everything.
  At the height of the Soledad Mountain gold excitement George Holmes and Ralph Wyman had chugged into camp with the rumble seat of their car filled with ore and dramatically announced location of gold at the Middle Butte.  This rhyolite outcropping a short distance away from and similar to the Silver Queen was later sold to and developed by Dr. A. H. Giannini.
  Later the Middle Butte was acquired by Walter Trent.  After Trent, discouraged by poor results in tunneling for a rich deposit, gave up his lease, Holmes took over.  Screening the tailing dumps Trent had left, he recovered $3,000 worth of gold in two months.  Then he gave Earl Blickenstaff the remaining fines he had screened out and the gold Earl recovered gave him a start in mining. Earl later bought the Standard Hill.
  "George wasn't a religious man," said Sue.  "But he believed in sharing."