16 gold nuggets found in a brass 12 gauge shotgun shell by Capt. Dan McCarty.

You never know where you will find gold. One year before I filed the first of the Havasu Gold Seekers claims and started the club, I was nugget hunting with Frank Lynn (owner of a prospecting store in Mesa, Arizona) on what is now HGS#1.

Frank Lynn was very good at finding gold with a metal detector and was teaching me some of his tricks.  I had found some small nuggets in the past while hunting with him, but he always found the first one and the biggest.

But on this day I was hunting along a small ravine (just east of what we call gold hill now) I saw a stack of good sized rocks outlining what was once a miners tent site. The rocks were stacked about 16 inches high and about 10 feet square with an opening for a doorway. I started detecting around the area and found some broken miners tools. I stepped inside the 10 foot square of rocks and was running my Lobo metal detector over the rocks when I got a loud report, I moved a rock from the stack and under it was an all brass 12 gauge shotgun shell with another shell end fitted over the open end. When I picked it up, I heard it rattle. I pulled the smaller shotgun shell base off  the all brass shotgun shell and poured the contents out in my hand.

What I had was 16 gold nuggets covered with burnt black powder, but I could tell it was gold. I put the gold back in the shell and ran up gold hill where Frank was still looking for his first find of the day. I said," Have you found anything yet?" , he said, "NO!".  I said," Well I finally beat you to the first gold." And handed him the shotgun shell with the gold still inside. He opened it and saw the gold and said, "You have found a miners poke, they would put their smaller nuggets in a container like a shell for safe keeping."

We talked about the possible reason the miner never came back to get his gold from its hiding place in his shack. Maybe he was killed in a bar fight in Kingman, Arizona a few miles east of the claim.

One year later I found another miners poke made from two 44 caliber shells in the same fashon with 4 two penny weight nuggets inside. It was found near Blacksmith canyon south west of claim#1.

P.S. Some of the nuggets missing from the picture were made into jewlery for my grandchildren.