Salting a mine

By Earl Cox

           Most westerners and readers of western history or fiction have heard the expression ‘salting a mine’ and perhaps wondered about the origin of the term. The phrase most likely originated in colonial America.

            In colonial settlements along the Atlantic seaboard salt, an important commodity, was obtained by boiling sea water in large iron kettles to produce a salty residue. As the country’s population spread westward, salt was obtained from salt water wells or springs. Any source of salt water was a valuable property and owners made good incomes producing and selling salt.

            Innovative entrepreneurs got into the act by dumping salt into fresh water wells, making the property attractive to someone wanting to get into the salt business. The term ‘salting a well’ soon worked its way into the language.

As the modus operandi moved into western mining areas, the practice evolved into salting a mine. Ingenious methods were devised to salt barren or uneconomical gold mines. Gold dust sprinkled in a mine or in ore sample sacks could easily fool the novice.      In one famous case in northwest Wyoming, mining claims were salted with small uncut diamonds. The scam fell through when a prospective buyer found a   few cut diamonds inadvertently mixed in.

 Uranium boom years of the 1950s and 60s were prime opportunities for scam artists. Prospectors with little mineral knowledge used a Geiger counter to detect radiation from uranium or other minerals such as thorium, which was used in gas mantles on Aladdin lamps. Scam artists wrapped gas mantles around a stick of dynamite and exploded it in an underground uranium mine, resulting in a high radiation reading on a Geiger counter. The unsuspecting prospector depending solely on the Geiger counter reading became a prime candidate for the purchase of a salted uranium mine.

            Another version of ‘salting’ happened in the Black Hills the summer of 1927 when President Calvin Coolidge, an avid fisherman, vacationed in Custer State Park. Fishing streams in the park were ‘salted’ with hungry trout prior to the presidential visit.