Ferrous
Elite Member
LETTER FROM SUN VALLEY about a dispute over a mason jar of gold coins unearthed by workmen Greg Corliss and Larry Anderson at the Sun Valley, Idaho home of Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner...
They unearthed the gold with a skip loader, and carried it back to Anderson’s gravel pit, where they looked over the 96 coins, weighing a total of about four pounds... After they got drunk and mooned the gold, Corliss suggested that they sign an inventory in blood... Anderson squeamishly declined. “That’s when I wondered if he was going to turn on me,” Corliss says now. “I mean, it’s buried treasure. You got to sign the documents in blood.”...
The historian Patricia Nelson Limerick has observed, “Mining set a mood that has never disappeared from the West; the attitude of extractive industry: get in, get rich, get out.” But in Sun Valley people tended to get in, stay poor, and stay put. By the time the last of the area’s mines closed, in 1970, people say that three dollars had been sunk into the ground for every two dollars in metal recovered... This made the find of gold all the more ironic, since the metal mined there had been silver...
Sun Valley’s treasure nowadays is real estate. Since 1991, property values have nearly quadrupled. ...Local residents include Richard Dreyfuss, Clint Eastwood, Jamie Lee Curtis, Steve Miller, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, and Bruce Willis and Demi Moore...
Tells how Corliss and Anderson’s friendship soured... Legally the coins could fall into one of four categories of found property. The first is abandoned property. But people don’t usually abandon gold coins, or trouble to bury them if they do. The second is mislaid property—something that the owner has hidden with the intention of recovering, but has then forgotten. The third is lost property: objects that the owner has parted with through neglect or carelessness. The fourth is treasure trove, an English commonlaw term for the riches of the Roman Empire that were buried in English soil when the Romans fled. “Treasure trove” refers to gold or silver coin or bullion concealed for safekeeping.
To qualify, the booty must have been hidden long enough so that the owner is probably dead. In England, treasure trove went to the Crown; in the United States, founded in opposition to the Crown, the law was generally modified into a “finders keepers” principle....
Tells how Corliss threatened Anderson and demanded his half of the gold, which led Anderson to turn the coins over to Wenner... After this, Corliss sued Anderson... The coins were eventually valued at $23,465-25,888...
On January 5th of this year, Judge James May ruled that the coins belonged to Wenner... Corliss is appealing the decision to Idaho’s Supreme Court... But the defeat of Greg Corliss and Larry Anderson can also be seen as marking the end of Sun Valley’s animating myth. Judge May’s decision doesn’t just make the rich richer; it also gives the haves of the world sole custody of a past built largely by the havenots.
The verdict scotches the “Go West” dreams of the lone prospector, the longshot player, the selfmade man. It signals that the frontier, always less open than advertised, is now truly closed....
Thought you guys might find this interesting. They just couldn't keep quiet.
They unearthed the gold with a skip loader, and carried it back to Anderson’s gravel pit, where they looked over the 96 coins, weighing a total of about four pounds... After they got drunk and mooned the gold, Corliss suggested that they sign an inventory in blood... Anderson squeamishly declined. “That’s when I wondered if he was going to turn on me,” Corliss says now. “I mean, it’s buried treasure. You got to sign the documents in blood.”...
The historian Patricia Nelson Limerick has observed, “Mining set a mood that has never disappeared from the West; the attitude of extractive industry: get in, get rich, get out.” But in Sun Valley people tended to get in, stay poor, and stay put. By the time the last of the area’s mines closed, in 1970, people say that three dollars had been sunk into the ground for every two dollars in metal recovered... This made the find of gold all the more ironic, since the metal mined there had been silver...
Sun Valley’s treasure nowadays is real estate. Since 1991, property values have nearly quadrupled. ...Local residents include Richard Dreyfuss, Clint Eastwood, Jamie Lee Curtis, Steve Miller, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, and Bruce Willis and Demi Moore...
Tells how Corliss and Anderson’s friendship soured... Legally the coins could fall into one of four categories of found property. The first is abandoned property. But people don’t usually abandon gold coins, or trouble to bury them if they do. The second is mislaid property—something that the owner has hidden with the intention of recovering, but has then forgotten. The third is lost property: objects that the owner has parted with through neglect or carelessness. The fourth is treasure trove, an English commonlaw term for the riches of the Roman Empire that were buried in English soil when the Romans fled. “Treasure trove” refers to gold or silver coin or bullion concealed for safekeeping.
To qualify, the booty must have been hidden long enough so that the owner is probably dead. In England, treasure trove went to the Crown; in the United States, founded in opposition to the Crown, the law was generally modified into a “finders keepers” principle....
Tells how Corliss threatened Anderson and demanded his half of the gold, which led Anderson to turn the coins over to Wenner... After this, Corliss sued Anderson... The coins were eventually valued at $23,465-25,888...
On January 5th of this year, Judge James May ruled that the coins belonged to Wenner... Corliss is appealing the decision to Idaho’s Supreme Court... But the defeat of Greg Corliss and Larry Anderson can also be seen as marking the end of Sun Valley’s animating myth. Judge May’s decision doesn’t just make the rich richer; it also gives the haves of the world sole custody of a past built largely by the havenots.
The verdict scotches the “Go West” dreams of the lone prospector, the longshot player, the selfmade man. It signals that the frontier, always less open than advertised, is now truly closed....
Thought you guys might find this interesting. They just couldn't keep quiet.
