Colorado's lost gold mines and buried treasure
(Book)

My father, George Jarvis Bancroft, was a consulting engineer. He held degrees both in mining and in civil engineering, particularly reclamation of the latter division. In the early 1900's he was very successful, and his fees more than sustained a living for his young wife and two daughters. But the panic of 1907 caused a number of his Eastern clients to withdraw both their interest and their investments in the West. He found it harder and harder to make a living at his chosen profession, especially as Colorado mining became slower and more restricted. By 1913 the family finances were a matter for real concern. Father decided to accept a regular job and became editor of Mining and Industrial page of the Rocky Mountain News, a page crammed with hard facts and my father's brilliant reports. In 1914 he decided to try to liven the page with human interest, and he thought of the idea of running Lost Mines stories. Naturally he knew dozens, as he had mined throughout the West, Mexico and Australia. One of the new department's most avid readers was the editor's sixth-grade daughter, Caroline. Many years later, in 1929, when I was editor of a literary page on The Denver Post, I thought I would like to write a book about the West. I remembered Father's Lost Mine stories and started to collect them on my own. But the next year J. Frank Dobie published Coronado's Children, and immediate best-seller. I decided I had been scooped. Yet my interest in folklore continued. From 1941 through 1955 I was one of the sponsers for the Western Folklore Conference, headed by Levette J. Davidson and held each July on the University of Denver campus. Every summer I gave a paper on some phase of Colorado folklore. One of my papers was Lost Mine Legends of Colorado. It was read during the summer of 1943 and published the following October in the California (now Western) Folklore Quarterly. As a scholarly resume of the subject, this article still stands alone, and I recommend a reading at the library for anyone interested in a detached approach. What is offered here in this booklet is the credulous point of view, a culling of thirty of my collection, told as they might be around a camp fire for entertainment's sake. I have been assisted in the writing by Agnes Nafziger, short story writer with many years of training in the narrative technique. We hope they divert you as much as they entertained us while preparing the stories for publication---from the front cover.