Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 55, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 March 1909 — HOW HE FOUND BIG NUGGET. [ARTICLE]

HOW HE FOUND BIG NUGGET.

Johnny Kearn, who has spent many years In the placer mines of the old Highland district, was In Butte yesterday. Mr. Kearn achieved considerable distinction last winter when he discovered the largest nugget ever found in the Highland district, it netting him |1,228 when it was sold in the assay .Office in Helena. “I will tell you how I found it,” he said to a reporter for the Standard. "I took up some ground of my own oh the head of Poodle Dog Gulch, where no one had a claim. I went up dose to a big slide and began working where placer miners had worked forty years ago and again twenty years ago. „ ; “I left the cabin pretty early and built a fire on a place where it looked like there used to be a side ditch. You could trace it although it is grass grown. I thawed the ground out and then I began digging. Pretty soon I got down to the ground, through the black dirt to the gravel. I had not shovelled few more than ten minutes before I found him. My shovel struck something that seemed hard and I looked close and saw it was yellow. His nose was pointed right toward me and you bet I got busy with my shovel and in a little while I had him in my hands. I saw it was a nugget weighing pounds—he weighed five of them—and I knocked off work and came to town. I took him to Mr. .’Johmiton of the Clark bank and he put him in the window, where people looked at him for six weeks, and then he was sold to the assay office. “Where I found the nugget men had worked, forty years; ago and twenty years ago. The last work was done by some Chinamen ; apd they were within three or four feet of the big nugget when they quit work. If they had found him they would have torn up the entire mountainside looking for more like him-“—Anaconda Standard.