PLSO The Oregon Surveyor November/December 2021

24 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 44, No. 6 Surveyors News Surveyors in the News By Pat Gaylord, PLS in the A tale fromLeadville, Colorado, shows that a surveyor using his head, even a petty, fault finding, scrub surveyor, can strike it rich in themines. Now the tale may be just that. Several Google search- es did not reveal a Little Triangle Mine in Leadville, Colorado, but nonetheless it’s fun to think the surveyor won the day and left with the riches to live happily ever af- ter drinking good German beer! The Sumpter Miner June 13, 1900 Mine Discovered While in His Room The Little Triangle was located by a man who wasn’t a prospector and who never had a pick or shovel in his hand in his life. He discovered it in a little back room on the third floor of a little cheap boarding house in Leadville, at about 1 o’clock in the morning. It was something like the math- ematical sharp who discovered Neptune with a lead pencil and table of logarithms, instead of a telescope. The man in my story was an old German proofreader, who had been a scrub sur- veyor in his early youth. I’ve forgotten his name, but that really doesn’t matter. The point is that he drifted out to Leadville in the days of the greatmining boomandone night, sitting in his little back roompouring over a map of the mineral tract for lack of anything better to do, his eye happened to catch an error in the side measurements of a rich and important mine. It was somethingwhichwould have attract- ed the attention of nobody but a surveyor, and a petty, fault-finding scrub surveyor at that, but he pounced on it like a hawk, made a few calculations, and there was a triangular bit of land, about ten feet wide at the base, and 20 feet long that nobody claimed. It lay right in the heart of a cluster of the richest mines in the Leadville dis- trict, and was supposed to be included in the boundaries of the two most valuable of them all, but owing to the error in the survey which I have already mentioned, it wasn’t covered by the deeds. Early the next morning, he went over and staked out the triangle as an original claim. Folks thought he was crazy at first, but when they examined the records, they sang a different song. The owners of the adjacent land paid $60,000 for his title, they simply had to have the strip to work their own mines, and he went back to Germany and lived happily ever after. The property is still known by the way, as “ The Little Triangle.” – New Orleans Times-Democra t x