The Claim
There’s a rich copper mine located somewhere near Jacks fork in Missouri that no ones been in for over 150 years.
Now copper isn’t normally what people think of as treasure, but its still worth about $4000 a ton and when you have a mine that’s supposed to be a rich as the Slater copper mine, that works out to the tune of hundreds of tons of copper, and should anyone find the location of this mine, even though they wont be entitled to keep any of it, there’s probably a good few companies out there who’d pay a pretty penny for its location.
The only problem is that no one has ever found it, and the story of how it came to be known sounds like any other typical treasure tale.
The story goes that man named Joseph Slater lived on a small piece of land with his daughter in the mid 1800’s, and on this land he discovered a copper mine with very rich seams of ore. Over the next few years he was regularly seen moving huge amounts of high grade ore along the Jacks fork and current rivers which he sold as far away as New Orleans. He apparently sold so much ore that he made several tens of thousands of dollars from it, a tremendous amount in those days.
To protect the location of his mine he official claimed that it was on a piece of land about 2 miles away from where it actually was. He carried on with his mining project until he found out that the land where he officially claimed his mine was belonged to one of his neighbours.
He decided to try and buy the land so he could continue to claim the mine was located there, but first thought it best to let some time pass so it didn’t look suspicious, so Slater and his daughter sealed up the mines entrance and removed any sighs of digging and headed east.
The plan was live off the earnings of the mine for a couple years and then come back and try to buy the land under the pretence of using it to farm. However Slater died before he could return and his daughter married and moved away, taking the secret location with her.
It seems she didn’t tell anyone the location of the mine and never came back to Missouri, taking the secret to her grave which has caused a huge amount of rumours to stir. One of these rumours made it into a paper called the “Kansas city star” who published an article on June 4, 1926 stating the following: “There were those who believe that at some time the lost mine will be found and that it will reveal a deposit of copper and perhaps other metals that may revolutionize the Ozark region of Missouri.”
The mine is supposed to be located some where near where the Jacks fork river and Current river meet each other, as Slater and his daughter were said to live in a log cabin along the bank of the Current river. The mine was supposed to be on Slater’s own land so it’s likely that if it does exist, it will be within a short distance of where his house was along the Current river, though there’s no information anywhere that reveals where that might be.
Recent Comments