Dr. French, after his failure, pursued another and even more intriguing lost mine. With a ready ear for tales of treasure, he heard of a tribe of Indians in the Death Valley area who were making bullets for their rifles out of gold. Accordingly he organized another party to find the gold. For eleven months Dr. French and his hand-picked comrades combed the country. The gold they found would have loaded no gun, but you may add the Lost Bullet to your list of lost mines. A member of this party was John Searles, for whom Searles’ Lake is named. Because early prospectors searched for Breyfogle’s lost mine throughout the region where he was found scalped, an interesting digression is not amiss. A few miles east of Shoshone, there is a Gunsight mine named, of course, by the discoverer in the hope that he’d found the one so long lost. It adjoins the Noonday and was a valuable property which belonged to Dr. L. D. Godshall of Victorville. The Noonday produced five million dollars and was operated until silver and lead took a price dive. A 12 mile railroad was built from Tecopa to haul the ore. The steel rails were later hauled away and the ties went into construction of desert homes, sheds, fences, and firewood. For years the two properties could have been bought for what-have-you. Then came Pearl Harbor and a young Kentuckian, Buford Davis, looking around for lead or any essential ores that Uncle Sam could use, dropped off at Shoshone. Charles Brown told him of the Gunsight and the Noonday. Davis inspected the properties, bought them for a relatively small down payment. He chose to begin operations on the Noonday and sent Ernie Huhn, an experienced miner to deepen the shaft. “Honest to God,” Ernie told me, “I hadn’t dug a foot when I turned up the prettiest vein of lead I’d ever seen.” In the next six years the Noonday produced approximately a gross of nine million dollars and a net of probably six million dollars. These figures were given me by Don Kempfer, mining engineer and Shoshone resident, from estimates which he believed accurate. In 1947 with the rich rewards attained but as yet unenjoyed, Buford Davis made a hurried airplane trip to Salt Lake. Returning, he was only a few moments from a safe landing when the plane crashed and all aboard were killed. Today, (1950) the property belongs to Anaconda and is considered one of its most valuable mines. For those interested in lost mines I offer the list that follows. (The names are my own.) THE LOST CHINAMAN: When John Searles was struggling to make a living out of the ooze that is called Searles’ Lake he had a mule skinner known as Salty Bill Parkinson—a fearless, hard-bitten individual who was the Paul Bunyan of Death Valley teamsters.