They seem to have hit it with a vengeance, not mere placer gold in the stream bed but a genuine lode, for on April 9, 1876, they patented the claim known as the Homestake. Discarding for the moment all idea of going on home with whatever meager wealth this “last” try should bring them, the Manuel brothers immediately consolidated their position by going into partnership with another prospector and taking shares in the Golden Terra, an adjoining piece of real estate, the Old Abe, and the Golden Star. The immediate returns, by the ton, are not today known, but they must have been substantial, for the lucky brothers built an arrastra—a crude millstone affair for grinding ore—and managed to pocket more than five thousand dollars in their first year of operation. In the natural run of events the Homestake and the adjoining parcels which the Manuel brothers were operating would probably have worked well enough for a year or so, and would then have suffered the fate of thousands of other diggings throughout the gold-rush West—the surface ores would have played out, and because of the high cost of following the lodes deeper into the earth than a few dozen feet, the mines would have been abandoned. But in this case a San Francisco syndicate came into the picture, providing the necessary capital funds for the searching out of whatever ultimate wealth the Homestake might have. This syndicate of Pacific Coast businessmen included James Ben Ali Haggin, a partner in the highly solvent Wells Fargo express company, and Senator George Hearst, the father of the publisher, William Randolph Hearst. These vigorous men sent a mining engineer into the Hills in 1877 to canvass the location for possible investments; and in the course of a detailed examination of whatever properties seemed to be paying well, this emissary from Market Street came upon the brothers Manuel. A superficial examination of the Homestake and the Golden Terra sufficed this engineer, and he optioned them both, the first for seventy thousand dollars and the second for half that sum. Returning immediately to California, he delivered to his employers samples of this richest gold mine in North America, and without delay Senator Hearst went to South Dakota to see for himself. What he saw impressed him most favorably, for upon his return to California he owned both the Terra and the Homestake, as well as several other claims on the same hill, a total of ten acres of mining property. That small figure is significant in the light of the fact that the Homestake Mining Company today owns more than six thousand acres of mining claims.