Combination Mine !

It was C. K. Jarvis, then a clerk in the Lathrop-Davis store at Tonopah who organized a jackpot of ten of his friends to grubstake Al Meyers and Tom Murphy, who discovered the Combination mine that started the Goldfield boom. Harry Stimler and Billy Marsh made the first discovery of gold in the district, but it was not until L. L. Patrick had optioned the Combination from the original locators for $75,000 and opened up 8 foot $250 rock that the big excitement started. At least $10,000,000 was extracted from the Combination. The interesting feature of the story, however, is how Myers and Murphy encountered the ore.

When they started out with their grubstake on a prospecting trip they headed for Tokop, the road to Tokop at that time led through Goldfield, or Grandpah, as it was then known, a small settlement made up of a few shacks and tents. The boys camped the first night at Columbia Mountain near where Stimler and Marsh were working. The next morning, before proceeding on their journey, they took a look around and located two claims that they named Combination and Combination No. 1. On the way back they stopped and did a little prospecting on the Combination claims and in doing so, cut a stringer that assayed $10 or $12. Jarvis and his associates insisted that the boys return and do the location work. Myers and Murphy did not think much of the ground, but the grubstake agreement was that they were to do the required location work on all claims they located.

It was with little enthusiasm that they returned to do this. Both were good prospectors and miners, however, and both were agreed as in the point where they should start driving in a tunnel, but at that point was piled a lot of waste, they had thrown up while doing their first prospecting. The extra work did not appeal to them. "Oh Hell" said one, "What's the difference, let's move down 25 feet and go in where we won't have all this dirt to move". That is what they did and with the result they went into the high grade. Had they gone in where they both were agreed was the proper point, they would have missed it by several feet. And once more the old saying, "Gold is where you find it", was demonstrated true.