Nancy Twinkie and the Giant Jumbo Watersnake

You might wonder what on earth water snakes have to do with prospecting for gold; well they live around water in lakes and streams, so doe’s placer gold.  The watersnake that is found in the north isn’t poisonous unlike the southern water moccasin that is also called the cottenmouth because of the white lining in their mouths.  Even though watersnakes aren’t poisonous about the last thing you want to do is stumble on one of these critters when you don’t expect them.

A northern water snake

To my surprise I found that Nancy Twinkie lived just a little over a mile from where my house was, so on the following Saturday morning I picked her up at her house to take off on a day of prospecting in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.  After stopping for breakfast at the Farmington River Country Store in Otis, We continued north to a stream in Chester, Massachusetts for our first stop.  This is a small stream right alongside US RT. 20 near the mineral collecting site associated with the old Chester Emery Mines. 

After parking the car on the south side of the stream we unpacked out gear; I brought along an extra shovel and gold pan for Nancy.  It was really good to talk with her without having a whole thundering herd tagging along.  No cameramen, no producers, friends, wellwishers or passersby were present this morning.

This is a mountain stream similar to where we were prospecting. 

After teaching Nancy the ropes of gold panning she wandered off a little ways downstream to try her luck on her own; meanwhile I went about my own panning when suddenly the most Godawful scream you ever heard split the air.

I jumped up to see what all the whooping and hollering was about when Nancy flew into my arms.  Over her should I could see a large watersnake about five feet long slither into the stream and head downstream as fast as he could.  Apparently he couldn’t stand all the noise either.

After a while Nancy calmed down as I explained that watersnakes are occasionally encountered near water, and although they can scare the devil out of you they aren’t really dangerous.

That ended the gold prospecting for that day, so we climbed the mountain to look over some of the old mine dumps from one of the emery mines.  The mines are located virtually under the powerline that crosses Rt. 20 just west of the center of Chester.  There are actually six of these old mines, but only one on the south side of the stream.

This is the sort of device that was made from the emery from the Chester, MA emery mines.

The dumps yield several interesting minerals including corundum, chromite, emery and margarite.  It was from the chromite produced from these mines that some chemist in developed “potassium chromate” that changed the tanning industry literally overnight in the late 1800s with the introduction of the chrome tanning process. 

A leather tanning barrel in a museum
Photo by Joan Grifols

If you actually climb up to where the mine is located be very careful because the thing is like a giant ant lion nest; once you get onto the funnel shaped slope leading to the mine entrance it suddenly  becomes a real chore to get out of the pit.  For the amount of ore the mine produced it is apparent that when the mine was active there was some kind of works that made the mine accessible.  Today any such works has long vanished leaving a slope that even trapped me taking over an hour to climb out of this ant trap.  Be careful!