stephbg | Pretty elemental metal of the day: Gold crystals

I acquired my first gold nugget many years ago, a very small standard lumpy affair as seen in this post here. It wasn't until much later that I discovered that gold grows as crystals, but at the time they were out of my reach. Those were being sold by a geologist and I never saw one for retail after that. But then eBay came into my rock shopping life, and the elusive gold crystal was one of my top priorities to acquire.

Here is my new baby:

It's a non-trivial exercise to find gold crystals on eBay, because there's so much irrelevant drek to sort through. This is my saved 'gold crystal' search, and it's just the starting point - I've always had to add extra filters based on whatever else the search kicked up on that particular day.

Here's my saved search: "gold crystal -pyrite -tiger -tigers -sphere -ball -ring -tumbled -rutile -carving -rutilated -healing -hair" in Collectibles > Rocks, Fossils, Minerals (Worldwide).

I couldn't eliminate "quartz" from the search because a lot of specimens (mine included) do actually grow on quartz, but that led to an awful lot of false positives.

I watched a few auctions and even threw in some almost-but-not-quite-scary bids for some, but they were stomped all over by more serious collectors. But, there are gold crystals and there are gold crystals, and there's a slightly more affordable grade that you can also find in tiny sizes, being enough to make them affordable.

In the end I started corresponding directly with the US dealer who'd sold me the native silver, and who'd cleverly given me some free silver crystals. His name is Kevin. Hi Kevin. I'd missed out on one of his affordable gold crystal auctions early on in my recent eBay career because at the time I didn't know the market well enough to know I was sitting on a bargain. I was "sniped" a few seconds from the end of the auction by a dealer (I define an dealer as any ebayer who's had more than 250 transactions). Few opportunities appeared after that, but Kevin sent me some info about his stock and I ended up buying one of those specimens from him directly.

The one I have now comes from the Little Johnnie mine in Leadville, Colorado. It was the gold mine owned by "The Unsinkable" Molly Brown, a Titanic survivor. Many gold crystals were found there in a discarded mud heap, overlooked by the original miners who were presumably more on the lookout for veins running through quartz and didn't think to check the mud pocket.