John Moss

John Thomas Moss, reportedly born on March 4, 1823, in Utica, Iowa, was one of the restless prospector-promoters of the far Southwest, active from the Colorado River country to the San Juan Mountains. In April 1861, as the Civil War began, word spread that Moss and others had discovered silver, gold, and copper lodes in El Dorado Canyon on the west bank of the Colorado River, then part of New Mexico Territory and now in Nevada. The canyon, at the practical head of steamboat navigation above Fort Mohave, quickly attracted miners, and its Techatticup and neighboring mines became some of the district's most productive, worked in fits and starts for decades.

Moss was famous among contemporaries for his friendships with Indigenous leaders, notably the Mojave chief Irataba, who by some accounts guided him to mineral outcrops; the connection let him travel and prospect safely where other white men could not. In 1863 he located the Moss Lode in the Oatman district of Arizona, selling it off in parcels for a reported $90,000, and in the 1870s he led prospecting parties into southwestern Colorado, where he helped found Parrott City in the La Plata Mountains.

Moss made and spent several fortunes; he is reported to have died penniless in April 1880. Surviving records of his life are anecdotal and sometimes contradictory, but he remains a characteristic figure of the borderland rushes: a trail-blazer who opened districts from which others made the lasting fortunes.