CHEYENNE, Wyo.—George Bee is prospecting for gold in folds of feldspar, granodiorite, and quartz exhumed from faults in the earth’s crust, hundreds of feet below a ridge-rimmed prairie vale on the eastern flanks of the Laramie Range.
He doesn’t need a pickaxe to muscle mineral from stone, or a stream-side sluice to sift river slag to find what he seeks. He doesn’t even need to be at the mine, a nondescript slit-trench gash amid waving buffalograss and sage-crested arroyos, to see its bonanza.
The gold is in decades of data, engineering reports, geologist analyses, and locked into the rocks on a conference table in Bee’s office on Capitol Street in downtown Cheyenne, three blocks from the Wyoming State House, the shimmering sunburst of its gold dome both testament and tease this bright July afternoon….