Can you imagine discovering mounds of gems in your backyard?
On May 12, 1881, two brothers, Walter and Robert, overheard whispered stories of rubies and sapphires being mined by the bucketful in the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina.
Hoping to strike it rich, they stowed away on a southbound train to seek their fortune.
When they arrived, Walter bought a pick and shovel, and hiked into the mountains.
Robert, on the other hand, decided to stay in the town of Franklin for awhile He wanted to find a mining expert and learn everything he could about mining for gems.
One day, while sitting in the surveyors office, a beautiful woman came in.
She told a heart-wrenching story about how her husband had searched for months for the most likely place to find rubies and sapphires. He was a geologist, and he located an area that was rich in gems, there for the taking.
He staked his claim, bought the necessary equipment, hired help, and got started. Sure enough, the mine was loaded with gems, and within months he had enough for him and his wife to live on for the rest of their lives.
Sadly, the miner perished when his horse threw him, and his beautiful widow decided to move back to New York to be with her family.
Did the surveyor know of anyone who would be willing to take the mine over? She was sure there were many more gems to be found. All she asked is that the person who bought the mine send her a little money every month, for as long as he worked it.
Of course Robert jumped at the chance, signed the papers, and the mine was his.
By luck, Walter returned that very same day, and Robert couldn’t wait to give him the good news that soon they would both be rich.
I should pause here, and let you know that Walter hadn’t been faring well in the mountains. He didn’t know anything about mining for gems. But he’d seen sapphires and rubies on rich ladies, certainly they couldn’t be that difficult to find, right?
So every time he found a place that he thought might contain gems, he’d spend a few hours digging a hole with his pick ax and shovel, only to come up empty.
What Walter didn’t know, is the sapphires and rubies in the hills of North Carolina aren’t like the one’s you see in jewelry. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you can walk right by them laying on the ground and never even notice them.
And this is exactly what Walter most likely did, time and time again.
Walter was ragged, tired, and in the foulest of moods. Robert told him about the mine he bought that day, but Walter just scoffed at Robert.
“Obviously the mine is played out, why else would she be selling it?”
“Besides, it’s too good to be true! Don’t you know anything?”
“Robert, how stupid can you be?” and so forth.
Walter bought more supplies and headed back into the mountains to seek his fortune.
Robert set to work, and within hours he knew that the beautiful woman had spoken the truth.
There was indeed a very plentiful pocket of sapphires and rubies that seemed to have no end. He worked diligently, d igging out the rock and carefully separating out the gems, which the expert had taught him how to identify.
Realizing the mine was too big for one person to work alone, he hired crews to work around the clock. Even while he slept, money pored in almost automatically.
Who ever dreamed such a thing could happen?
Several years later and bored with mining, Robert retired a very rich man.
But he worried about Walter, who never reappeared from the mountains. Hoping that one day he’d come back, Robert sealed up the mine with a locked iron gate, and arranged for the key and the land to go to Walter, should he ever return.
Robert moved to New York, and married the beautiful widow who first sold him the property.
Walter had been hiding in the mountains all this time, ashamed with himself for never striking it rich. He worked as a logger, trading time and back-breaking work for a pittance of money, and learned to hate the world for his lot in life.
Somehow, news made it back to Walter about the land. Walter figured Robert would never leave him the mine unless it was all played out.
But he decided to build a shack of a house there, and used rock from the mine as the foundation.
This is where Walter spent the rest of his life.
And he never did figure out why, at night, he had to sit on the front porch with a shotgun in order to keep trespassers from digging out the foundation of his house and stealing it.
You see, Walter never learned to identify raw gemstones.
The very foundation of his shack contained gems worth more than everything he ever made working for others.
Walter died penniless, living on top of one of the richest gemstone mines in the world.
That same mine is still producing gems to this very day.
So the question I have for you is…
…Are you wandering the Internet…
…just sure there are gemstones everywhere…
…but you don’t know how to find them?
Could you be walking past giant sapphires and rubies everyday, and not even know it?
The Internet of today is a lot like the gemstone mines of the late 1800’s. Where there were gemstones just lying on the ground, waiting to be discovered, now there are pocketfuls of cash everywhere on the Internet, just waiting to be found.
The Internet is the GREATEST treasure hunt ever, better than the gold mines, the gemstone mines, and the diamond mines put together.
But if you can’t identify a gemstone when you see one, how are you going to strike it rich?
Remember, Robert didn’t know anything about mining, either.
He purchased a working mine opened by an expert who had done all of the preliminary work for him.
What if you had a team of Internet experts build you a genuine…
