Guys, just FYI, I'll bet I can find stuff there from the battle. I have done this at other battle locations that had been "hunted out" years before. Since I may never get to try it there, I'll tell you my secret: White's makes a special tiny hunting coil that's perfect for "sharp-shooting." It obviously takes a long time to cover an area, since the sweep is only about 3 or 4 inches wide, but it's miraculous in mineralized areas or areas with old rusty iron. I used this coil at Fort Concho in San Angelo, Texas, and found saddle plates, insignia and jars full of cartridges and bullets. A good, discriminating detector will ignore a gold coin or nugget if it's anywhere near a nail or a tiny chunk of rusty iron, but the little coil will reach past the iron and find the gold, unless they are laying right together. In that area, I would also recommend turning the discrimination off and hunting everything. I'm sure you have tried backtracking the battle. I think I would also "forward track" it to try to find things that dropped off the runaway burro. I have learned that the detector is only about half the trick, the other being the ability to imagine what people (or burros) would do. I figure the main rocks and washes won't have moved much since then: where would I have found temporary cover or a hiding place?
As far as the women are concerned, the David Deangelo method is what you use if you don't look like Tom Cruise or have a pocket full of gold nuggets. If we find the LDM, we won't need it.
-Rock
