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Show those who have come back to the desert are full-time prospectors, using terminal-leave pay and GI readjustment allowances as a grubstake until they make the big strike." . Where the old-time prospectors worked with a pack mule and the crudest of equipment, the new crop drives to his claim in a surplus sur-plus carryall over paved highways a good part of the way, and in many cases he's home for dinner with the little woman every evening. "Talk with any of these young men who are seeking their fortunes for-tunes in the desert today, and you can't help coming away with the impression that America's frontier spirit, on which historians have been hanging crepe since the turn of the century, is not as moribund mori-bund as we've been led to believe. Optimism shines out of the eyes of these GI . 'forty-niners' and sparks, off their speech. "Furthermore it's a twentieth-century twentieth-century frontier spirit. Not as glamorous, perhaps, as the lawless-rip-roaring days that Bret Harte immortalized but more likely to endure." VET HITS DESERT PAY DIRT; CLAIM YIELDS BIG SUM Forty thousand dollars worth of tungsten was taken recently in one week from one of the thousands thous-ands of claims staked out by war veterans in the Mojave Desert. California is experiencing its newest mining rush, but this time the quest is not only for gold, but for valuable metals such as molybdenum, molyb-denum, titanium, tungsten, beryllium, beryl-lium, chromite and a dozen others, according to an article in the July issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. In addition there are to be found nonmetals like talc, graphite, graph-ite, mica, zircon, and dolomite which were mined to the extent of $60,000,000 in California's desert country in the first year after the war. Center of the new mining activity acti-vity is the triangle bounded by the towns of Randsburg, Johannesburg Johan-nesburg and Red Mountain. Many of the veterans who have become prospectors received their military - training in - California's desert country and had leained something of the art of prospecting prospect-ing from the oldtimers they met in the saloons of the remote mining towns of the desert. "In their time off from desert-warfare desert-warfare training, they became spare-time prospectors. Now, |