In 1849, James Allen Hardin traveled the Applegate-Lassen Trail. While north of the Black Rock, he found ore that at the time he thought was lead. He returned to camp with thirty or forty pounds and found that it easily melted. They made bullets out of a portion, left a portion at the camp and kept a portion. The portion that remained at camp was later found and eventually assayed to be a carbonate of lead and silver. Hardin smelted a portion of the rock down to a button that many thought to be silver. Hardin sent the button to San Francisco in 1850, where it was lost in the fire of 1850 (possibly the San Francisco Fire of 1851?). In the meantime, Hardin had settled in Petaluma, California. In 1858, an expedition was launched to find the mine. As with many stories of a lost mine, nothing was found, though there was a rush and the town of Hardin City was created.
