Found by Grabbing a Tree

The richest silver mine in South America was found by a man chasing something else.

An Indigenous hunter named Hualpa was climbing the side of a mountain after a wild animal and caught hold of a tree to help himself up. The tree was so slightly rooted that it came out of the ground entirely. The animal escaped — but there were grains of native silver clinging to the roots in his hand^[1].

The vein ran so close to the surface at Potosí that no shaft was ever needed there. Miners simply scooped out the hillside, in the end opening several hundred pits, none of them more than seventy yards deep.