John Eliot Allen

Did you go out on the coast and make some field investigations on your own?

No. I was pretty busy on the chromites job. I moved over to Grants Pass later and then made trips to Washington to chromites deposits up there. The reason I left after three years was that I had discovered an excellent deposit at High Plateau right on the border of California and Oregon and I dickered with the owner to buy it for $8,000, and he’d agreed with me. And m boss back in Baltimore decided that he’d better send somebody else to help this young fellow that had been working there. So he sent somebody out and lost the deal and that made me so mad I quite. I really didn’t have to quit because I’d already been asked if I’d serve on the State Department of Geology, but anyhow, I was glad to quit. Later they mined a million and a quarter dollars worth of chrome out of that mine.

That would have been during WWII?

That was during WWII.

There was another question I was going to ask you in regard to Smith and Schwartzlow, they mentioned at one point that there was an island in the Tonga Group that was supposedly identical to Crater Lake. Do you remember that?

No, I don’t remember that. Of course, there are a lot of calderas that are more or less similar to Crater Lake.

They wanted to compare…

Not many have water in them.

They said these one ad two islands in it and I think it was Niuafoou in the Tonga chain.

Well, could be. Let’s see, the four geologists were Schwartzlow, Smith, Dutton, and myself. Four geologists out of that crew.