John Thomas Moss
John Thomas Moss (March 4, 1839 – April 11, 1880) was an American frontiersman, prospector, and miner who helped open mining districts in what is now Arizona and Nevada. He learned many Native languages and acted as a go-between and peacemaker between American miners and local tribes in the Southwest.
He was born in Utica, New York, to Nathaniel William Moss and Margaret Cardwell Moss. He left home in 1857–1859 to travel west, working as a trapper and even riding for the Pony Express. In 1860 he appears in the census living on his father’s farm in Iowa, but he soon returned west. He lived with the Paiute in Utah and with the Hopi, Yavapai, Mohave, and Pima in Arizona. He scouted for the Army at Fort Mohave and claimed that in April 1861 he floated alone down the Colorado River from Lee’s Ferry through the Grand Canyon to Fort Mohave, though no witnesses confirm this.
In 1861 Moss helped discover rich silver lodes in El Dorado Canyon west of the Colorado River above Fort Mohave. He prospected and staked the Techatticup and Queen City Mines, then rushed to San Francisco to tell others and sold his claims to mining investors, including George Hearst, for a large profit. In 1862 he discovered the Moss Mine on the east side of the Colorado River, about nine miles from Fort Mohave, in what became the San Francisco Mining District. He mined an estimated $250,000 in gold from a pocket and later sold the claim for $30,000 to the Philadelphia Ophir Company, whose backers included Thomas A. Scott.
Later in 1863 he helped form the Wauba Yuma Mining District in the Hualapai Mountains, named for the Hualapai chief Wauba Yuma. He tried to become Indian Agent for the Colorado River Indian Reservation, taking Mohave leader Irataba and Pima leader Antonio Azul to New York and Washington, D.C., in early 1864, but did not get the appointment. He prospected in the Sierra Nevada, crossed the Mohave Desert on foot, and returned to Iowa in 1871 before rejoining mining efforts in California’s desert regions.
Moss also had a peripheral role in the diamond hoax of 1872. In 1873 he moved to Colorado to help open the San Juan mining region and established Parrott City in La Plata County, named after a backer. In 1874 he guided photographer William H. Jackson to Mesa Verde. In 1875 he married Alida Olson—the first marriage in La Plata County—and was elected to the state legislature. He later returned to San Francisco, where he died on April 11, 1880, from complications of a gunshot wound reportedly received from an Indian in Southern California.
Mount Moss, a 13,192-foot summit about six miles north of Parrott City, is named in his honor.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 16:31 (CET).