Earendel should find the "Tolkeinesque" title irresistable (LOL).
One of the later episodes of Frederick Russell Burnham's life involved finding strategic minerals during WW1.
I found these paragraphs somewhat compelling.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Burnham did find a way to fight Germany. To make steel for armaments, the U.S. military suddenly needed large quantities of little-known metals such as tungsten and manganese. But where to find these crucial war metals, formerly disregarded? Old geological surveys offered scattered clues, but Burnham had a better source: old prospectors. He knew many, and had renewed their acquaintance in the last two years while crisscrossing the West as a mining scout. These men had wandered over every inch of the desert searching for gold and silver, and Burnham thought they might remember patches of the strange black metals now in need. “I urged them to recall to memory some long-forgotten cañon with stained walls,” he wrote in Scouting on Two Continents, “or some crags and peaks streaked brown and black, crumbling in the blaze of the desert sun.”
One half-crippled prospector, seventy-four, remembered finding a vein of manganese thirty years earlier in the Chuckawalla Desert. He was sure, as prospectors always are, that he could find it again. For days Burnham followed him across sand dunes, through cactus, up steep mountains strewn with baking rocks. They wore damp handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses to protect their lungs from temperatures well above 100 degrees. The peaks in the distance quivered like candle flames, and the crystalline air trembled. “I could sit here and gaze on these mountains forever,” said the prospector happily.
He and others like him led Burnham to neglected veins and forgotten mines near Tombstone, Mount Diablo, and other old camps. Loads of tungsten and manganese began rolling to eastern smelters to become steel, then weapons and munitions used against Germany. “It was certainly the desert people’s best tribute to the nation,” wrote Burnham. “It was the last fine rally of the long-beards.”
Kemper, Steve (2016-01-25). A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham (p. 354). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.