Gideon Cowan Thorp was born in Tennessee in 1844 and had settled in Texas with his family by 1850. The Thorps later moved to Llano County. Gideon served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War and returned to the area after the war, relocating to Birdtown, now Round Mountain, in Blanco County. He married Sarah E. Bird in 1871, and they and their eight children lived in the Round Mountain area for forty years. Rumors of gold in the Texas Hill Country, possibly fueled by the California Gold Rush of the late 1840s, persisted despite an 1866 geological report that said weathered biotite, or mica, was being mistaken for gold in the region. In the late 1880s, rancher Joel P. Smith grubstaked Thorp to investigate reports of gold in the Sandy Creek basin. Thorp then constructed an arrastre in Walnut Creek, a type of ore-crushing mill first used in Texas by the Spanish during the early 18th century. Carved into the creek’s hard sandstone bottom, it used creek water to flush stone through a carved trough so an animal-drawn millstone could crush it. Thorp and his family lived in a two-room house near the arrastre, but it is not known how much gold, if any, was found in Walnut Creek. Thorp died in 1929.