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Collection: Directories and Documents > Pamphlets
An Illustrated History of California's Gold Rush by Wells Fargo Bank (PH 1-27) (34 pages)
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Page: of 34
Life in The Diggings
———— ts
he first gold came easy. For centuries flakes
and nuggets had been washed down from
the high deposits by the winter rains. The
heavy gold had sunk into the gravel of the stream
beds. Naturally the heaviest pieces sank down closest to the source and the lighter flakes were carried
downstream to lodge in the sand and gravel bars of
the lower foothills. The early miners staked claims
on these bars and washed out the gravel in large
pans, whirling the water and gravel around so that
the loose sand and gravel washed over the edge of
the pan and the gold sank to the bottom.
As these rich bars were worked out and the miners
moved further upstream they began to find coarser
gold and large nuggets. There were also “dry” diggings—deposits of quartz and coarse gold where a
vein came to the surface, and large pieces of the
precious metal could be dug from the ground with
a pocket knife. When all of this surface gold had
been panned out the miners had to range further
from the stream beds and dig through the topsoil to
get at the gold bearing gravel below, or divert the
streams themselves to get at the gravel bottom. This
was done by building a wing dam which would divert the stream through a wooden flume so that it bypassed the section of stream bed the miners wished
to work. Naturally this sort of endeavor required 2
joint effort, and many independent argonauts who
had worked out their early claims used the proceeds
to invest in companies for the purpose of developIng a promising stream.
As the gold became harder to come by, more sophisticated methods of mining were developed. Wooden
rockers” were devised which could wash the gravel
faster and give better yield. Some inventive (or POS
sibly lazy) miner discovered that he could use the
force of the water to wash away the topsoil ten times
as fast as he could dig it away with his shovel. This
was the forerunner of the disastrous hydraulic min6