Collection: Books and Periodicals > Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins

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Title: Volume 055-2 - April 2001 Collection Type: Books and Periodicals Collection Name: Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins # of Pages: 8 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

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Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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Highgrading in Nevada County by Michel Janicot S IMPLY STATED, HIGHGRADING IS THE THEFT OF particles of highgrade (superior quality) gold ore by employees in a mine. Rich ore has always invited theft and wherever men see valuable mineral, greed overcomes conscience, The lure and lust for the acquisition of gold have endured through thousands of years and it has been considered fair prize for the taking. The California early day miners followed the philosophy that gold theft was a miner’s right and that the taking of highgrade ore was a just compensation for the hazards and discomforts of working underground.! When a miner, laboring in the dark and damp for $3.50 or $4.00 a day, encountered a pocket of highgrade ore, temptation naturally arose and the miner soon devised ingenious means of appropriating the ore. Miners equipped themselves with loose pockets— long canvas tubes suspended inside trouser legs; vestlike garments containing many pockets and worn beneath the shirt; false—or double-crowned hats—in which as much as five pounds of ore might be hidden; and various belted and suspended harnesses invented by wives handy at sewing. The mine owners, who regarded highgrading as nothing less than larceny, took steps against it. They searched lunch pails and built “change houses”: buildings where men going off shift were expected to strip and change their muddy work clothes for clean ones before going home. This procedure was strenuously opposed by organized labor, and led to a strike at Goldfield, Nevada, in 1907, but it became an accepted practice thereafter in all mining districts throughout the United States. Not all highgrading was done by $3.50-a-day miners. Thomas Rickard, a leading mining engineer of the day, pointed out that high-salaried executives also practiced the art. “I know the president of a mining company . . . who used to visit the mine whose operations he supervised and on the occasion of each visit, he filled his dress-suit case or valise with specimen ore. Finally, at the end of the fiscal year he told the manager to debit him with $4,000. The manager told me that he had kept tally on the little shipments that went from the mine in the president’s valise, and he estimated the total at $22,000.” 4 Highgrading was not limited to miners underground, but amalgam, precipitates or other forms of gold were in open season. An example of one form of theft was the practice of suspending a sock full of zinc shavings or dust in a pregnant cyanide leaching tank to collect or precipitate gold, which was then taken home and melted into bullion.> F. W. / (» Nevada County Historical Society Bulletin VOLUME 55 NUMBER 2 APRIL 2001 McQuiston also mentions that amalgam was available for theft in the Empire stamp mill-concentrating-plant except for the surveillance of trustworthy foremen. Furthermore, as a security measure, there was an elevated enclosed walkway from the manager’s second-story office across the mine yard and into and through the width of the mill. The walkway was equipped with louvered portholes for sight observation throughout the stamp-table-concentration area. One could see out, but no one could see in, and the mill hands could thus be observed day or night.6 When a mine owner caught a miner with highgrade ore and hauled him into court, it was well-nigh impossible to get a conviction. Courts and statutes proved incapable of stopping the practice in face of lax moral sense in most mining communities. The sympathy of the community, friends and local merchants dependent on the miners was always with the accused man. The judges, who were elected by popular vote, were not likely to side with the mine owners.” During the heyday of hydraulic mining in Nevada County, gravel was washed through a sluicebox with cleats across the bottom to trap particles of gold. Mercury (quicksilver) was put behind the wooden cleats forming the riffles in the sluice boxes. This was to aid in the separation of gold from other heavy materials in the rushing waters below the monitors (water, sand and pebbles will float over the surface of mercury, but gold will be submerged and trapped). Robbing sluices became a common practice until the boxes could be secured with a lock. In the early 1880s, when anti-Chinese discrimination was at its worst, public opinion pointed to the Chinese as sluicebox robbers. Not only were they blamed for the robberies, but for everything else that went wrong in the mining districts. They represented a minority group that was a real or implied threat to the wage structure of non-unionized laborers throughout California. The local newspapers of those days are replete with articles about sluice box robberies attributed to the Chinese. Being too numerous to cite them all, a typical view of a national publication, The Century Magazine, will be presented. Under the heading of “Hydraulic Mining in California,” the writer notes: