Getting the Gold

During the Gold Rush, placer mining involved finding gold-bearing gravels, digging them from river bars, stream beds, and hillside benches, and separating the heavier gold from the gravel in hard, back-breaking work. Placer gold appeared as dust, flakes, or nuggets mixed with gravel, and prospectors washed gravels in water with a pan while hoping to find a pay streak where gold was heavily concentrated. After finding gold, prospectors staked and filed claims to protect their rights to mine it. Miners then dug pits called open cuts to extract pay dirt that had settled just above bedrock and shoveled it into rockers or sluice boxes, where water washed the material through and trapped the gold in the bottom. A rocker was a shaken cradle, while a sluice box was a long, open-ended, slightly inclined box or series of boxes. Within a few years, hand mining gave way to other methods, including hydraulic mining, which used water under pressure to thaw gravel and push it through sluice boxes, as well as scrapers and large mechanical equipment such as dredges. In places where placer gold was deeply buried, miners recovered it by underground mining, sinking shafts through frozen ground to bedrock and using fires or boiler-heated water to thaw the ground. When they found gold, they dug horizontal tunnels, or drifts, to reach the pay streak, hoisted the pay dirt to the surface, and piled it in dumps, then in summer, when running water was available, sluiced the dump piles to learn how much gold they had found.

Harding-Birch Lakes, Alaska · United States