by Jim Richards
Once the sieve was full, we lowered it and the gold pan together into the water and jigged them up and down so the finer material fell through the sieve into the pan below.
We then checked the sieve for gold nuggets – no such luck. Then, with a circular movement of the pan, we washed the remaining fines (less than 2 millimetres in diameter), removing the lighter material. A final swirl left the remaining heavy fraction of black sand in a tail at the bottom of the dish.
‘Look, Jim. Look!’ cried out my friend excitedly, pointing into the pan.
Right at the end of the tail were five fine specks of gold, unmistakable even to the untrained eye.
The psychology of gold panning is strange: you start out believing you are going to find a large nugget and end up perfectly happy with a fine speck. Gold is like a homely fire; just seeing it lifts your spirits.
Our specks weighed roughly 0.02 of a gram. We would need to wash 1,555 pans to get an ounce of gold worth $1,200. A strange queasy feeling developed just above my stomach, a mixture of eagerness and greed; we hadn’t found much gold, but we might have. If I went somewhere else and kept looking, who knew what I would find?
It was the first of many lifetime technical successes – i.e. commercial failures – and I became obsessed by the idea of discovering gold. However, this was not an easily fulfilled aspiration in the UK, which did not have a single operating metal mine, far less a gold mine.
So how could I get a piece of the action?
Gold mining was all about rocks. If you wanted to study rocks, you studied geology. Simple. The geology students I worked alongside at Dolaucothi were my kind of people. They loved science, the outdoors and gold mines.
My panning friend had encouraged me. ‘You should do geology at university, Jim. There are lots of field trips to study rocks in exotic places. It’s science without the maths, and unlike physics there are plenty of girls on the course.’
Learning about the earth, its rocks, minerals and structure sounded fascinating to me. This new interest led to my reading every mining-related book I could find. This included Men of Men, in which Wilbur Smith vividly described the diamond rush at Kimberley in South Africa in the 1870s. The idea of finding and mining diamonds gripped me from that moment.
So in my final year at school, I applied to London University to study geology and was thrilled to win a place. Maybe this line of education would help me learn how to find my own gold.
CHAPTER 2
MINING TIME
Dolaucothi had given me the gold bug, I wouldn’t call it gold fever, not yet, but it was definitely an itch that needed scratching. It was 1982, and although my undergraduate geology degree at Goldsmiths College was absorbing, there was a problem. It told me nothing specifically about gold mining.
As a teenager, I had read everything about travel and adventure I could lay my hands on. Papillon by Henri Charrière, the brutal true story of a convict escaping from a penal colony in French Guiana, I had found particularly enthralling. These books helped me to dream, and I liked to dream.
So at the age of eighteen, to dream my gold-rush dream, I descended on the second-hand bookshops that lined Charing Cross Road in central London. They had to be second-hand bookshops, as the only books about gold I could find were all very old.
Veteran bookshop owners took an amused interest in my enquiries.
‘Gold rush, eh? Off to make your fortune, are you, laddie?’ one asked.
‘Maybe, if you can sell me a book cheap enough.’
Chuckling, he led me to the darkest corner of his shop. The books on the bottom shelf looked like they hadn’t been touched in years. This was a whole section on gold, many of which were about gold rushes – a whole lost genre of literature. I sat on the carpeted step next to the shelf and started to read books I could not afford to buy.
In these books were tales of the wild gold rushes in California and the astonishing riches of the gold fields in Australia. There were real-life heroes and heroines with plenty of bounders, cads and villains. Fortunes were won and lost. To an unsophisticated lad from Wales, these stories were a revelation.
The earliest known use of gold is from 4000 BC by the Sumerians in ancient Iraq. They were expert goldsmiths whose gold was probably derived from alluvials in the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
In ancient Egypt, gold mines in the eastern desert were worked to provide gold to the pharaohs. Highly skilled craftsmen used this gold in creating such exquisite objects as the death mask of Tutankhamen.
The Lydians were the first to introduce gold and silver (electrum) coinage. The trading city of Sardis (now in modern Turkey) was the capital of Lydia, and the River Pactolus, which flowed through the city, had alluvial gold and silver deposits. In Greek mythology, this gold had appeared when King Midas removed the curse of his golden touch by bathing in the river.
In the sixth century BC, the Lydians discovered that if they heated electrum with salt, they could separate the gold and silver, which often occurred together. This allowed the minting of the first pure gold coins, fittingly issued by King Croesus. These coins became widely accepted and were the first international currency.
The increased status and wealth that flowed to the Lydians as a result of this remarkable invention were not used wisely. Croesus destroyed his kingdom in a series of ill-advised wars. But now the gold genie was well and truly out of the bottle and the race was on to find more.
As time passed, various gold-mining districts were discovered and mined throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Presumably some unrecorded early gold rushes took place when these mines were first discovered and the rich near-surface gold exploited.
The first recorded large-scale gold rush started in 1693 at Minas Gerais in Brazil. So profound were the series of discoveries over the next thirty years that some 400,000 Portuguese and 500,000 (mainly African) slaves migrated to this state. It is estimated that at the peak of this gold rush some 350,000 ounces of gold (worth $420 million at today’s prices) were mined every year.
The next major gold rush helped define the American nation.
I soon shall be in Frisco and there I’ll look around.
And when I see the gold lumps there, I’ll pick them off the ground.
I’ll scrape the mountains clean, my boys, I’ll drain the rivers dry.
A pocketful of rocks bring home, So brothers don’t you cry.
Oh, Susannah, Oh, don’t you cry for me
I’m going to California with my washpan on my knee.
‘Oh Susannah’ by Stephen Foster, 1840s
In the 1840s, Northern California was a remote rural backwater, but then gold was accidentally found near Sacramento in 1848. As word leaked out, people rushed to the site of the discovery and surrounding settlements emptied.
Some of the initial strikes were astounding. In parts, men simply picked up gold nuggets that lay on the surface (specking) or prised them out from river crevices with a knife, and tens of thousands of ounces of alluvial gold was swiftly won.
This was before the time of the telegraph, so it was when newspaper reports started to carry the news of the strike to the eastern United States that enthusiasm built up. When actual shipments of gold dust and nuggets started to arrive in New York, the atmosphere there reached fever pitch. The great California gold rush of 1849 was on.
One question was on everyone’s lips: ‘When are you off to the diggings?’
It was an era of limited social mobility and people saw the opportunity to free themselves from dreary jobs and lives, to be their own boss and get rich quick. A mass hysteria enveloped the eastern states and the fear of missing out overcame any caution or sound counsel. The gold was real, but the rush was based upon a dream.
During the next six years, over 300,000 people arrived in California in one of the largest mass migrations in American history: wealthy families and newly arrived immigrants; doctors and labourers; family men and poets. No one, it seemed, was immune when
gold fever gripped the nation and the world. They called themselves the Forty-Niners, after the year the gold rush began, or the Argonauts, after the band of adventurers in Greek mythology who accompanied Jason on his search for the Golden Fleece.
There were casualties, too: families and children were deserted, confronting great hardship on their own, and the departed themselves faced years of loneliness and uncertainty. One man left instructions that his son should be taught to say ‘Papa is coming home’ and ‘Bye bye’, to be repeated on demand.
There were two main routes from the east of the country to California – overland or by ship – and both carried many hazards.
The overlanders went by wagon, blazing trails that would become a part of American folklore. The California Trail was the main route, a 3,000-kilometre track leading from the eastern states directly to the California goldfields. But it was risky, especially because the lack of sanitation at the freshwater campsites led to rampant cholera.
It is not known how many died on the California Trail. Estimates are up to 10,000 through cholera, 1,000 in American Indian attacks and several thousand more to scurvy and accidents.
Those who took the more expensive and faster option of travelling by ship faced different perils. The initial route saw Argonauts sail south from New York and then around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of South America, but this Southern Ocean journey took six months and the passage often encountered terrible storms.
A much shorter journey was via ship to Panama in Central America, where Argonauts disembarked and journeyed overland across the narrow isthmus to the Pacific coast. This part of the trip by canoe and on foot along rivers and muddy jungle tracks had its own problems, with malaria and yellow fever ending many a dream.
When they reached the Pacific Ocean, a boat ran the Argonauts up the west coast to San Francisco – if they were lucky, that is. Chartered boats often failed to turn up, leaving gold seekers to wait, sometimes for months.
Ships arrived in San Francisco packed with expectant miners from all over the world. Yet as soon as they docked, many of the crew absconded to join the gold rush. This often meant cargoes remained unloaded and the harbour became full of abandoned ghost ships: a gold-rush fleet that could not sail.
At San Francisco the Argonauts were met by hustlers, pimps and bums, all there to fleece the new arrivals before they even reached the diggings. But on to the rush the Argonauts continued by foot, oxen or tender up the Sacramento River. They journeyed to a series of unfolding discoveries 150 to 300 kilometres east and north of San Francisco. Nothing could stop them.
Upon arrival at the diggings in the early days, things were easier. The new hopefuls might observe the established miners to see how they were working, then move on to find their own unclaimed area, using a gold pan to prospect the river gravels along the way.
After washing a sample of gravel, the pan was given a final swirl. An inch of gold left in a line at the bottom of the pan (an inch tail) meant good ground, well worth working. Now the new miner could stake his claim.
Each camp had its own rules. Generally claims were staked (or pegged) over as much land as a single miner could work, 100 square feet (9 square metres) being a common size. This was done by driving wooden pegs into the ground at the corners of the claim, with the name of the miner(s) and claim written on the side of the pegs.
A whole industry sprang up in trading claims. Some men never dug at all, they just got rich buying and selling claims. The best ground was vulnerable to claim jumping, where an individual would be removed from his claim by force, and murders over this highly charged issue were common. ‘Claim jumper’ is still a pejorative term used in the mining industry today.
After staking his claim, the new miner was ready to mine. There were a few intrepid souls who, through sheer determination or obstinacy, managed to transport mining equipment bought in New York all the way to the diggings. For their troubles, they were usually mocked by the seasoned miners as their devices would be of no practical use. They had been conned by New York merchants who knew nothing about gold mining.
The miner would start by working the shallowest and highest grade (most gold per tonne) material first – the easy stuff. This was done using simple hand tools: a pick and shovel for the digging and a gold pan for the washing.
The panning was back-breaking work, requiring the miner to constantly bend over water. So most miners used a rocker, a device more easily worked by two or three men; already the new miners were teaming up.
The rocker, or cradle, was a simple wooden apparatus about the size of a stool. It had an iron grate on top with a riffle box below, a hand lever provided the rocking motion. The device greatly sped up the washing of the material. One miner shovelled gravel into the top and agitated (rocked) the cradle while the other, using a hand ladle, dumped water onto the gravel. The finer material, including the fine gold, washed through the grate to a riffle box below where the heavy gold would get caught by gravity.
Every few hours, the pair cleaned out the riffles (wooden slats) to get the concentrate – gold and black sand – which was then panned off to recover just the gold. Rockers were used extensively, but they were not good at recovering the floury (very fine) gold, much of which was lost.
As time progressed and the easier gravels were worked out, the gold grades fell. The miners now formed larger teams of four to eight men to construct and operate a more efficient device called a tom, or long tom. This apparatus was similar to a rocker. It had a launder (wash box) into which the gravel was shovelled, and below this a long sluice box to catch the gold. The tom required a constant flow of water to puddle (break up) the clays and to work the sluice, so the diggers often had to build elaborate earth or wooden water raceways.
A considerable camaraderie and loyalty was created within these teams, a common bond built upon the hardest of labour that captures the spirit of the Forty-Niners.
Over time, the mining techniques became ever more sophisticated. Entire rivers were diverted in order to access the auriferous (gold-bearing) gravels beneath, and long toms running for tens of metres were deployed to increase recovery of the fine gold. The longer the tom, the better the recovery.
The hardships of living in the goldfields were a constant challenge. The lucky ones had canvas tents; many others made their own shelters from brushwood or whatever came to hand. The food was poor. Flour, dried corn and salt pork were the staples, as these could be stored. But there was little fresh food to fend off scurvy.
Prices were sky high. In 1849 an ounce of gold was worth $20.67 cents, and a man on a good claim would be doing well to produce an ounce a day, with a quarter of an ounce being more common. In gold rush camps, beef cost $10 a pound, or half an ounce of gold. At today’s gold price, that would be the equivalent of $600 for a pound of beef.
The few women at the diggings either helped their husbands wash gravel or had more traditional roles running boarding houses or eateries.
Mail was of the greatest importance to the diggers and to their families back home. In 1849, William Brown, an Argonaut from a well-to-do Toledo family, went from unsuccessful miner to successful mailman. He carried 500 letters a month from the San Francisco post office to the miners in their camps, charging his subscribers a dollar a letter ($60 in today’s money).
Brown grew his ‘express business’, taking orders for goods and buying gold to resell at a profit. His is an example of the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that flourished in the Californian gold rush.
Not all of the miners continued to stay in touch with home. As time, loneliness and separation corroded family bonds, some created new identities and remarried. Their bewildered first wives, and often children, were left abandoned.
Life was rough and hard for the miners. This was manual labour at its most manual. For relaxation, each mining camp had its own saloon and Sunday was the day set aside for drinking rather than worship.
At the rougher camps, this saloon would be nothing m
ore than a tent and a couple of benches where miners would gamble and drink themselves to oblivion. When the diggers had a good strike they would often head to Sacramento or San Francisco, to enjoy the grand saloons with entertainment and ‘working girls’.
The only form of law and order in the camps was imposed by vigilante groups set up by the miners themselves. This led to injustice and violence as different bands vied for dominance. The early tolerance at the diggings fell away as the gold became harder to win. Non-English-speaking groups were particularly vulnerable, and by 1850 they were being violently evicted from their claims by the predominantly English-speaking miners.
But there was gold. Around 12 million ounces were won during the first five years of the California gold rush, worth around $14 billion at today’s prices. The resulting economic boom led to increased trade and communications within the United States and around the world.
By 1853, the gravels that supported the smaller-scale alluvial mining were essentially worked out. Only larger and more organised bands of men or companies could afford the capital required for mechanisation. Many of the now impoverished diggers ended up working for salary in these larger companies – exactly the sorts of positions they had come to California to try to escape.
One of these organised methods was hydraulic mining, which was introduced to California in 1853. This involved high-pressure water-blasting of the auriferous hillsides, directing the resulting gold-rich slurry over long toms. The widespread destruction caused by this led to some of the earliest environmental laws, with hydraulicing banned in California in 1884.
The alluvial (river) gold was originally derived from primary gold-bearing ore that had, over millennia, been eroded into the surrounding rivers. Much of this primary ore – mainly quartz – still remained in the hills and mountains, and as the alluvial gold was mined out, these ‘hard rock’ sources were opened up and worked. This required the blasting of shafts (vertical) and adits (horizontal) into the rock, and the subsequent crushing of the ore using stamp mills (mechanical crushers). Over the ensuing decades, gold mining in California continued to evolve as new technologies took over, which is still the story of the industry today.
