260 E E S O U R C E S O F C A L I F O E X I A . 



cradle is cleaned up two or four times in a day. The clean- 

 ing up is done by lifting the hopper, taking out the apron, 

 scraping up all the dirt in the bottom of the cradle with an 

 iron spoon, putting it into a pan and washing out the dirt, so 

 that only the gold will be left. This last process is called 

 panning out, and will be described in the next section. Most 

 of the gold collects above the upper riffle-bar, including all the 

 larger lumps. If the apron be of rough woollen cloth, some of 

 the fine gold will be caught there. In diggings where the 

 gold is very fine, the hopper is sometime? placed over the 

 lower end of the cradle, and the apron is made twice as long, 

 and with a lower inclination than in the more common form 

 of the rocker. The water for the cradle should be supplied by 

 a little ditch, with a reservoir at the head of the cradle, to 

 contain five or six gallons. The dipper should be of tin, 

 shaped Hke a basin, hold about a gallon when full, and have a 

 handle an inch and a half in diameter, and eight inches long. 

 The difference of height betw^een the upper and lower ends of 

 the cradle should not be more than two inches : a steeper in- 

 clination will make the current runnmg through it too strong, 

 and the gold will be carried off"; and, on the other hand, if 

 the cradle be nearer a level it will be hard to rock, and the 

 dirt in the bottom will pack more rapidly. The amount of dirt 

 that can be washed in a day w^ith a cradle, varies from one to 

 three cubic yards. The dirt is usually shovelled into a pan or 

 bucket, from which it is throw^n into the hopper. The miners 

 usually measure the amount of dirt washed by the number of 

 "pans." One man working alone with a cradle ought to 

 wash from seventy-five to one hundred and fifty pans in a day, 

 and two men will wash twice as much. A pan may contain 

 one-third or one-half of a cubic foot. Two men can work more 

 conveniently with the rocker than one. There is enough work 

 to give constant employment to a cradler and a shoveller. The 

 latter has a couple of buckets or pans, which he fills alter- 

 nately, always keeping one full and near the cradler, so that 

 without moving his feet he can pick it up and empty it into 



