HISTORY OF MINING AND MILLING METHODS IN CALIFORNIA 



By C. A. LOGAN 



PLACER MINING 





Simple Early Day Mining Methods 



The action of water had been chiefly responsible for the formation of 

 the rich placer deposits of gold sought by the pioneers, and it was the 

 principal agent used by them in winning the gold. The richness of the 

 most accessible deposits found by the earliest miners along the stream 

 courses permitted them to make a profit from working small quantities 

 of auriferous gravel in the miner's pan, batea or horn. Soon it was found 

 that the miner's cradle or rocker would permit a man to work many 

 times as much gravel in a day as with a pan, so that he could make a good 

 profit from poorer gravel. As the number of miners increased, the richer 

 diggings were exhausted and it became necessary to work more gravel for 

 a given amount of gold. The long torn was next introduced by men from 

 Georgia. This was a trough of boards 12 feet long, 8 inches deep, 12 to 15 

 inches wide at the head and widening to 2 or 2 feet at the lower end, 

 which terminated in a sheet of iron with upturned edges. This iron was 

 punched with small holes that permitted the gold and finer sand to fall 

 into a box below while the coarsest rock could be cast aside. The long torn 

 required a steady stream of water. For this purpose the first mining ditch 

 in California is claimed to have been dug at Coyote Hill, Nevada City, in 

 March, 1850, to supply miners' long toms. It was about two miles long. 

 The first miner's sluice box is also said to have been originated in Nevada 

 County. It was a V-flume of two boards, a type which later came into wide 

 use for transporting lumber. The miners soon changed to a sluice box 

 made of three boards, which at first had a bottom board 12 inches wide 

 with sides 10 inches high. A number of these boxes, fitted end to end, 

 made a string of sluices of greater capacity than the long torn. Later, as 

 developed for use in river mining, flumes 18 to 40 feet wide, with sides 

 6 feet high, were used to carry the entire low-water flow of one or more 

 branches of the American, Yuba and other rivers in the gold belt, so that 

 the beds of these streams could be worked. 



As the placer miners thus exhausted the gravel that could be profit- 

 ably worked by their methods on the banks, bars, and even from the beds 

 of the rivers, they began to follow "prospects" higher in the hills among 

 the tributary streams. There they noticed deposits of gravel on the canyon 

 sides and on benches of land sometimes hundreds of feet above the present 

 river.v These were ancient buried river channels. The gravel was similar 

 in appearance to that of the modern rivers and some experimental work 

 proved it also carried gold. It was not long after these hillside deposits 

 were found that some miner, whose name is not known, conceived the idea 

 for a new and cheaper way to work them. By this method, which came to 

 be called ground sluicing, a stream of water was brought to the top of a 

 bank of gravel and allowed to flow down over the face. It softened the 

 gravel and with a little help from the miner, carried it along to a natural 

 sluice prepared on the bedrock below. A man was thus able to handle in 



a day with very little shoveling much more than he had previously been 

 able to lift into his sluice box or long torn. By a later adaptation of this 

 method, the gravel in the bed of a stream with sufficient grade could be 

 worked by damming the stream and releasing the flow of water at regular 

 intervals by means of an automatic gate. The large volume of water 

 released carried gravel and boulders down stream until the volume of 

 material to be shoveled into sluices for the final cleanup was reduced to 

 a minimum. This was called "booming" or "hushing." Other variations 

 of ground sluicing were practiced. 



Hydraulic Mining 



Edward E. Mattison, working at American Hill, just north of Nevada 

 City in 1853, is credited with first making use of water under pressure to 

 undermine and wash gravel into sluice boxes. In this pioneer plant for 

 hydraulic mining, water was brought in a ditch to a point on the hillside 

 40 to 60 feet above a bank of gravel and thence taken from a penstock 

 or intake reservoir through canvas hose four or five inches in diameter to 

 a point in front of the gravel. There the water was directed through a 

 sheet iron nozzle against the base of the gravel bank, undermining it and 

 causing it to fall, whence it could be easily washed into sluice boxes laid 

 in a trench cut in the bedrock to receive it. Only 25 to 50 miners' inches 

 of water was used in this project. The method was introduced at Yankee 

 Jims, Placer County, in 1853 by Colonel William McClure, who had 

 visited Mattison 's mine that year. Canvas hose was soon in great demand, 

 and a number of inventors began to make "gadgets" for use in this new 

 process, which Mattison made no effort to patent. Thus began the great 

 system of reservoirs and canals needed to supply water for dozens of large 

 mining ventures in all the counties from Plumas southward to Tuolumne. 

 Hydraulic mining flourished in the region for about 25 years until 1880. 

 In 1867, there were 5328 miles of main canals, with probably 800 miles 

 more of branch ditches built at a cost of $15,575,400. Some of the water 

 systems extended into the higher portions of the Sierra Nevada. Main 

 ditches were usually 8 to 15 feet wide at the top, 4 to 6 feet wide at the 

 bottom and three feet or more in depth. Water was carried across valleys 

 and around rocky points first in wooden flumes, which were later largely 

 replaced by heavy iron pipes from 20 to 40 inches in diameter. These 

 systems were often owned by companies that sold the water to miners. 

 In later years, after hydraulic mining was enjoined, many of the canals 

 and reservoirs became part of the Pacific Gas & Electric Company 's hydro- 

 electric system, and the Nevada Irrigation District 's system draws water 

 from reservoirs and ditches of one of these systems which once supplied 

 immense hydraulic mines. 



As hydraulic mining began to be applied to larger deposits the 

 equipment used and the method of operation underwent rapid change, 

 all in the direction of greater working capacity and lower unit cost. 



(31) 



