254 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 
inches wide, and are connected by four ropes which ran per- 
pendicularly down. The rings are about three inches apart. 
The “ crinoline hose,” thus made, is very flexible, and will sup- 
port a column of water one hundred and fifty or two hundred 
feet high. The pipe at the end of the hose is like the pipe of 
a fire-engine hose, though usually larger. Sometimes the pipe 
will be eight inches in diameter where it connects with the 
hose, and not more than two inches at the mouth; and the 
force with which the stream rushes from it is so great, that it 
will kill a man instantaneously, and tear down a hill more rap- 
idly than could a hundred men with shovels. 
One or two men are required to hold the pipe. They usu- 
ally turn the stream upon the bank near its bottom until a 
large mass of dirt tumbles down, and then they wash this all 
away into the sluice; when they commence at the bottom of 
the bank again, and so on. If the bank is one hundred and 
fifty feet high, the mass of earth that tumbles down is of 
course immense, and the pipemen must stand far off, for fear 
that they will be caught in the avalanche. Such accidents are 
of daily occurrence, and the deaths from this cause probably 
are not less than threescore every year in the state. Often 
legs are broken; still more frequently the pipemen have warn- 
ing, and escape in time. When men are buried in the falling 
dirt, the water is used to wash them out. In some claims, the 
pipe will tear down more dirt than the sluice can wash; in 
other claims, the sluice always demands more dirt than the 
pipe can bring down. In the latter case, blasting may be used 
to loosen the dirt, or the miners may undermine the bank, 
leaving a few columns of dirt for support; and then these be- 
ing washed away by the pipe, the whole bank comes tumbling 
down. 
In hydraulic claims, all the dirt is washed; in all other 
kinds of claims, such dirt as contains no gold is thrown to one 
side, or “stripped off’’—“ Hydraulic mining” is the highest 
branch of placer mining; it washes more dirt, and requires 
more water, and a larger sluice, than any other kind of mining. 
