Rick Just
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Author
  • Speaker
  • Contact
  • Subscriptions
  • Heroes & Villains

Placer Mining (Tap to read)

8/25/2022

Comments

 
When you think of a miner, you probably picture some old Gabby Hayes character with a pinned back hat brim crouched over a stream with a pan, dreams of gold glittering in his eye. That’s not a bad picture of a prospector, because most miners (some of whom were also minors) started out that way. Panning for gold is slow and tedious. Shake, shake, shake, rinse, shake, shake, shake, rinse, and repeat until your beard grows down to your waist. Gold flecks are heavier than most of the surrounding material so they sink to the bottom of the pan. A good panner could sift through about a yard of sand and gravel a day. If they turned up $3 or $4 worth of gold, that was excellent. It was about what they might make for a day as, say, a captain in the army in the 1860s, or your average bricklayer in the East.
 
But miners did not dream of bricklayer wages. They wanted more. That’s why prospectors were typically testing the waters, so to speak, in search of a vein higher upstream. Let’s assume for a moment that they couldn’t find that ledge of quartz, but the quantity of gold in the stream gravel was pretty good. They were stuck with mining the streambed itself or an alluvial fan where water once ran. That’s called “placer mining.” In that case they needed a way to sift more sand and gravel faster in order to have more gold at the end of the day.
 
Rockers were boxes into which the miner dumped gravel and sand scooped from a stream bottom or alluvial deposit. At the top of the box was a sieve where the larger bits of gravel were screened out. Below that was an incline set up with a series of bumps or ribs down the length of the box over which sand would run when the worker poured water into the device while rocking it back and forth, the equivalent of shaking a gold pan. A piece of draping canvas helped filter out the gold from the lighter stuff. Rockers were especially useful if the material a miner was working with was partially cemented, meaning sticky clay had to be washed away. A good rocker operator could triple his day’s take over panning, meaning he was up close to what a major general might make.
 
Still, it was pretty tedious work and the miner was not making the fortune he was dreaming of. A faster production method was called for.
 
The quickest way to pull gold out of a streambed for one or two men was a sluice running into a rocker. The downside was that you needed a downside. That is, you needed some elevation for water to pick up some speed to wash over the material you were working. Sometimes that meant digging a ditch, which was a lot of work. A sluice was only practical if the bits of gold were fairly large. Gold “dust” would float right out.
 
A sluice running through a giant could handle 500 yards of gravel a day, compared with that one yard a man with a pan could process. That meant a miner could work material that was a lot less rich and still pull much more gold out in a day.
 
This sloshing escalation of mining methods could be carried to ends that a single miner couldn’t handle, such as hydraulic mining and large-scale dredging. 
 
No matter the method, the idea behind placer mining was to rinse away the rubble and expose the gold in the remaining sand. It’s a fairly benign operation at the lower end of the scale, but the more material an operation uses the more a streambed or ancient deposit is disturbed. See the aerial below of the windrows of gravel left by the Yankee Fork Dredge.

Picture
This 19th century engraving shows a miner using a rocker box at a streamside. He would dump sand and gravel in the top, then pour water through it to rinse the material.
Picture
Aerial view of the gravel windrows left by the Yankee Fork Dredge. The Yankee Fork dumps into the Main Salmon near Sunbeam.
Speaking of Idaho history posts are copyright © 2020 by Rick Just. Sharing is encouraged. If you don’t find a button that lets you do that, find the post on Speaking of Idaho. If you’re missing my daily posts, select the RSS button, or select See it First under the Facebook Following tab.
Comments
    Picture
    The first book in the Speaking of Idaho series is out. Ask for it at your local Idaho bookstore, find it on Amazon, or, if you want a signed copy, click the button.
    Picture
    The second book in the Speaking of Idaho series is out. Ask for it at your local Idaho bookstore, find it on Amazon, or, if you want a signed copy, click the button.
    Picture
    Rick's book about Fearless Farris is available on Amazon! Click the picture above to be taken to Amazon. If you'd like an autographed copy, click the button below.

    Author, Speaker

    Rick Just has been writing about Idaho history since 1989 when he wrote and recorded scripts for the Idaho Centennial Commission’s daily radio program, Idaho Snapshots. One of his Idaho books explores the history of Idaho's state parks: Images of America, Idaho State Parks. Rick also writes a regular column for Boise Weekly.

    Rick does public presentations on Idaho's state park history and the history of the Morrisite war for the Idaho Humanities Council's Speakers Bureau.idahohumanities.org/programs/inquiring-idaho/
    ​


    Check out Rick's history of Idaho State Parks.

    The audio link below is to Rick's Story Story Night set called "Someplace Not Firth"

    Archives

    July 2025
    June 2025
    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018

    RSS Feed

Speaking of Idaho history posts are copyright © 2025 by Rick Just. Sharing is encouraged. If you’re missing my daily posts, select the RSS button, or select See it First under the Facebook Following tab.

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. That means if you follow a link (generally to a book) from my page to an Amazon page, I get a tiny percentage of any purchase you may make.