Gold Mining Methods
Miners during the early Gold Rush years wanted only one thing: gold. They didn’t care about elegance, craft or aesthetics. Greedy and in a hurry, they made do with simple yet effective tools.
The gold panner patiently crouching alongside a river is symbolic of the Gold Rush, and yet gold pans were probably the most ineffective of all the miner’s tools, even though that is what most miners used early on. As word leaked out in 1848 about gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills, early-day entrepreneur Sam Brannan cornered the California market on pans, picks and shovels. Without lifting a finger to do any gold mining of his own, he became California’s first millionaire by catering to the needs of the miners. Miners who couldn’t find pans made do with kitchen bowls or whatever they could find.
Although gold pans were much in evidence during the early days of the Gold Rush, miners used them less and less as time went on and they created better gold extraction devices. Even today, however, some gold seekers will use the light and simple pans for prospecting, systematically sampling gravels as they work up a stream, for example, and knowing that when the gold “color” stops, a vein or two of gold feeding into the stream may be close at hand.
Fortunately for the miners, gold has an unusual quality: it is heavy, and thus all early-day mining processes take advantage of this property.
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