Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

La Fanciulla del West
The Girl of the Golden West

Early Mining Methods

James J. Rawls

Miners in California used a variety of methods to extract gold. The simplest method was panning. Squatting by the side of a river or a stream, the miner filled a shallow, flat-bottomed pan with what he hoped would be "pay dirt." Then he held the pan under the surface of the water and swirled it about with a gently rotating motion for several minutes. With one side of the pan held lower than the other, the water washed away the lighter dirt and sand. The heavier gold particles-if any-would remain in the bottom of the pan.

Panning was a tedious and back-breaking job. Miners improved on this simple method by using a rocker, an oblong box without a top, several feet in length, mounted on rockers like a child's cradle and placed in a sloping position. Pay dirt was shoveled into the rocker, followed by buckets of water. As the miner vigorously rocked the cradle back and forth, the muddy water rushed through and the gold was trapped behind "riffles" or cleats in the bottom of the rocker.

Further improvements appeared by the end of 1849. The "long tom" was an open wooden trough about twelve feet long. Water and dirt flowed through the tom more rapidly and in greater quantity than could be handled by a rocker. The long tom later evolved into a sluice, a series of riffle boxes fitted together, sometimes as much as several hundred feet in length.

Hydraulicking
The easily available gold in California soon was depleted, but rich deposits of the precious metal remained far below the surface. Thus the early mining methods gave way to methods more complex-and more destructive.

Working together in large mining companies, miners turned aside entire rivers to expose the pay dirt of streambeds. They also dug deep shafts or tunnels into the earth. One of the most spectacular of the new mining methods was "hydraulicking." Miners used the destructive power of high-pressure water to wash away banks and hills, uncovering gold-bearing gravel far beneath the surface. Hydraulicking left the earth deeply scarred and in some places unrecognizable from its previous state.

Hydraulic mining was a true California innovation. In 1853 a former sailmaker named Anthony Chabot constructed a sturdy canvas hose, and a Connecticut Yankee named Edward E. Matteson invented a tapered nozzle of sheet brass. For the next three decades, hydraulic mining was the dominant form of gold extraction in northern California.

Reprinted courtesy of the California Historical Society.

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