Ca gold rush tools

A sluice box did most of the work for the miners. It contained an open trough where dirt and rock debris would be placed, and a shaft where it could be washed out with water coming from an attached flume. Gold would be caught by ridges in the bottom, while rocks would be washed out. Large rocks or chunks of gravel sometimes contained gold or quartz, and miners from Sonoran Mexico invented the horse-drawn arrastre to pulverize the ore.

Horses or mules were hooked to large spokes with masses of rock attached to the inside. As they turned the spokes around an axle, the rocks were crushed over a rocky surface.

Nearly everyone, of course, went to the sawmill to dig for gold. But one enterprising Mormon merchant named Sam Brannan had a better idea. Then he took a quinine bottle full of gold flakes to the nearest town, San Francisco. The rush was on! Even with the crudest of mining tools, the earliest Argonauts did well. All one had to do was to dig down into a placer, and wash the pay dirt.

The entire gold country was open to all. No taxes were levied on what the miners found. No towns or roads existed in the gold country. Every miner was on his own, and nobody had to work for wages unless he wanted to. The individualist entrepreneurial spirit that pervades California to this day was born in the gold fields in the summer of News of gold, free for the taking, continued to spread.

By the end of summer the first gold seekers were arriving from outside California. The Gold Rush of the s ended the era of the solitary miner sitting by a stream with pan in hand. Throngs traveled to California hoping to find their fortunes. Tools were soon developed to easily extract gold from rocks and riverbeds. Many of these tools have been found in the original mines above and below ground.

Image: Panning for gold. And so does uncovering buried treasure while metal detecting. And don't forget melting or smelting cell phone parts or old jewelry and coins. No matter your favorite way of finding gold, one thing is for certain, there's nothing quite like getting out there— in the field or in the water— and getting your share!

Favorite Ways To Find Gold.