In late January of 1848, James Marshall had a contract with John Sutter to construct a sawmill on this stretch of the American River near Coloma in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, and on January 24th, he was realigning the millrace to get the sawmill working properly. They let the river do some of the work by letting water flow through the culvert all night, and in the morning he and his workers found yellow flakes of metal in the bottom of the millrace ...
On February 2, 1848, far to the south in Mexico, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ceding California to the United States in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. This strikes me as one of the stranger chronological coincidences ever.
Word spread quickly about the gold in the Sierra foothills, and the rush was on. Sutter's Mill didn't operate for very long. It was essentially abandoned by 1853, and all surface evidence was swept away during a flood in 1862. Many years later, the foundation timbers were excavated, allowing archaeologists to calculate the dimensions of the mill. A replica was constructed on the site in 1967, and the original timbers have been put on display (below).
The village at Coloma is now a state park that commemorates the discovery of gold and the rush that followed. There is a fundamental fascination with the yellow metal that caused hundreds of thousands of people to abandon their homes to seek a fortune in the gold fields of California. Legends abound of miners who found giant nuggets and rich pockets that made them instantly rich. Other legends tell the story of bandits and desperadoes. Few stories are ever told of the people whose culture disappeared into the mists of history without ever being recorded. The Native Americans of California, who may once have numbered over a million people, had already been decimated by European diseases, but for some cultures the Gold Rush was the last nail in the coffin.
The 1967 reconstruction of Sutter's Mill in Coloma |
Gold-bearing gravels could be found on ridge lines where ancestral rivers once flowed prior to the main uplift of the Sierra Nevada. The miners couldn't efficiently work the deposits because of the lack of water. Mining companies put together a system of flumes and canals in the high country to bring water to the gravels, and one of the most destructive kinds of mining ensued: hydraulic mining. A water cannon, called a monitor, was pointed at the cliffs with the gold bearing gravels, and the explosive spray washed away the gravel into a large tunnel. Large riffles filled with mercury trapped the particles of gold, and the waste material was dumped into the nearby rivers.
A monitor (water cannon) used in hydraulic mining at North Bloomfield. |
And then there were the dredges. It took the mining companies a long time to figure out a way to find the very fine gold particles that filled sediments in the Central Valley. The first successful dredge went into action in the late 1890s, and profitable production continued into the 1970s. The dredges were large factory barges with a system of shovels on one end, a waste conveyor belt on the other, and a series of sieves and mercury coated copper plates in the middle to trap the microscopic particles of gold. The dredges were floated in a pond, where they dug away at one end, and filled in the other. In this way, they "sailed" across parts of the Central Valley, producing huge rock piles where fertile soils once existed. Huge swaths of land were ruined in the chase for the elusive metal.
The hard rock mines of the Mother Lode had their own problems. The first mines were dug in 1849, and they were active until 1942, when presidential orders shut down the mines for strategic reasons. A few tried to start up again after the war, but were ultimately unsuccessful. The miners brought huge amounts of ore to the surface, where the rock was crushed to a powder in stamp mills and treated with mercury or arsenic to tease out the gold (cyanide is used today). The mine dumps are toxic, not only with the mercury and arsenic, but also the acids produced by exposure of the sulfide minerals in the gold veins to oxygen in the atmosphere. Clean up efforts are still ongoing today, 70 years after the mines closed.
The mines weren't just damaging to the environment. The miners themselves were subject to constant dangers from explosions, cave-ins, falls down shafts, and the gold miner's equivalent to black lung disease: silicosis, a deadly lung disorder caused by breathing in fine quartz dust.
Source: Kennedy Mine Foundation |
The Fricot Nugget, the largest surviving nugget from the Gold Rush era. Thieves attempted to steal the nugget last year, but failed. They still made off with numerous other beautiful specimens. |
2 comments:
One great dredge still works the gravel east of Yuba City. It makes the most amazing racket, as if Rube Goldberg had designed it. A steampunk Burning Man would be the perfect setting for it.
This video has a bit of the sound.
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