How did the miners from the gold rush get the gold?

Answer 1

The vast majority of gold found during a gold rush is placer gold. This is gold that has been carried and deposited by flowing water. Placer gold appears in several forms: gold dust and black sand (most common), gold nuggets and gold flakes, wire gold, etc.

Towards the end of the gold rush and for years afterwards, the more successful miners begin to trace back from the placers upstream to the lodes that originally supplied the gold. They now mine lode gold in underground mines typically on the sides of mountains or hills. Lode gold also appears in several forms, but the most valuable is where the gold is embedded in clear or translucent white quartz as many jewelry makers pay well over the value of the gold for the rock that contains it.

Answer 2

One popular method used during the gold rush was "panning" by which the miners would find a stream and run netting plates in the water in the hopes of finding small nuggets out of the rocks that settled in the netting.

However, there were other, more complex methods used as well to extract larger quantities of gold. These included:

• Cradling involved a wooden box loosely resembling a cradle. The cradle was used for sifting through larger amounts of sediment to find gold, and was popular from the early times of the goldrushes. It required at least two men to work. The cradle had a grate and a sieve. The dirt and sediment to be sifted through was emptied onto the grate in the cradle. The cradle was rocked quickly back and forth (in the action of a cradle) while water was poured over the sediment to help work it through. The grate stopped coarser stones from going through, while the fine material was sifted out the other end. The gold would be left behind for easy collection.
• Sieves were also popular. They were like a pan but with a mesh base through which the water would drain, to help separate gold from similar sized particles.
• Windlass was one of the slower methods of mining for gold. Two people were required to operate it, one at the surface and one in the mine shaft. The person in the shaft filled a bucket with potential gold-bearing soil and rocks, and the person on the surface operated the windlass to wind up the bucket. The contents of the bucket were then sorted through, perhaps in a cradle or a pan.
• Long Toms were like cradles, but they used paddlewheels to make sure there was a continuous flow of water.

Answer 3

Initially of course they used whatever money they brought with them, but that usually ran out quite quickly due to the localized high inflation. Then they used gold dust

. Many gold rush prospectors actually left much poorer than when they arrived.

During the California Gold Rush, since it was in California the San Francisco Mint produced Double Eagles in these denomonations 1, 2.5, 3, 5, 10, 20. It was then circulated throughout the country by ships taken to the east. America's Greatest Treasure Found was in 1987 by a guy named Tommy Thompson. He found the SS Central America. Which was a steamship sailing from California to Havana, Cuba, and it's final destination the east coast. It sunk in a hurricane off Cape Hatteras and laid in it's final seabed. Many sought after coins such as the 1857-S almost in mint condition was at the bottom including gold bullion, gold coins, gold dust, gold nuggets, foreign silver, and a couple of other forms of precious metals.

Brian Luong