What are the 4 main mining methods used in the gold rush?

Answer 1

There were more than two mining methods used during the gold rush. Diggers in the gold rush used the following equipment and methods to find gold :

• Panning involved the use of a solid pan. An amount of potentially gold-bearing dirt was placed in the pan with some water, and gently swished and shaken around, a process which would bring the smaller particles of gold to the surface.
• 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.
• Fossicking was another method which involved picking at rock and stone with sharp tools until gold was located inside, or to pick through mullock heaps left behind by other miners.
• 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.
• A poppet head and winch was a larger version of the windlass. Poppet heads stood over deep mining shafts.
• Stamper batteries were large steam-driven machines, which were used to crush the quartz in order to extract gold.

Answer 2

The majority of people that joined the gold rush were placer miners. Meaning they would dig up the soils that had been deposited along stream beds and use hand methods to separate heavy particles (like gold) from the rest of the material they dug up. The gold pan being most common. Another popular method was to outfit a barge like object with the means to dig up stream beds below water and use sluices or jigs to separate gold. this is called dredging. The most gold was recovered in hard rock mines, where gold miners usually worked for a mining company that chased quartz veins that run through fractures in bedrock. They created deep underground tunnels to get to the veins, always looking for the mother lode. So this was sometimes called a lode source or lode mining. The good ore was sent to stamp mills and separated from the gangue near the mines using gravity separation or flotation techniques. I guess the 4th method was extracting gold from the miner's pockets at the various boom towns that sprang up near the gold rush sites. This was by far the most profitable, using booze, gambling, and prostitutes as the means to capture the gold.

1 - placer mining by hand

2 - placer mining by dredge

3 - hard rock mining using tunnels & shafts

4 - open pit mining using dynamite