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GOLD-PANNING ON THE COTTONWOOD RIVER
The romance of the great British Columbia gold rush lingers on.
Written and photographed by Steve Pridgeon B.Sc.
Much has changed since the Cariboo gold boom ended. Fortunes are no longer made overnight on the river banks of British Columbia, although large mining companies still extract gold from hard-rock deposits at a reasonable profit, often as a by-product of other operations, such as copper mining. Barkerville, once the gold-mining capital of the world and the largest community north of San Francisco and west of Chicago. is now populated, not by drunken "Forty-niners" squandering their new-found wealth on overpriced liquor, but by tourists exploring its painstakingly reconstructed main street.
Nevertheless, the days of the individual prospector are by no means over, as a visit to the mining claims office in nearby Quesnel will reveal. Special maps there show that most of the Cariboo creeks and rivers are still divided into thousands of small claims, each measuring a standard 1km. by 500m. About two-thirds of the approximately 3200 active claims (1985 figures) are worked by private individuals, most of whom use methods not much different from those employed a hundred years ago.
Yet these claims are not, as one might suppose, mere novelties, to be worked purely out of nostalgic interest in a dead technology. In fact, for many people, the income gained from working their claims during summer weekends and holidays provides a useful supplement to their regular earnings, and a number of local residents make a comfortable living from this source alone. This is despite the fact that many if not most of these claims have been worked over and over again for a hundred years or more.
Not everyone who makes money from gold has a permanent claim. A few hardy souls still live the life of the true prospector. spending most of the year alone in the bush with no more gear than they can carry. The gold they find keeps them for the winter months and buys their supplies for another season's search for the perhaps mythical "mother lode", the source of all the gold in the Cariboo.
As a rule, claim owners do not strongly object to finding someone panning for gold on their claims, whether it be a tourist trying his hand or a prospector passing through. Claim-jumpers, however, are a different matter. These pirates of the creeks often operate at night, using lightweight portable sluices capable of processing large quantities of gold-bearing gravel in a short time. Claim-jumpers are not tolerated to any degree, and shootings are not entirely unknown, even in recent times.
To understand how this small army of prospectors are still able to extract significant quantities of gold from the Cariboo, it is necessary to examine the background of gold-mining in the region. There are two main types of gold deposits in the Cariboo. hard-rock and placer (pronounced plasser).
Hard-rock deposits usually consist of small amounts of metallic gold combined with other minerals, notably quartz. In this case, the gold is not normally visible to the naked eye. The rock must be crushed and heated until the molten gold collects at the bottom of the containing vessel. This is an operation requiring extensive investment in plant and equipment and is generally beyond the scope of the small operator.
Placer gold is that which has been eroded out of gold-bearing rock by the action of water. Because of the great density of gold, it is not distributed randomly along the length of a river, which would make its recovery hopelessly uneconomical. Rather, it tends to settle, with other heavy minerals, at points along the stream bed where the flow is interrupted by an obstruction or curve in the river. Larger pieces of gold, or nuggets, which have been eroded from outcropping veins of pure gold (these are rare), do not move far down the river, while fine gold dust ("flour gold") can be found great distances downstream. One can be quite sure, however, that virtually all the larger nuggets have long ago been taken from the known gold-bearing streams, and these days a nugget the size of a match-head is a real find.
The B. C. gold story began in the 1850s, when stories of Indians using gold for trade brought large numbers of hopeful miners to the Fraser river from California, where the recent gold rush was on the wane.
By 1860, prospectors had reached the Cariboo, and a large strike in the autumn of that year started a major rush. Two years later, a Cornish sailor named Billy Barker, working in an area on Williams Creek already dismissed by others as useless, hit pay dirt. His claim eventually yielded gold worth $10,000,000 at today's prices. The town of Barkerville grew up rapidly around Billy's claim. Later claims along Williams Creek were even more productive, the best of them having a lifetime output of about $32,000,000.
By the end of the 1860's, the "easy" gold was gone. The prospectors drifted away, many of them northwards towards the yet-to-be discovered Klondike goldfields. Among those who remained were the Chinese, diligent workers who were well-known for working over old claims to the last flake of gold, often with surprisingly good returns. Since then, most of the claims have been worked over and over again, often almost continuously, until the present day.
How is it, then, that these claims are still yielding worthwhile amounts of gold? The answer, quite clearly, is that there must still be some gold entering the rivers, possibly from undiscovered veins exposed to water action, or from areas where the rivers are cutting through ancient stream beds, releasing the placer deposits once more into the river.
Staking a claim is a fairly straightforward, if lengthy, process. The cost of the required licences and tags is about $80. However, it is rare for a producing claim with road access to lapse, so a would-be miner must either stake a claim which can only be reached after several hours' slog through the bush, or buy a more accessible one from its present owner. A typical buying price would be in the $3,0O0-$4,000 range.
The first task facing a miner on a new claim is to test likely spots with a gold-pan. Panning, in common with nearly all placer mining techniques, relies on the fact that gold is very heavy. The pan is filled with gravel and sand, then shaken under water. The gold, if present, settles to the bottom of the pan, and the lighter material is carefully washed away. Eventually, all that remains in the pan is "black sand"—a heavy mixture of haematite, magnetite and garnet fragments— and, perhaps, gold.
In the hands of an expert, the pan is a most effective method of recovering gold. Traditionally, pans were made of iron, but modern plastic versions, with a textured surface and moulded riffles which help retain the gold, are now generally preferred. The major disadvantage of the gold-pan, however, is that it can only process small quantities of gravel at a time.
To process larger amounts of material, a number or devices have been developed over the years, nearly all of which rely on the same property of gold as does the goldpan, namely its great density compared to the other materials with which it is mixed. Some modern devices are extremely efficient, can process very large quantities of gravel in a short time - and cost thousands of dollars.
The most popular device, today as a hundred years ago, is the sluice. This consists of a sloping tray or series of trays, varying anywhere from two to two hundred feet long. Gravel is shovelled into the tray at its upper end and a constant stream of water is directed onto it. The bottom of the tray incorporates obstructions of some kind, which trap the heavier particles in the gravel/water mix. These obstructions may be stones, small logs or small transverse strips of wood, about 1/2" high, called riffles. Riffles are most commonly used today. The efficiency of a sluice is determined by the angle of slope and the rate of water flow. these are adjusted according to the nature of the deposits being worked. Sluices can be built at low cost. and are also available commercially.
A typical one-man sluice consists of three trays, each four to five feet long and mounted one beneath the other. The upper tray is lined with sheet metal to withstand the wear of shovelfuls of large rocks and coarse gravel. At the lower end of this tray is a metal grating called a grizzly. Gravel of less than 1/2" diameter drops down through the mesh to the next tray. The coarser material is simply pushed or raked off the end of the tray. This must be done carefully, however, for two reasons. Gold dust has a tendency to stick to pebbles, fingers, or anything else, so all materials must be washed thoroughly before being discarded. Also, rare as they are, large nuggets might just be present.
The lower trays are the ones that collect the gold. The bottom of each tray is covered with a piece of coarse open-weave cloth (some miners prefer heavy-duty carpeting) and this in turn is covered by a sheet of expanded-metal mesh. This works well for gold dust, which settles into the weave of the cloth, but is less effective if larger particles of gold are present (this is determined by test-panning). If this is the case, a set of riffles is added. These will collect the tiny nuggets, but with the penalty of also retaining more gravel and black sand.
Water to run the sluice can be piped or channelled from a point farther upstream, a traditional method still used on steep mountain streams. An easier modern alternative is the portable gas-powered pump.
At the end of a day's shovelling, the sluice is carefully dismantled. Each part is thoroughly washed in a large bucket, particular care being taken with the cloth and metal mesh. The "concentrates" are then transferred from the bucket to a gold-pan and any remaining light sand and gravel are washed off. At this stage all that remains is a mixture of black sand and gold. This mixture presents something of a problem, as the disparity between the densities of the various components of the mixture is no longer great enough to enable reliable separation by conventional means. Miners have traditionally resorted to a number of chemical separation processes, most of which involve the use of toxic substances such as sodium cyanide.
Perhaps the mast common recovery process is the mercury amalgamation method. Mercury has a strong affinity for gold, the two metals combining to form a closely bonded mixture called an amalgam. To isolate gold from the black sand mixture, a small quantity of mercury is added. The mixture is then agitated thoroughly. The amalgam collects into a single mass at the bottom of the gold-pan and is removed. To recover the gold from the amalgam, a mercury retort may be used to boil off the mercury and collect it by distillation, leaving pure gold behind. This is a hazardous operation, as mercury fumes are potentially lethal.
An alternative system used by many small operators is the "baked potato" method. As much of the mercury as possible is removed from the amalgam by squeezing it through a chamois leather cloth. A potato is cut in two, and a depression scooped from the centre of one of the pieces. The amalgam ball is placed into this depression, and the two halves of the potato are tied back together with wire. The potato is then wrapped in foil and placed in a camp-fire. After an hour. the potato is opened, and the depression contains only metallic gold. The mercury vapourises in the heat and condenses in the tissue of the potato, which can now be crushed and panned to recover the mercury. This method, however, releases dangerous mercury fumes into the air. It is quite probable that the inhalation of these fumes is a major cause of the "crazy prospector" phenomenon.
A recent invention, available for those with $1,000 or so to spend, does away entirely with chemical separation processes. The gold-wheel, or gold-hound as it is known, is a truly remarkable machine. It consists of a wheel 18" or so in diameter, inclined a few degrees from the vertical and slowly rotating. The front face of the wheel is fitted with a series of spiral ledges about 1¼" deep. Water is trickled down the face of the wheel from a row of low-pressure jets. The whole thing is powered by a car battery.
Concentrates - collected after a day's sluicing - are ladled onto the deep lip formed by the rim of the wheel. The combined action of the water and the revolving wheel tends to make the concentrates work their way along the spiral ledges towards the centre of the wheel. The precise adjustment of angle, speed of rotation and water flow rate possible with this machine, however, allow the operator to take advantage of the comparatively slight difference in density between the gold and the unwanted material, so that only the gold reaches the very centre of the wheel. At the wheel's centre is a small hole through which the gold particles are washed, to collect in a container suspended from the rear of the wheel.
This description. however, scarcely hints at the magical illusion created by this apparatus. The gold appears, to the observer, to rise of its own accord from the black, churning mass at the base of the machine, then to ascend the vertical face of the wheel, shedding its impurities as it climbs, finally passing in pure flakes through the central hole. A touch lyrical? Well, perhaps, but I challenge anyone to watch a gold-wheel in operation and remain unimpressed, and for the prospector, after a hard day's work, what could be better than to sit back, relax, and watch that gold pour itself into the collecting jar?
But just how much gold ends up in that jar after a day's shovelling? This can vary widely from claim to claim, and from place to place within a claim. However, a single operator, working for pleasure more than profit, would likely be pleased to recover one ounce of gold for a week's work, which would provide a return of about $500 at present market values.
There must be a catch in such a golden story, you might think, and indeed there is. Its name is Bureaucracy. Gone are the days when staking a claim meant just that, literally. Stakes carrying relevant Information must still be placed at prescribed points within a claim, it is true. But these must be backed up by a veritable mountain of certificates, licences, maps, affidavits, permits and the like. The whole process of staking a claim, in fact, can take over six months. Buying an established claim hardly lightens the load, either. Furthermore, a detailed resume of work done must be filed each year. In the absence of evidence that at least $250 worth of work has been done each year, the claim lapses. In addition to the provincial Department of Mines, those of Forestry, Water Resources and Fisheries must he kept informed of the nature and scope of the work being undertaken. Fisheries, in particular, keep a careful eye on placer mining operations, to ensure that no damage is done to salmon and trout fry or breeding areas. And, of course, the taxman is always waiting in the wings to take his share of the profits. Nevertheless, placer miners take all this in their stride. After all, tomorrow might just bring that big strike…