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Show CALIFORNIA PLACERS. The surface placers of California were pretty well exhausted in ten years after 1849. Of course, there was a good deal of that kind of mining still going on but the cream had been skimmed. Indeed, in 1858 thousands of miners left California for Fraser river, in British Columbia, on the hope that a new California Cali-fornia had been found there. But hydraulic mining on a most extensive scale had been going on for several sev-eral years and continued for many years thereafter. But some six or seven years ago a new scheme was trisd. By a simple machine a river bed was dredged and the result was so successful that a new industry was created. Costly machines were devised, de-vised, set to work and now are being operated in a hundred places in rivers, river banks and low bars. The other day a clean-up was made of the washing of a dredger at Oroville after a run of twelve days. The yield was $30,000. All the Feather river banks have been bought up from Oroville for miles down the stream. The dredges cost $80,000, but now one company believes the same results would be obtained by using the ordinary steam shovel instead of the costly revolving shovels or buckets of the dredger, and one California paper says: , "If this proves to be a success, the business will be revolutionized, because the steam shovel will cost but $10,000." It is the evolution of placer mining, and the Golden State remains what it has been for fifty-seven years, the wonder of the world. |