| Show the wonderful old gold placers of the sierra nevadas r what has happened in the past visualizing their future by leroy A palmer E M gold was discovered in california in 1849 the next year saw the rush that made history and it is estimated that in 1850 a hundred thousand men were working every creek ravine or gully seemed to carry at least some gold and deposits of phenomenal richness were found where the channels of the present day had robbed the ancient channels rich in themselves where the gold had been concentrated originally of course the records of the earlier days when there were vere thousands of individual operators were exceedingly incomplete and estimates of yield must be taken with great allowance but it has been stated that the golden years of the fifties saw annual yields of from fifty to eighty million dollars nearly all of it from placer with the skimming of the cream there followed rapid progress toward handling the gravel on a larger and cheaper scale the rocker gave place to the long torn the first crude sluice box the evolution of which was the sluice as used in later years similarly as with improvements in washing came forward strides in movin moving 9 the gravel ground sluicing followed the pick and shovel and then came hydras licking at first with a rawhide hose and wooden nozzle these changes in fundamental principles came rapidly 1852 seeing the introduction of both sluicing and hydraulics ing from then on there were no essential chan changes in principles but rather a gradual evolution tending toward improved efficiency and greater economy the latter principally by increasing inc increasing reasin 9 the magnitude of the operations thus the sluice was widened and lengthened to hundreds even thousands of feet and various types of paving or riffles fiffles evolved to meet different conditions and improve recovery and the undercurrent designed to catch the very fine gold evolution of early day methods of place Pla cering ring for moving the gravel the rawhide hose gave place to canvas and finally became a steel pipe the nozzle wood in the first experiments was changed to metal and then came the development of the stationary nozzles first the gooseneck then the monitor and finally the giant the ultimate development came when the north bloomfield gravel mining company introduced bi big 9 betsy at its malakoff diggings at north bloomfield this giant giant in more mor e than one sense of the word was twelve feet long with a twelve inch nozzle that belched forth its floods under a head of hundreds of feet while mechanical appliances were undergoing this development business in methods methods likewise were experiencing a change the placer may be a poor mans mine when he can rock out anywhere from half an ounce up per day but when the yield of his gravel drops to ten or fifteen cents a cubic yard lie he must make way for organization and ca capital p ita the first mines worked the gulches of the present presen t day streams As they followed the gold to its source it took them to the great deposits of the ancient streams which were of immense size but correspondingly low grade capital was required for working these and while there were many individual operators consolidation or at least cooperation soon became the order not only was the question of water supply a vital one but that of tailings disposal was hardly less so most of the ancient channels are high up on the ridges of the present day the gravel rests in the depressions that formed the original stream bed so that in hydraulic 0 operation p era it was very necessary to find some way to get the tailings out of this depression occasionally a property was favorably located with a breakout of the channel into some ravine or canyon so that the problem was a simple one but more often it was necessary to drive a long tunnel in the bedrock from the nearest canyon at such an elevation as to get under the low point in the channel and then raise to the gravel the tunnel then formed not only a debris exit but a sluiceway as well these tunnels driven in the days of hand drilling and black powder were frequently very ambitious projects in themselves in fact when we consider that these developments were taking place at a time when business did not think in the terms in which it does today we realize that the 0 4 jk I 1 all 6 v low t az 17 1 an all old hydra hydraulic ulle p pit I 1 t 3 2 main street north Bloomil eldo calif on a 1 husy 1147 day in 1923 1925 3 headwords Head words works malakoff leasing co 1 north bloomfield calif hydraulic enterprises were projects of truly great ignagni magnitude worthy to rank with the big business of their period consider for example the north bloomfield mine popularly known as the Malak malakoff of in order to provide a water supply the company built a storage system on tie the headway headway of canyon creek consisting of six reservoirs the largest known as bowman lake having a capacity of acre ac feet held by a dam feet long and feet high but this was only a starter connecting the lake win with the mine were thirty two miles of ditch involving frequent flumes blumes some of them along the faces of cliffs so steep that it was necessary to carry them on iron brackets imbedded bedded im in cherock the rock and supported from above by heavy chains this system was designed to deliver miners inches 80 sec ft at the lower end then there was the bedrock tunnel a mile and a half long with eight shafts sunk along its course all in solid rock A total of was spent in this preliminary development not so much perhaps in comparison with some operations of today but still quite sufficient to remove such an enterprise from the category of a poor mans mine and this was a half century ago when wages were to 3 a day ten to twelve hours agriculturalists rated as interlopers Interlope rs but the miners made a fatal error in that they failed to reco recognize 6 nize the growing importance of agriculture or in fact to ta 6 give ive it any consideration at all except that of disdain california was settled by the miners and mining was the principal and practically only industry for many years when agriculture came in it was regarded as an interloper and not entitled to consideration As a matter of fact the early farmers accepted this situation and appeared to take it for granted that they must put up with anything necessary to the furtherance of the interests of the mining industry i but the broad valleys of the lower reaches of the rivers rivers and the deltas were rich land and responded generously to 4 the he care of the husbandman so the time soon came when the owners refused longer to stand by without protest and see ee their lands seriously damaged or even ruined as happened when a high water swept the accumulated debris of the hydraulic mines down the mountain rivers and spread it over the lowlands but the first feeble protests fell on deaf ears and the miners believing themselves to be all powerful ignored the or treated them with an arrogance that rankled and was not soon forgotten i finally in the early seventies the anti debris asso elation was organized for the purpose of protecting the farmers and the battle was on the defense of the mines mines wis entrusted to the powerful california miners association and 1 A a bitter struggle that consumed more than ten years followed I 1 i huge damage by Hydraulic king j to get some conception of the viewpoint of the agriculturist Fult urist let us consider a certain report of the state engineer of california which estimates that in 1880 there were I 1 carried into the sacramento basin cubic yards I 1 1 acre feet of sediment and pravel nine per cent of this amount or cu ads was due to natural erosion but the remainder was from the hydraulic operations conditions on the yuba one of the principal tributaries tributa ries of the sacramento were even worse than on the main stream the yuba receiving the debris of several of the largest placer mines the world has ever known the report ci cited estimated that a total of cu ads remained deposited in the sacramento in 1880 but the yuba contained more than three times as much this stream had cu ads equal to acre feet an amount of gravel that would bury a hundred square miles of ground to a depth of over a yard at about this same time a cong congressional riss ional report estimated that on the feather yuba and bear rivers the principal tributaries tributa ries of the sacramento acres of agricultural land having a value of had been destroyed and acres of a value of had been injured Is it any wonder the farmers kicked placer mines finally acknowledge ac knowl edge defeat the legal proceedings took the form of injunctions ions against the mines the latter employed the best counsel and ana the best engineering talent available and no angle of defense was overlooked costs were vere enormous the total amount amount spent by the miners association in litigation up to the time of the sawyer decision approximating a quarter of a million dollars although an injunction had been obtained in a lower court as early as 1878 it was not until judge sawyer of the U S circuit court of appeals rendered his decision on january 23 1884 in the case of edwards woodruff vs north bloomfield gravel mining company that the miners acknowledged defeat the injunction did not prohibit hydraulic mining as such but it did prohibit discharging the debris thereof into the streams and of course the effect was the same with this precedent established injunction followed injunction and one mine aft after er another was closed down desultory attempts were made to operate here and there and in in some cases in defiance of injunctions but these did not last long and soon the hydraulic mining industry practically passed out of existence but these injunctions of the farmers proved to be two edged swords they cut both ways at the fatal date the value of the ditch and reservoir systems used in hydraulic mining was about twenty millions A like amount was invested in other equipment and property values according to assessors records were sixty millions so that the industry represented a total capital value of one hundred million dollars one cannot wipe this amount from the assets of ten mountain counties without the effect being far reaching in fact the farmers lost their best and principal market as whole communities went out ol 01 of existence and found their taxes notably increased with the decrease in total assessed valuation the caminetti act nominally an act to aid hydraulic mining passed by congress in 1893 created the california debrich commission for the control of hydraulic mining and provided for the operation of the mines under certain conditions this aroused great hopes for a short time but these have failed of i realization and thirty years under the caminetti act have left the industry in essentially the same c condition ondi tion as when it was passed As the industry looks today it would be charitable to draw a veil over the present of this once important industry the impressions one gets today are depressing of unsightly gashes on the mountains figure 1 villages wholly deserted or so nearly I 1 so that one could fire a cannon on the main street on the fourth of july and not hit anyone abandoned abandon ed ditches ditche sj rusted pipes rotted flumes blumes everywhere the appearance of abandonment with little hope of restoration north bloomfield figure 6 2 once the site of the largest placer mine of all time and of many 0 others of a magnitude to compare favorably is now well nigh nig h a deserted deperte d village and not a dozen of the remaining inhabitants de depend pendon on mining for a livelihood north san juan second only to north bloomfield in its heyday is slightly better off because it is now on one of the well traveled state highways but I 1 doubt if there is a man in the town today who is making his living at mining because of this state of long desuetude hydraulic king as an industry has been practically forgotten by the public at large and conception of the gra gravels vels that remain remain are very hazy these conceptions usually take one or the other of two extremes there are those to whom they appear in the of old the days of gold i light 19 lit of the romance of the days mines cut off in in were that the hydraulic wh who 0 will tell you their prime or sooner and that there is as good or better gravel remaining as has been worked there are others who take the pessimistic point of view and insist that practically all of the pay gravel is is gone and that the big mines had practically shot their bolts when the law stepped in neither of these extremes is true the cream was s skimmed off before the mines were closed but deposits ot of 4 an immensity that taxes the imagination were left and the there re is some virgin channel that has not been touched touch ed and would merit exploration by the more expensive method of drifting up to the time of closing down it had not been customary to make extensive exploration by bore holes so that estimates of the yardage and value of the remaining gravels must must be of a tentative nature and within wide limits can still garner hundreds of millions it has been estimated that the ancient river channels tributary to the great basin of the sacramento and san joaquin ra rivers vers contain cu ads of placer gravel of which cu ads can be handled by icking bicking on the basis of past recoveries it is estimated that this gravel will yield fifteen cents per cubic yard so that we may estimate as the sum that these vast deposits p as its ma may y ultimately yield these figures are startling and may well cause one to pause and consider one single deposit in nevada county is estimated to contain cu ads nearly all of which is virgin ground with the trough odthe of the channel the richest part untouched on the basis just given there is gold of a value of awaiting the one who will solve its problems but so far no one appears interested surely there is a situation to arouse the imagination and awaken the ambition of the most daring operator why do these deposits lie unworked Is the situation so very different or the solution more difficult than the one that confronted the operators of the porphyry coppers in their early days in giving this matter consideration it will be well to turn first to the efforts that have been made to operate these deposits within the law since the injunctions imposed their restrictions most of these have been along one of two lines either by drifting the channels for the richer gravels concentrated in the lower portions or by hydraulic king and impounding pounding ini the tailings As both of these methods were in vogue before the litigation became vexatious we can say that the only progress that the industry has made in the past fifty years has been in impounding the tailings and in the variation of the dams attempted in the effort to get one that would operate effectively and still kee keep P within a reasonable operative expense drift mining supersedes Hydraulic king more money has been produced in recent years from the old diggings by drifting than by hydraulic king gold naturally seeks the low point in the channel and these narrow narow portions the troughs are often very rich these deposits can be worked by driving tunnels so as to reach them from tho the side or by sinking shafts when the channel is r reached drifts 11 are driven on it and the pay gravel scoped or breasted out obviously one must have a good grade of gravel to make this kind of mining pay but this method has added many millions to the production of california figure 3 shows the head works of the malakoff leas ing company which is operating in the old north bloom field fi eld diggings this has been the only activity for years in in what was in its day perhaps the largest placer mine in the w world 0 ald some conception of its |
