Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
lecting wood from banks, and fishing and hunting for food. Employment
for a whole second wave of Californians involved supplying the miners
with tools, food, hotel rooms, and transport. Small settlements around the
bay grew larger, and new towns sprang up along Central Valley rivers as
farmers discovered the rich soils on the floodplains.
In the beginning, the miners simply swarmed around every creek and
river bank looking for glints of gold. Their early methods involved collect-
ing and sifting through streambed deposits, or “placers.” They used picks
and shovels to loosen the sediments, and rinsed water through the ore in
grooved sluice boxes designed to separate the silt, sand, and gravel from
their precious quarry. But the streambeds soon gave up the flakes they had
collected in their running waters over millennia, and the miners expanded
their search to the nearby hillsides. To dislodge these more ancient depos-
its, they experimented with ways to wet the soils. They also took to adding
mercury to their sluices because it attaches to gold.
Even in this first mining wave, hundreds of small streams at the highest
levels of the bay watershed were disturbed, and their environs eroded.
In 1853, a miner from New England named Edward Matteson had the
bright idea to reroute his water supply so that it poured down from above
the mine onto the excavation site with more force. With the addition of a
nozzle, this new pressure hose blew the ground into a muddy slurry that
could be run directly into a sluice box. The water was made to do the work
of many miners. These hydraulic mining methods—with their distinctive
hiss and roar—were soon brought to mines in the ancient gravel beds of
four of the rivers upstream of San Francisco Bay: the Feather, Yuba, Bear,
and American.
Gathering the water from far up the mountains and delivering it to
hydraulic hoses ignited some of California's first large-scale engineering
projects. By 1867, miners had built 300 water systems, operating 6,000
miles of mining flumes and pipelines, and storing nearly 15,000 acre feet
of water. In the 1870s, the Bloomfield mine in Nevada County consumed
a hundred million gallons of water a day.
“Turning their powerful jets on the hillsides, the hydraulic miners
soon excavated great pits in the flanks of the Sierra Nevada, their red-dirt
interiors gleaming through the dark green forest. Out of these broad cavi-
ties stretched long lines of sluice boxes, three feet wide, through which
rushed torrents of brownish-red muddy waters. The nearby air echoed to
the steady deep rumbling of gravel and rocks rolling along the bottoms of
the sluices. Out of their mouths shot spraying catapults of debris-laden
waters that tumbled on down the hillsides into adjacent creeks. Much of
the debris lodged there, where it permanently remains, wide glaring white
deposits of sand and gravel. Great volumes of tailings, however, also
