USA > California > History of California, Volume V > Part 14
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The gravel channels in these old dead rivers are often a thousand or more feet in width, varying the same as modern streams. But only the richer portion of the gravel may be mined profitably and this "pay lead" is generally near the center of the old channel and at its lowest point where the water had cut the deepest into the rock. Pay leads of one hundred to one hundred and fifty feet are of average width, but some are three hundred or four hundred feet. The gravel runs from $2 to $10 per cubic yard. In some localities as at Iowa Hill in Placer county, the miners took out as high as $1,000 per lineal foot in mining up the channel in the center and for the full width of the pay lead.
Capital is required to develop and operate both drift and hydraulic mines and the ordinary miner cannot
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handle them alone. In drift mining the tunneling through bedrock to tap the gravel channel involves considerable initial expense before pay can be reached, and the ground must all be timbered in the tunnel and the mine. In hydraulic mining the necessary water rights, reservoirs, and water supply systems must be provided before any gravel may be washed. And in both cases the original cost of the mining ground must of course be considered. For many years past the federal government has prohibited hydraulic mines from operating anywhere in the drainage basins of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, unless suitable steps are taken to restrain and impound the debris or tailings resulting from washing through the sluices such immense quantities of earth and gravel. This material used to enter the smaller streams and finally reach navi- gable waters of the main rivers, and farming and orchard lands along the banks were more or less damaged. At the time of this prohibition the hydraulic mining regions of the central portion of the state were almost depopulated, the mines closed down, and millions of dollars worth of mining and water property virtually confiscated and rendered worthless, either for use or sale.
In order to be able legally to operate a hydraulic mine in the drainage basins referred to, a permit must first be obtained from a federal commission of engineers, called the California Debris Commission, who supervise the plans and construction of the restraining works, dams, etc., and who close down the mine altogether if it be shown that damage is being done by its operations, even after the works are completed. Having to keep
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the debris behind the dams until fully settled, greatly restricts the amount of material which may be washed during a water season, so that the hydraulic mining industry is no longer as attractive for investment as formerly. In all other parts of the state except the drainage basins of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, this kind of mining may be carried on without any restriction whatever as there are no navigable streams north or south of the central drainage basin referred to. The northwestern counties of Siskiyou, Trinity, and Humboldt are now the main hydraulic mining centers and many large and important mines continue to be operated. There are large areas of ground still available for this class of work in these counties which have not yet been developed, as the water supply systems are by no means to be compared with those formerly used in the central counties.
There are still some hundreds of known miles of the ancient buried rivers of California which have never been worked for gold, and there are many thousands of acres of exposed auriferous gravel suitable for hydraulicking, still waiting to be mined. An account of the origin and scope of the gravels, with maps, and descriptions of the mines and channels, etc., may be found in Professional Paper No. 73 of the United States Geological Survey, entitled "The Tertiary Gravels of the Sierra Nevada, California," by Waldemar Lindgren, the eminent geologist.
With the exhaustion of the open surface gold deposits, the day of the individual miner came to an end in California. Then both the character of the mining and of the mining population changed. It was no longer
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possible for the nomadic miner with a few simple tools, his own labor, and no technical knowledge or capital, to gather a fortune where nature had concentrated it for him in a few yards of earth or gravel. It became necessary to employ both capital and labor to carry on gold mining under the changed conditions. Ditches, flumes, and reservoirs had to be built for water systems for the hydraulic mines; long tunnels had to be run to tap the ancient gravel channels under the lava-capped divides; and shafts had to be sunk or tunnels run, and pumps, hoists, mill, and other machinery provided, before profit could be expected from the quartz mines.
The great body of miners then stopped working on their own account, and were employed on daily wages by companies organized to conduct the operations requiring investment. The miners gave up their noma- dic habits and became permanent residents of the larger towns, taking steady employment in mines and hills, and this condition continues today. Naturally, how- ever, there are numerous prospectors throughout the mining regions, as well as miners working their own "prospects" (undeveloped mines), but the majority of the mining population now work for the companies, where large operations are carried on.
This has resulted in building up permanent towns and villages in all centers of extensive operations, and many of these have all the appliances of modern civili- zation, with convenience of transportation, far different from the temporary mining camps of the early days.
The era of speculative mining common to newly settled regions has long since passed in California and the industry has for many years been conducted in as
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legitimate a manner as farming, manufacturing, etc., profits being sought from the products of the mines themselves rather than from fictitious and evanescent prices of stock. The stock exchanges have never been able to induce the gold miners to place the stock of their mines on the lists to be be dealt in by people who knew and cared nothing for the real value of the mines themselves, but only for possible profits from daily fluctuations of the stock.
It is a somewhat remarkable fact that long years after the superficial free-gold placer deposits were sup- posed to have been virtually exhausted, a new system of mining ground on or near the surface should have been put in practice which has made so marked a change in the industry that the gold yield from gravels has nearly reached that from the quartz mines. The system of dredging is one where improved modern appliances of a mechanical nature are utilized to handle vast quantities of auriferous material in a brief space of time, and then without the use of water under high heads, the necessity of tunnels or shafts, or the employ- ment of much manual labor. Moreover, what is an important feature in this system is that it may be used on ground which has no "fall" or dump, is below the level of the neighboring streams, and had hitherto been mostly considered worthless for mining.
A pit is dug in the ground in which a very strong wooden or steel hull or scow boat is built, and the pon- derous digging machinery is placed in this. A series of heavy steel digging buckets, some with as high a capacity as sixteen cubic feet each, revolve on endless chains around drums placed at the top and bottom of
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a heavy "ladder," digging out the material at the bot- tom of the pit and, at the top of the revolution dumping it into a hopper. Water under pressure is led into this hopper so as to disintegrate the material therein before it passes to the gold-saving apparatus below. The tailings or debris, from which the gold has been taken, passes continually out into the pond behind, the larger rocks, however, being elevated by a "stacker" to a pile outside the pond. The boat floats in water in the pit and as the dredge digs ahead, cutting out one end of the pit, the space behind is filled with the mate- rial which has been dug and washed in the sluices and riffle boxes on the boat. In effect the machine carries the floating space or pond around with it, digging a new space constantly, and filling in where it has already dug. Most of the machines are operated by electric power.
The largest machines now in use are capable of digging between 10,000 and 12,000 cubic yards of gravel daily, digging to sixty-five feet below the water line of the pond and piling rock, etc., forty feet above the water line. The largest machines have buckets of sixteen cubic feet capacity although many have buckets of five to seven cubic feet capacity each. The cobbles or water-worn rocks dug up with the gravel are separated from the dirt and piled up on the bank by the stacker, taken by power machinery to the large rock crushing plants owned by the dredging companies, and there crushed and sized for macadam road building, giving a good profit as a by-product of gold mining.
The principles of hydraulic mining have also been applied with effect in gold dredging. Where the gravel
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banks above water are at all cemented, two nozzles, one at each corner of the dredge, throw water under high pressure to disintegrate the material being dug by the buckets so it may be more easily mined.
This is a business requiring large capital, as good dredging ground is worth from $500 to $1,000 and upward per acre, and a dredge may cost from $100,000 to $360,000-the latter the cost of the most recent one with sixteen cubic feet buckets and all modern equip- ment. The cost depends on the size and capacity. The ground to be worked is prospected in advance by a system of drilling, so it is pretty closely known upon beginning operations what the gross output and profit may be on a given area of ground.
In gold mining by this most modern system the presence of paying gravel is not the only consideration. It is impossible to dredge areas which are suitable for either hydraulic or drift mining, or gravels carrying too many and too large boulders, or lying on hard or rough bedrock. Those too deep or too shallow may not be dredged, and there must be sufficient area in one place to warrant the construction of the expensive machinery. In places where the area of dredging ground is not large, only small machines are constructed.
The three points in the state where extensive dredging operations are carried on are in Butte, Yuba, and Sacra- mento counties where swift streams from the mountains and foothills, after having cut for ages through the older auriferous gravel systems, debouch upon the val- ley, spread out, from narrow channels to wide ones, and deposit the silt and fine gold. No coarse gold or nuggets are found in these places, that having been
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previously deposited further up the streams. There are other isolated places in the state where one, two, or three dredges of small size find profit in working limited areas. There are now sixty-five dredges, large and small, operating in California, and their annual gross output of gold is about $7,500,000 a year, which is far more than the yield of all other forms of placer mining combined. Since the first dredge was installed in California in 1899 the gold yield from this source to the end of 1912 has been in the aggregate $55,415, 191.
At some places orange and olive orchards and vineyards as well as farms have been purchased by the dredge men and the ground mined for gold, and this has caused some complaint against them locally. The largest of the companies now, however, remove the rocks, level over the worked-out ground, and at once plant it in orchards and vineyards again, restoring, as far as may be, the ground to its original condition, minus the gold they have recovered.
Notwithstanding the combined output annually of the different forms of placer mining-dredge, drift, hydraulic, and surface claims-the quartz mines of the state continue to produce more gold than all these methods together. The deep or quartz mines now produce 56.14 percent of the gold and the combined placers 43.86 per cent. The dredges alone produce 37.68 per cent of all the gold, and 85.93 per cent of the placer gold.
The deep or quartz mines are yielding annually 2,640,000 tons of ore, including gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc ores. The gold mines predominate largely and are worked on a very extensive scale. Out
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of five hundred and thirty-two properties of this class productive in 1912, there were four hundred and seventy gold mines and the others produced more or less gold with their other metals. The siliceous ores derived from these four hundred and seventy gold mines amounted to 2,225,429 tons with an average value of $4.95 per ton in gold and silver and an annual average of all metals of $5.13 per ton. The average value of ores varies not only in different mines, but in different counties. For example, in Nevada county, where the veins are comparatively small, the average value in gold and silver from 270,000 tons of ore treated was $7.62 per ton. In Amador county, where the Mother Lode vein is quite wide, 673,498 tons of ore milled, yielded $4. II per ton on the average. In some counties such as Sierra and a few others, where they have small veins, with more or less irregular pay ore, they some- times obtain hundreds, and even thousands of dollars per ton from comparatively small quantities of ore.
In the earlier history of gold mining in California some very foolish and extravagant ideas prevailed in relation to the gold mines, and, as a result, numbers of mines were given up and people came to look on quartz mining as a risky business. It was found later that the fault lay more in the men than in the mines themselves and most of the old abandoned mines were subsequently reopened and put on a paying basis. The quartz mining industry of the state is today in a more satisfac- tory condition than it ever has been since its inception. The appliances for saving the gold have been greatly improved and are used carefully and intelligently. Every effort is made to gain as large a percentage of
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the gold in the ores as possible. It is now possible to work ores at a profit that twenty years or so ago were considered worthless. This has been brought about by the adoption of more economical methods in both mine and mill, increased knowledge of the proper way to treat ores, improvement in processes, and use of electric power instead of steam. The cyanide process, chlorination process, and canvas and slime plants now in use, play an important part in the ultimate saving of all the gold. There is now a certain reliability to quartz mining that it did not formerly possess, so that the industry has grown to large proportions mainly through local and individual efforts and the application of capital. At present most of the more prominent quartz mines are worked by companies, although some are operated by individuals; the latter being worked on a comparatively small scale.
At the quartz mines of the state there are now four hundred and eighty-three stamp mills and fifty- four roller mills, having two hundred and ninety crush- ers, 6,020 stamps, five tube mills, 1,334 concentrators, and fifty-six cyanide plants. The combined capacity of these mills is 24,381 tons of ore in twenty-four hours.
In the larger and older quartz mines considerable depth has been attained. The vertical shaft of the Kennedy mine in Amador county, is 3,896 feet deep, and the machinery is built for a depth of 5,000 feet. The Plymouth shaft is 2,000 feet vertical and in other mines in the same county, the Fremont has two inclined shafts one 1,550 and the other 2,200 feet; Keystone 2,220, Lincoln 2,050, Wildman 1,450, South Eureka 2,765, and Argonaut 4,000 feet on an incline. At
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Grass Valley, the North Star, the most productive quartz mine in the state, has a shaft 5,000 feet on the incline and measures are being taken to provide machin- ery for sinking 5,000 feet additional. It is noteworthy that the two deepest mines named, the Kennedy and North Star, mined ore in 1913 as good as any they ever encountered in the upper levels. This is a source of great encouragement to owners of other properties which have not sunk to such depths.
Quartz mines are being worked in a great many counties of the state from Siskiyou on the north to San Diego on the south. Most of these are in the mountain, foothill, or desert regions; there being none of note in the valley counties. Several of the old mines in the Mother Lode counties, especially in Amador, have recently been reopened and unwatered after lying idle for twenty years or more. The shafts have been repaired and retimbered and operations to continue sinking resumed.
The space at command prevents any extended consideration of the quartz mining industry in any detail. It should be stated, however, that few new mines of importance have been discovered in recent years, mainly because active prospecting has almost ceased. The old time prospector is a thing of the past, not only in California, but in other states as well. The new men who have gone into mining are working for wages and few of them do any prospecting, while the old-timers who followed that occupation are growing fewer every year. Moreover, the government has set aside so much forest and other land as reservations, and so much is owned by railroad corporations and private persons, that the area in which prospecting
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may be carried on has gradually become smaller and smaller. This subject of the decline of prospecting has attracted the attention of the mining journals and mining men and has brought about considerable dis- cussion without, so far, any satisfactory solution to the problem. Another thing, too, in connection with quartz mining and milling, is that the enforced eight hour law in both mines and mills, and the workman's compensation law, have entailed additional expenses which are burdensome not only to large properties but to small ones as well. And a matter of perhaps greater importance to the quartz miner is, that it is highly probable in the future the larger operators will have to impound the tailings or refuse from their mills, in the same way the hydraulic miners are compelled to do. This is a matter which has been impending for some time, but it was only in 1912 that the first steps were taken in that direction. An injunction suit involving several thousand acres of land was filed against several large mines in Amador county and a number of land owners. The charge was that the mining companies have allowed debris or tailings to accumulate in a cer- tain creek to such an extent that the stream has fre- quently overflowed and inundated the surrounding territory. A compromise was effected so that the large mining companies would be exempt from litigation until December, 1914, if by that time they took steps to protect the property of the plaintiffs by restraining their tailings and not allowing them to enter the streams. The mining companies have purchased lands near their properties, and some of them have put up large tailings
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wheels to elevate the tailings and pass them to these lands so they might be impounded behind suitable dams away from the streams. This adds to the cost of the milling of the ores, of course. When it is recalled that the quantity of ores milled annually in the state runs from 2,000,000 to 2,225,000 tons it may be seen what damage might result in certain localities when all this material is allowed to pass into streams or spread where the waters carry it. In Amador county alone, where the first suit has been brought, the mills treat from 700,000 to 750,000 tons of ore a year, all the tailings of which (virtually the whole quantity) has been dumped for years into the creeks to pass on down to lands below when the winter storms filled the streams. It is not probable that mines with small mills will be affected by this matter, but in certain localities more or less damage may be done unless quartz tailings are impounded. It is a new thing for quartz miners to have to impound their tailings, as heretofore they have always let them run into small creeks or streams and be carried away.
Perhaps a few words should be said before closing this account of the gold mines of the state, of the ocean beach, or "black sand" mining for gold which is carried on, as it is somewhat peculiar and is only done elsewhere in this country on the coasts of Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. The sandy beaches at certain points on the coast line contain considerable gold in very fine particles, and this is found in the black sands, or magnetite, underlying in thin strata, the ordinary white or yellow. sands common to all ocean beaches. The constant erosion of the bluffs and banks of earth
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bordering the beaches, by the action of the waves, cuts them down, and the fine gold therein contained is concentrated with the heavy iron sands under the top layer of lighter sand. These beaches are worked inter- mittently, especially after winter storms when the over- burden of ordinary beach sand has been washed away, leaving the heavier and more valuable sand behind. The black sands are dug up and washed in sluices or "toms" and the gold saved. Many beaches containing gold are known at widely separated points along the California coast. An important feature is that the black sands also contain considerable quantities of platinum and iridosmine, as well as other minor miner- als. The sands of the ocean beach back of Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, contain more or less gold, but not in sufficient quantities to warrant mining them. At one period, many years ago, the discovery of excep- tionally rich beach sands at Gold Bluff on the northern coast almost depopulated San Francisco, so great was the rush of people to locate claims. The first comers got hundreds of thousands of dollars in that locality as they found what had been concentrated for ages. The beaches renew themselves in gold every few years. When pay gold is found one year, it may be three or four years before the beach will pay again, and this depends largely on the severity of the winter storms which concentrate the sands.
As California has always been best known for its gold mining industry, and has been preeminent in that, most of the space reserved for this chapter has been devoted to that subject. But it is to be borne in mind that while the gold miners are still active, and
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still lead the other states of the union, other depart- ments of mining have come to the front in later years. This is shown by the fact that the annual gold yield of the state is, on an average, about twenty million dollars, yet the total value of all mineral substances produced in California is now nearly ninety-three millions yearly. And it is worthy of note that the larger proportion of the values from mineral products have only been apparent in later years, long after the gold mines were at their highest point of activity. The state has proved that it is rich in mineral wealth aside from its gold and silver. Thus, in 1892 the total value of all mineral substances, including gold, was only $18,300,168, and in 1902 it was $35,069,195, while in 1912 the total value was $92,837,374. This is a won- derful showing for the last two decades, and it is not supposed that the highest point of production has yet been reached.
There have been found in California some seventy mineral substances which are valuable to mankind and between forty-five and fifty of these are now being commercially utilized to a greater or less degree. With some of the others arrangements are being made for utilization on the completion of the Panama Canal, when the heavier and more bulky substances may be shipped at a profit to points of consumption, but which cannot at present be mined profitably owing to high railroad rates from California.
It is not possible in this brief and condensed review of the mines of the state, to give space to consideration of minor minerals or even to show the conditions surrounding all of the important ones.
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It is deemed proper, however, to make mention in a brief manner, of some few substances more or less peculiar to the state, or not found in other parts of the union, except in isolated localities or in quantities to make it profitable to mine them.
Borax, for example, is a substance which is produced in the United States only in California, the annual value of the output being from $1,250,000 to $1,500,000. All the product of recent years is from Colemanite ore, and not from superficial marsh deposits as formerly. The ore is mined principally in Inyo and Los Angeles counties, but some is also obtained from Ventura county. The main supply is from Inyo county where new deposits are about to be opened. A number of known deposits have not been, as yet, utilized. What ore is mined is shipped to New Jersey where it is refined into the borax of commerce.
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