Document I
Excerpt from: Gold Fever!
Giant Gold Machines - Hydraulic Mining
An ancient northern California river once laid down an immense bed of gold-bearing
gravel. There had to be an easy way of getting down to the ancient streambeds now buried
in the mountains. There was: hydraulic mining.
Water was diverted into ditches and wooden flumes at high
elevations, and gravity did the rest. Channeled through heavy iron pipes, the water
exploded from a nozzle far below with a force of 5000 pounds. This giant hydraulic
monitor looks like a cannon. No wonder. It's a water cannon, and it could blast the
mountains to smithereens, leaving huge craters. It was very efficient at getting to the gold.
The first monitors were small, with canvas hoses. Then miners decided bigger is better.
This thirteen-foot monitor, made by the Empire Foundry in Marysville in the 1870s, is not
even the biggest. Imagine a monitor sixteen to eighteen feet long, blasting a stream of water
four hundred to five hundred feet, like was used at Malakoff Diggings.
The gravels were washed through sluices, and the
heavy gold settled behind riffle boards. The rest of the mountainside was washed into the
streams and rivers.
At What Price?
One visitor to a massive hydraulic mining pit observed: Nature here reminds one of a
princess fallen into the hands of robbers who cut off her fingers for the jewels she wears.
Hydraulicking may indeed have been an efficient mining method, but at what cost to the
environment? Hydraulic monitors blasted 1.5 billion cubic yards of soil and rocks from the
Sierra hillsides. Imagine taking all the soil excavated for the Panama Canal, and
multiplying it times eight! Where did it all go? It was washed through sluice boxes and
dumped into the nearest creek or river canyon. This massive amount of debris literally
buried the Sierra streams, which had been teaming with trout, salmon, and other wildlife,
under one hundred feet of gravel. It changed those natural habitats irrevocably.
The Yuba River promptly flushed the gravel downstream, inundating rich farmlands. Other
sites, like the Bear River Canyon, remain buried to this day. In this photo you can see a
stream, partially purged of its load of gravel, revealing the stumps of trees smothered during
the initial burial.
Live and Let Live: Resume Hydraulic Mining. It was a battle cry in the war between the
hydraulic miners and the valley farmers in the 1870s and 1880s. Massive flooding occurred
in the valley orchards, grain fields, and even towns downstream. Grain ships couldn't
navigate rivers. The farmers' pleas were ignored by the miners, because mining was king in
California! The farmers organized and fought back. Legislators debated. Dams were built to
try to hold back the debris, but nothing worked. Finally, on January 7, 1884, Judge Lorenzo
Sawyer ruled on the matter. - no more dumping of mining debris where it could reach
farmlands or navigable rivers. The farmers won. Farming became king. The rivers remained
the dumping-ground for mining debris.
Top: Hydraulic Hose, Collection of Norm Wilson
Second from Top: Hydraulic Platform, Photo by Christopher Richard
Third from Top: : Malakoff Monitors, Photo by Carlton Watkins, Collection of Oakland Museum of California
Forth from Top: Parks Bar, Photo by G.K. Gilbert
Bottom: Shadey Creek
© 1998 Oakland Museum of California
http://museumca.org/goldrush/fever19-hy.html