Gold Mining Methods in 1830s Georgia

Sluice box

by Denise Farnsworth

My last two posts introduced the Georgia Gold Rush and its first boom town, Auraria. Today let’s look at the gold mining methods used in the early days of the bonanza.

The typical picture we imagine of a miner bent over a creek with pan in hand reflects placer or deposit mining. Prospectors often searched for a bend in the stream where the eroding bank might reveal a gold-bearing layer. Gold flakes washed into the stream would be caught at the bend with other rocks and minerals in a gravel layer. The process of plunging and swirling water over the contents would eventually reveal the heavier gold flakes on the bottom of the pan.

Other early methods were not much more advanced and consisted of washing the gravel layer of a stream through a sluice box or a splint basket into a trough rocker, a hollowed-out log about a dozen feet long. While the water from the sluice box passed through the trough, it was kept in constant motion. The gold sank to the bottom through the continually moving silt and was caught by transverse cleats.

Diving bell on its side with bottom exposed.

Enterprising miners with some cash on hand soon broadened efforts by drifting flatboats on the Chestatee and Etowah rivers to dredge the bottom. In early 1833, a diving bell was launched on the Chestatee by a former Tennessean named McCallom.

Eventually, placer mining petered out, and hard rock mining was required. To locate a vein mine, a miner would begin at a spot in the creek known to have placer deposits and work their way upstream, test-panning as they went. An abrupt drop in the gold content indicated a vein in the surrounding hills. Soil testing continued until it was located. Then tunneling operations would begin. 

The ideal tunnel was seven feet square, but most ran only two to four. Timbers were needed to reinforce the rock riddled with fissures. Wheelbarrows or tracks and carts might be employed depending on the size of the mining operation. Vertical shafts were also dug, usually twenty to thirty feet deep but occasionally over a hundred. Once the ore was extracted from the vein mines, it was taken to a stamp mill to be crushed. These mills ranged from a single stamp hung from a bent sapling to as many as ten stamps powered by a water wheel.

The more complex mining methods required organization and financing. A number of gold mining companies were formed during the Gold Rush. Some of these included: 

• Augusta Mining Company, Habersham Mining Company, and Naucoochy Mining Company, 1832
• Pigeon Roost Mining Company and Belfast Mining Company, 1834
• Georgia Mining Company, Chestatee Mining Company, and Cherokee Mining Company, 1835
• Lumpkin County Mining and Manufacturing Company, 1837

The easy gold played out by the early 1840s so that when gold was discovered in California, prospectors were all too eager to abandon the Georgia hills. They took their tools, their expertise, and even their town names with them. But later in the 1800s, another surge of hard rock mining occurred with the use of high-powered drills and hydraulic mining methods. Many Georgia mines continued lucrative operations well into the 1900s.

Look for further upcoming posts about the Georgia Gold Rush. Book one of my Twenty-Niners of the Georgia Gold Rush, The Songbird and the Surveyor, set in Auraria in 1833, is now available! A marriage of protection. A past full of pain. In Georgia's wild gold country, love might strike when it's least expected. https://www.amazon.com/Songbird-Surveyor-Twenty-Niners-Georgia-Gold-ebook/dp/B0F556951W/

Denise Farnsworth, formerly Denise Weimer, writes historical and contemporary romance mostly set in Georgia and also serves as a freelance editor and the Acquisitions & Editorial Liaison for Wild Heart Books. A wife and mother, she always pauses for coffee, chocolate, and old houses.

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Georgia Gold Rush! What?

By Denise Farnsworth

Pre-CW Graham Hotel remains, Auraria

As a native Georgia author, I was frequently surprised by the number of people who were unaware that not only did Georgia’s gold rush precede those in California and Alaska, but Georgia gold was typically purer. The first book of my very first series, The Georgia Gold Series, touched on the Gold Rush but went on to focus more on the Civil War. I’ve always known I might return to the unique time period of the 1830s to write more thoroughly about the days when miners bent over creek water with pans and sluice boxes and boom towns as wild as any in the West cropped up across North Georgia. This year and next, it’s happening with my Twenty-Niners of the Georgia Gold Rush Series.

Around 1828, Benjamin Parks was returning from a lick log on the west side of the Chestatee River when he kicked up a nugget that started the frenzy. By the next year, gold activity stretched from the Clarkesville to Canton. Desperate men—up to ten thousand as 1829 closed—paid big rents to mine areas for forty days or less. That the land was part of the Cherokee Nation did not deter prospectors. The Indian Removal Act was introduced in Congress and supported by President Andrew Jackson, even though Cherokee warriors had helped him rout Creek Indians allied to the British during the War of 1812.

The Cherokee lands were surveyed into 160-acre farm lots and 40-acre gold lots and reapportioned by lottery drawing to white settlers in the autumn of 1832. Every citizen had one draw with additional draws to heads of families and Revolutionary War veterans. Names of those eligible were placed in one huge drum while the numbers of each lot were placed in another. Some won lots that included Cherokee farmsteads with homes, outbuildings, businesses, and orchards, though the government was to compensate the families for such improvements. Incentives were offered for Cherokees who relocated to Oklahoma early. Otherwise, lottery winners had to wait for the May 1838 removal deadline.

One of the first boom towns, now a ghost town, was Auraria, located in Lumpkin County on a ridge between the Etowah and Chestatee rivers. Within six months of the lottery, a hundred families, eighteen to twenty stores, twelve to fifteen law offices, and four to five taverns comprised the rowdy village. Mining companies formed and assaying labs popped up. A newspaper, The Western Herald, began publication in 1833. Nathaniel Nuckolls opened the first hotel, later purchased by Agnes Paschal and her son, George W. Paschal, a lawyer from Lexington, Georgia. Former Vice President John C. Calhoun stayed at the hotel two weeks at a time, overseeing his thriving gold mine. Drovers brought hogs from Tennessee and wild turkeys to camps outside town to help offset the scarcity of meat in the area.

In 1832, farther west, 130 white families in Cherokee County set up a government. Cherokee Court House (or Etowah/Edawah) soon became Canton, and Harnageville soon became Tate. Residents in Canton planted mulberry trees and imported 100,000 silk worms.

Auraria, 1932

Back in Lumpkin County, a dispute about the legality of the land where the courthouse was to be placed led to the county seat being moved five or six miles north to Headquarters/Talonega/Licklog, close to where Parks had his bonanza. Town lots were sold on the Fourth of July, 1833. Within months, government offices and businesses deserted Auraria for the newly named Dahlonega. A jail and 18x32 log courthouse with a door so low that a tall man had to stoop to enter were hastily erected. As in Auraria, gambling dens, saloons, tenpin alleys, and houses of ill repute proliferated well before the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians could organize places of worship.

Look for further posts to share more about gold mining methods and the rowdy towns and colorful characters of the Georgia Gold Rush. Book one, The Songbird and the Surveyor, set in Auraria in 1833, can be pre-ordered now for the Nov. 3 release. https://www.amazon.com/Songbird-Surveyor-Twenty-Niners-Georgia-Gold-ebook/dp/B0F556951W/

Denise Farnsworth, formerly Denise Weimer, writes historical and contemporary romance mostly set in Georgia and also serves as a freelance editor and the Acquisitions & Editorial Liaison for Wild Heart Books. A wife and mother, she always pauses for coffee, chocolate, and old houses. 

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Boo! Haunting Towns

By Tiffany Amber Stockton

Last month, I continued a summer series on ghost towns with the spotlight on Montana and Wyoming. If you missed that post, you can read it here: https://www.hhhistory.com/2019/07/dont-blinkyou-might-miss-it-ghost-towns.html.

Today is the final post on this series. Remember to share ghost towns in YOUR home state if there are any. This month, we'll travel a little further west into Idaho and Utah.

* * * * *

Boo! The Haunting Towns in the Rocky Mountains

Like Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado, mining for both gold and silver in the mountains saw thousands of prospectors, vigilantes, pioneers, and all sorts of explorers headed west during a short period in our nation's history. Population booms were the norm, and often, towns disappeared as quickly as they grew. The result? A ghost town.

As with the other states, the ones I feature are only a handful compared to the dozens of other towns scattered throughout the area. If you are on a road trip and interested in exploring more, check out some of the ghost town web sites first to plot out a route for exploration and discovery.

UTAH

Sego Canyon

A few fun buildings are fun to explore, but on the way out to this town, you will also find some amazing petroglyphs, so it's like getting two historic treats in one visit. The sandstone cliffs are an outdoor art gallery and a holy place. Native Americans painted and chipped their religious visions, clan symbols, and records of events onto the cliffs. It's an impressive site that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Ophir

WF Willis

This site isn’t a true ghost town as there are still residents living here. However, the historic site was created around the ghost town buildings, so what you find is a restored historical town with remnants of the original site. The historic buildings are only open to the public on Saturdays from May to September, but they are worth a visit if you are interested in ghost towns and the history of Utah.

Grafton

If you have any plans at all to visit Zion National Park, you should make it part of our visit to take a short jaunt over to Grafton. This ghost town has been refurbished and features a schoolhouse as well as a handful of homes. The scenery is beautiful, and the interpretive signs tell the story about this unique cotton town, something you primarily found in the southeastern United States. Grafton flourished until it was flooded by the Virgin River.


Osiris

Not too far from Bryce Canyon National Park, there's a scenic route that will take you to the town of Osiris. This location has a few homes and a large mill that once supported the community. It sites right next to the river, so it's a nice little stop and way to break up a long time in the car on a road trip. With so many towns that were full of miners and vagabonds, it's always a nice change of pace to find one with a form of industry based off the products of the mining.

Old Iron Town

Old Iron Town is located west of Cedar City. This town still has current residents living nearby, and the remaining buildings from Old Iron Town are from an old mining site. The highlight feature of this site, though, is the amazing beehive oven, the only one of two remaining from the original site. These unique kilns were used to burn wood, which then smoldered for several days and was used as charcoal for the iron making process. There is also a good variety of mining relics to explore and see.

IDAHO

An amazing fact about the state known for its potatoes is there are over 100 documented ghost towns spread out across the state. Sure, towns like Silver City have been fully preserved and welcome visitors all year long, but what about the other towns which made a name for this state during the mining boom? You might want to brush up on your Idaho history and take note of these.

Rocky Bar

J Day Photography

It's nearly impossible to imagine this was once one of Idaho's major metropolitan areas back in the 1860s. Spanish prospectors were the first to settle here, and the growth of the town was so explosive, it rivaled Idaho City as a contender for the title of Idaho's capital. When visiting Rocky Bar, just a few miles north of Featherville, add an extra dose of history to the journey by taking a side trip up to Atlanta on the outskirts of the Sawtooths.

Ulysses

Patty's Photos

This town was once home to Idaho's largest active gold mine. The original town had an ideal setting near Indian Creek, from which the mill processed low-grade ore for a major profit, but the community was set back in 1904 by a major fire that completely destroyed the plant and Ulysses' hope of riches. Today, a few dilapidated cabins and mining remnants are all that remain.

Yellow Jacket

Patty's Photos

No, it's not a town with an overwhelming presence of wasps and hives. This one was a 19th century gold rush camp that features a 5-story boardinghouse, an impressive mining relic with a charm that is fully "Idaho." The population only peaked around 200, and the town began to dwindle right after the turn of the 20th century, holding on until 1942, when both mine and mill operations fully shut down.

Ragtown

Bureau of Land Management

This town sprung up as a unique temporary community. Rather than hundreds of log structures, the landscape was dominated by the makeshift shelters that gave the town its original name: Tent Town. When cabins cropped up as necessary to protect workers from Idaho's frigid winters, local folklore and legend in stories says rags were stuffed into the cracks between logs to keep out the chill, giving rise to community's new name.

* * * * *

NOW IT'S YOUR TURN:

* Are there any ghost towns in the state where YOU live? If so, share the state and the name of the town(s).

* Which one of the ghost towns above tickles your fancy the most and makes you want to visit?

* What was your favorite part about today's post?

---

BIO

Tiffany Amber Stockton has been crafting and embellishing stories since childhood, when she was accused of having a very active imagination and cited with talking entirely too much. Today, she has honed those childhood skills to become an award-winning and best-selling author and speaker who is also an advocate for literacy as an educational consultant with Usborne Books. Through personal development, she strives to help others become their best from the inside out.

She lives with her husband and fellow author, Stuart Vaughn Stockton, along with their two children and three dogs in Colorado. She has sold twenty (21) books so far and is represented by Tamela Hancock Murray of the Steve Laube Agency. You can find her on Facebook and GoodReads.

The Lost Blue Bucket Mine

Treasure Found and Lost & Book Giveaway

by Susan Page Davis

The legend of the Lost Blue Bucket Mine has intrigued people for a hundred and seventy years. Is it still out there, waiting to be discovered, or was it real in the first place?

It all started in 1845, when a wagon train got off the beaten track in eastern Oregon. There are several

Photo by James C Davis

versions of the story, and no one has proof of what actually happened. But we know it involved at least one kid, a blue bucket, and some strange pebbles.

A large wagon train had reached eastern Oregon. When they camped for a few days at a hot spring, the travelers were apprehensive about the coming ordeal of rafting down the Columbia River. 

Stephen Meek

A man named Stephen Meek, who was the brother of mountain man Joe Meek, had joined their party. He said he knew a shortcut and could lead them overland, via the “Meek Cut-off,” to the Willamette Valley, their final destination. Some of the families decided to go with Meek. The others kept to the
trail heading for the Columbia.

As the story goes, the travelers realized after a while—some say a week, others a month or two—that Meek had no idea where he was going. He left them on their own in the wilderness.  They had to get through the Cascade Mountains before winter or they might starve to death.

Most versions of the story say children went to the river to get water and returned with a blue bucket full of strange-looking pebbles. To be fair, one version says three young men went in search of some straying cattle and wandered for hours before returning with the famous rocks.

Anyway, the wise grownups of the party puzzled over the kids’ find. The blacksmith put one pebble on a metal wagon rim and pounded it. It flattened easily. They decided it was copper.

Why copper? No one’s really sure. The standard excuse is that it was 1845, several years before the California Gold Rush, and most people had never seen raw gold. Supposedly most of the rocks were dumped, but one woman, Mrs. Fisher, kept one. A few years later, with the advent of the gold craze in California, she had it assayed. It was a gold nugget.

The people who had been on that wagon train started remembering, and prospectors from all over began trying to find the spot. Many people spent years looking for it. Some people found gold in various places in Oregon, but no one was ever sure where the so-called Blue Bucket Mine was.

One clue often cited was that the gold was found three days’ ox team journey from the grave of a
Mrs. Chambers near the mouth of Crane Creek. Well, you can imagine how many people were out there looking for that grave. Supposedly the grave has been found more than once. And another tale says two Frenchmen moved it to keep people from finding the mine. 

Gravestone reads "Mrs. S Chambers Sep 3rd 1845" - found along Meek's Trail. Photo by Lostwagonman (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The woman who reportedly saved one nugget from the children’s bucket plays large in some of the stories. Mrs. Fisher’s story was written down by her grandson, but even this version is riddled with errors. For instance, he said the man who led the pioneers astray was Joe Meek, not his brother Stephen.

The wagon train split at a hot spring about a mile below the present town of Vale, near the Malheur River. Dr. Fisher, who was traveling with the Meek contingent, died and was buried August 12, 1845. The man writing Mrs. Fisher’s story knew several survivors of the wagon train. They named other landmarks they had passed.

So … The wagon train wandered on. Its exact route is a mystery, though many have tried to trace it. Eventually, they rejoined one of the trains they split off earlier. Some settled near Eugene, and some went on to California.

Wagon train using oxen. 1890 photo

 Twenty-five years later, several veterans of that wagon train got together and discussed it. They made a map of the points they knew they had passed and where they thought it most likely the gold had been found. Mrs. Fisher insisted that Mrs. Chambers died three days before the gold was found. Samuel Parker, who was also on the train at the time, said she died three days after. So, within about 100 miles—probably more like 50—in either direction, if anyone knew for certain where that grave was.

The site now believed to be the famous grave of Mrs. Chambers is about six miles east of where Crane Creek flows into the Malheur. If Mrs. Fisher was correct and the gold was found before Mrs. Chambers died, that would put the wagon train in the Willow Creek area. Gold has since been found in that area.

Gold panning--public domain photo

My best guess as to the whereabouts of the Blue Bucket Mine? I think it’s been found, in one of the areas where gold strikes were later made, but the people who found it were never sure that was the exact place.  In 1960 a group of people claimed to have found it and filed claims as the Blue Bucket Group. At least three other gold mines over the years have been named “Blue Bucket Mine,” but none of them had anything to do with the legendary east Oregon find.

One amusing point made by a woman who was part of the Blue Bucket Group: In 1845, about 3,000 traveled west over various routes in wagon trains. By 1850, she said, at least a third of them claimed to have been in the party that discovered the Blue Bucket Mine.

To enter a drawing for a copy of Susan Page Davis’s The Lady’s Maid, a story about the Oregon
Trail, or another book in this series, leave a comment and your contact information. The drawing will be held Nov. 29.

Susan Page Davis is the author of more than sixty published novels. She’s always interested in the unusual happenings of the past. She’s a two-time winner of the Inspirational Readers’ Choice Award, and also a winner of the Carol Award and the Will Rogers Medallion, and a finalist in the WILLA Awards and the More Than Magic Contest. Visit her website at: www.susanpagedavis.com .

Adolph Sutro--King of the Comstock

Forty-Niner panning
for gold

Most of us know about the discovery of gold in California in 1849, which led to the California Gold Rush. But not as many know that gold and silver discoveries happened in other places as well. One such discovery of both gold and silver was in Virginia City, Nevada (or as it was know in those days, Utah Territory) in 1859.

Within a handful of years after the California Gold Rush started, it peaked and waned. Many who had staked everything to find their fortunes in California’s gold fields lost everything instead. In order to get back on better footing, they wandered farther afield, hoping to find a new vein of ore. A few of the lucky ones did—in Virginia City, Nevada.

At first, the prospectors were focused on gold. However, as they dug deeper into the ground, they found a layer of rich black sand, black manganese mixed with a blue-gray quartz. Upon testing the strange sand, they found it was three parts silver to one part gold. One of the original people to lay claim to this strange sand was Henry T.P. Comstock. And so began silver mining in America. The discovery became known as the Comstock Lode.

This picture shows the
Square Set Timbering method

The silver was buried in the ground or in the mountainsides, so it had to be dug out. Thankfully, the consistency was such that it could be easily dug out with a shovel at first. But as these miners had to dig deeper and deeper, several problems arose. Cave-ins were one such problem. The soil was too soft, and many lost their lives as the surrounding ground gave way. To combat that problem, a German mining engineer created a special timber support system called Square Set Timbering to strengthen the mine shafts.

Another problem was that the mine would fill with water, making it difficult and costly to continue the mining process. At first, large pumps were employed to pump the water up to the shaft openings and out of the mine. But this was very cost prohibitive and time consuming.

Adolph Sutro

A Prussian-born engineer by the name of Adolph Sutro proposed an answer to this issue. Build a horizontal tunnel through which the water could flow out of the mine on its own. Said tunnel would also provide other benefits, in that it would help to vent the poisonous gasses that often built up in underground mines, and it would provide a lower-cost method to remove the ore and transport miners in and out of the mine. Construction of the tunnel began on October 19, 1869.

While the tunnel presented many positive reasons to proceed, some of the mine bigwigs feared that Sutro would use the tunnel to his own benefit in order to take control of the entire Comstock Lode. Sutro struggled to find the monetary backing to proceed with the project until he was finally able to secure a loan from a London bank.

During the construction phase, Sutro was known to work right alongside those he hired as tunnel diggers. He faced the same avalanches, mudslides, and poisonous gasses that his diggers faced, and he often was the first one in and last one out of the tunnel they were constructing. The tunnel was completed in 1878, nearly nine years after it began, and it cost a whopping $5 million to complete. (To put that in some context, that would be $119,047,619.05 in today’s dollars).

The Sutro Tunnel emptied nearly 4 million gallons of water a day from the mine. Sutro rented use of

Entrance to the Sutro Tunnel

the tunnel to the mine owners to the tune of about $10,000 a day. But by 1879, he realized that the richer parts of the mine were petering out, and they had to dig even deeper than his newly-completed tunnel. His profitability began to decline, so rather than hang on to the tunnel, he sold it at a great profit and moved to San Francisco as a very rich man. There, he became one of the city’s largest landowners, and he also served a few years as the city’s mayor.

Because of his work on the tunnel, as well as his great profit from it, Sutro became known as the King of the Comstock.

Jennifer Uhlarik discovered the western genre as a pre-teen, when she swiped the only “horse” book she found on her older brother’s bookshelf. A new love was born. Across the next ten years, she devoured Louis L’Amour westerns and fell in love with the genre. In college at the University of Tampa, she began penning her own story of the Old West. Armed with a B.A. in writing, she has won five writing competitions and finaled in two other competitions. In addition to writing, she has held jobs as a private business owner, a schoolteacher, a marketing director, and her favorite—a full-time homemaker. Jennifer is active in American Christian Fiction Writers and lifetime member of the Florida Writers Association. She lives near Tampa, Florida, with her husband, teenaged son, and four fur children.

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