Finding Gold

Finding Gold. Surviving in Independence. Panning: Panning for gold is a manual technique in which a large shallow pan is used to swirl the water, sand and gravel around, letting the heavier gold nuggets drop to the bottom of the pan. This is the easiest way to find gold and, while not practical for large commercial operations, it's a fun activity for families to try their luck., Hard Rock Mining: Hard rock mining is the process of extracting the gold from a vein inside a solid rock formation, usually via a tunnel to the vein. The ore is crushed and concentrated to separate gold from other minerals. This is the type of mining that occurred here at Independence., Placer Mining: Unlike hard rock mining, placer deposits are usually composed of loose rock materials that are not conducive to tunneling as with hard rock mining. In order to extract the ore, placer miners use water to spray the hillside down and collect the water and rock materials in a sluice box. The sluice box allows the water-saturated sand and gravels to slowly move downhill letting the denser gold nuggets drop into the grooves of the box., Naturalist Note: The arrival of gold preceded the miners by about 70 million years. Faults, or cracks, in underlying sedimentary rock were injected with dissolved minerals carried by superheated water from deep in the earth, forming pockets of gold-rich ore., Caption , Top right: Hand drilling rock to extract ore, 1891.