Placer Mining at Coloma

Placer Mining at Coloma. . When quartz decomposes, small gold particles are freed. They wash downstream and collect as placer gold in sand and gravel bars along Sierra rivers. Placer mining is the simple but exhausting task of washing tons of sand, gravel, and dirt to recover ounces of gold., Miners here found gold mainly in the American River’s gravelly bed or in gravel terraces along the banks. Depending on the size of their operation, they washed dirt in pans, cradles, long toms, or sluice boxes. The heavy placer gold settles to the bottom of a pan or catches in the riffles of a sluice., Inset Images: , A Sluice Box or Long Tim was a man-made channel, placed next to or in a stream of water with riffles to catch gold particles. Some had a gate at the top to regulate the flow of water in and multiple areas to catch gold. Because they processed a great deal of placer material, sluices vastly sped up the gold separation process., A Gold Pan with some “color”, A Cradle or Rocker functioned as a large gold pan to shake out shovels full of placer rocks at a time. A screen separated out larger rocks; bottom riffles trapped gold., The gold pan was the easiest method of processing placer rock to separate out gold. Dish pans, pie plates or whatever Gold Rush miners had on hand could be used to pan gold., People form many nations came to mine the bed of the American River., Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park