Miners in California used a variety of
methods
to extract gold.
The simplest method was panning. Squatting by the
side of a river or a stream, the miner filled a shallow, flat-bottomed
pan with what he hoped would be "pay dirt." Then he held
the pan under the surface of the water and swirled it about with
a gently rotating motion for several minutes. With one side of the
pan held lower than the other, the water washed away the lighter
dirt and sand. The heaviesr gold particles--if any--would remain in
the bottom of the pan.
Panning was a tedious and back-breaking job. Miners
improved on this simple method by using a rocker, an oblong box without
a top, several feet in length, mounted on rockers like a child's
cradle and placed in a sloping position. Pay dirt was shoveled into
the rocker, followed by buckets of water. As the miner vigorously
rocked the cradle back and forth, the muddy water rushed through
and the gold was trapped behind "riffles" or cleats in
the bottom of the rocker.
Further improvements appeared by the end of 1849. The "long
tom" was an open wooden trough about twelve feet long. Water
and dirt flowed through the tom more rapidly and in greater quantity
than could be handled by a rocker. The long tom later evolved into
a sluice, a series of riffle boxes fitted together, sometimes as
much as several hundred feet in length.
