Traveled to california, the physical geography of the area and evolving Technology Used to mine gold. Good morning everybody. The topic of our lecture is the history of the gold rush and i will talk mainly about california in the years following 1848. But gold played a very, very Important Role in American History. Think back to the conquistadors, one of the things they were fascinating about was the quest for gold. An unquenchable desire for Precious Metals, gold above all, but also silver. When the first settlers came to jamestown they were hoping to find the same supplies of gold found by the spaniards and bitter disappointment not to find gold in the whats now virginia and brought with them jewelers and gold smiths. Americas first gold rush took place in georgia in 1829 in north georgia. If youve been about 100 miles north, you would see the old lump kin county courthouse has been converted into a gold mining museum. Its about 100 miles up the road. What happened was, first gold was discovered and people started pouring into the area in huge numbers because of the intoxicating possibility that gold would make them wealthy quickly. Until then this had been an area really beyond the line of settlement. But suddenly now the White Settlement catches up very quickly. Here is the governor, george gilmore, describing what it was like meeting the georgia miners in 1829. Many thousands of idle people flocked into georgia from every point of the compass whose pentup vicious propensities made them like the evil one. In other words, the devil, in his worst mood. After waiting all day in the rivers, picking up particles of gold, they collected around light wood fires at night and played on the ground and on their hats at cards, dice, pushpin and other games of chance for their days findings. Whiskey carts served them too. Hundreds of combatants were seen at fisticuffs. Swearing, striking, and gouging eyes as frontier men only can do these things. One of the ways frontiersmen used to fight until one of the men gouged out the eyes of his combatant. That was regarded as victory in one of the fights. The army was sent to restore order in this chaotic scene where people poured in from every direction. The major the army major sent to keep order reported this. Upwards of 200 persons who presented a motley appearance of whites, indians, halfbreeds and negros. Boys of 14 and old men of 70 and indeed their occupations appeared as various as their complexions. Comprising, diggers, soilers, shop keepers, peddlers and thieves and gamblers. Also found two colonels of the georgia militia, two candidates for the legislature and two ministers of gospel. All no doubt attracted by the love of gold. I think hes making the most of it with the lovely twos. This is very rich site of gold and a large quantity of gold was drawn out of the mines there between 1829 and into the 1870s and 80s. For a while it was minted into federal currency. See the coin on the left is a United States of america coin and on the right there after the confederate succession in 1861 the Confederate Bank also used georgia gold for minting. Just by living here youve all seen an example of the gold down on the state Capital Building five or six miles from here. The dome is thinly coated with gold. This is a very important source. Now the people who already lived there and who already lived in the area where the georgia gold rush took place were the cher row keys, one of the native american societies. Ever since the American Revolution the federal government had been trying to integrate the native american nations into the United States saying, learn to become christians. Learn literacy. Learn to become farmers instead of hunters and gatherers. Become integrated into our society. That was the federal policy in the first three or four decades of the republic. Now it turns out the cherokees are living on land for which the whites are very hungry indeed. What principle was going to prevail . Unfortunately the principle of racial exclusion would prevail. The whites just wanted to get rid of the indians one way or another. In the election of 1828 which immediately preceded the georgia gold rush, in their successful candidate, andrew jackson, they had found somebody who also wanted to get rid of the native americans any way he could. This is john ross, one of the cherokee chiefs. If any community of native americans had lived up to the hopes that the federal government had, it was clearly the cherokees. They had learned how to read one of the missionaries created a syllabus of to enable them to write down the cherokee language, the bible had been translated, many had become christians and many wore american dress. This was a highly integrated community. But nevertheless, the principle prevailed, weve got to get rid of them. Actually passed the indian removal act in 1830, which was signed by president jackson, saying that the socalled five kriflized tribes, this is president jackson, he said that five civilized tribes should move from their current lands out on to a place that was then called end yands territory. The five groups they had in mind were the creeks, cherokees, seminoles, chocktaws, and the seminoles. And there would be a resettlement, this is now oklahoma, and was then called indian territory. The Georgia State government passed a law specifying that the lands up in this Northern Tier of georgia should be reallocated by a land lottery to white settlers, in order to dispossess the former inhabitants and to hand it over to the whites instead. So this was the prelude to the movement youve heard about, the trail of tears, by which the cherokee were shifted and forced to migrate several hundred miles under very adverse conditions with large numbers of them dying along the way. Its one of the great Human Rights Violations of American History, and particularly in the history of the state of georgia itself. Now, last time in talking about the spread of american settlement and also the spread of american political power, we talked about the mexican war. This was the war fought between mexico and the United States in the years 1846 to 48. As i said then, although the american armies were not particularly well led, they were much more effective than the mexican armies they were able to win a spectacular series of battlefield series and by late 1847, the leader of one of the american armies Winfield Scott landed on the coast of the eastern coast of mexico at vera cruz, led his army inland and they were able to overrun mexico city itself. On the right you can see a picture of general scotts army marching triumphantly into mexico city. Where in effect they were able to dictate the terms of the peace treaty that followed. This was the treaty of guadeloupe hidalgo whose geographical significance was that a vast area of mexico was now handed over to the United States, nearly all the land which currently comprises california, nevada, utah, arizona, and then parts of new mexico and colorado. Whats today the southwestern corner of the United States. Certain things about it are important to remind you of. This is an area with a high population, but then its population was extremely low, only a few thousand spaniards actually lived there. Or a few thousand mexicans. There was a low density of native american settlements but it was mainly unoccupied territory. The reason it was unoccupied because its so dry. Nearly all this land has got very, very low rainfall, with a few exceptions like on the Northern California coast, most of it is too dry for ordinary agriculture, so not many people could live there. Just to give you an idea of how low its population was who has been to San Francisco . All right. As you know, its a fantastic natural harbor, you sail in through the golden gate, which was a fairly narrow entrance into a deep water enclosed harbor and now of course one of the great cities of the world is right there. But this is what it looked like in 194647. Just a handful of huts and a few streets, it was a very, very quiet and sleepy little place, and its future significance was unimaginable at that time. Now, this is a sether, a man called johan suts her and he lived on what was called sutters site. I mentioned in one of the previous lectures that americans had been moving into texas even when texas was still a mexican territory and in the same way american settlers had been moving into california when it was still mexican territory. One of those was johann sutter. He came from switzerland and he set up a trading fort. There it is in the upper picture. Its very different from a shop and the fact that he had to have a fort is how politically volatile the area was. He was expecting to be attacked so he took precautions against that. Now he was at sacramento and one of the things he needed to sell was lumber, but the lumber was going to come from up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains which is east of sacramento. And so he sent one of his assistants, called James Marshall up the American River and asked him to design and build a saw mill. And this was just a place where the American River is flowing fast enough that the water can turn a water wheel and the wheel is attached to circular saw blades so the lumber could be brought there and sawed and further down the river to sutter himself. And one thing you have to do to make an effective saw, is divert the river down the mill race, can you picture this, a designed flume which carries water fairly rapidly to turn the water wheel. In the mill race there, he found little flakes of gold, little metal flakes. He reported back to sutter his boss saying found gold in the mill race and sutter said dont tell anybody. Well keep it secret. They could foresee it was a great thing. You know how bad everyone is at keeping secrets. Dont you know from your own experience. The only way to have a secret is never tell anyone because somehow as soon as you tell anybody the secret gets out and thats exactly what happened in this case. And it wasnt long before the news got back east and it spread very rapidly all over the world, with the result that a massive incursion of people into california began to take place. This is the area where the gold was discovered. This is sacramento and sutters fort was right there. And he had sent his assistant marshall, upriver, up the American River to here where the gold had been discovered. We now know from substantive extensive geological work is that the gold field is the area shown in yellow, and the richest area where most of all the gold was found was about here, called the mother load. Those little boxes where the mining camps sprung up and they correspond very closely as you would expect to the lode itself. If you imagine a simplified version of the coast of california, i will do this for reasons of simplicity, heres San Francisco bay, one river is flowing south, and this is the Sacramento River. And eventually it flows into the San Francisco bay. And its parallel with the coast, about 100 miles inland, theres a Coastal Range here, and then a big Central Valley, and another flowing north is the San Joaquin River and it also eventually flows into San Francisco bay. So this is the Central Valley. And over here is much higher mountains, what are they call, jenny . I dont know, actually. Theres a clue. Oh, well, the Sierra Nevada. Thats right, just means the snowy mountains, thats right. So as you can tell from the map, lots of rivers flow out of the Sierra Nevadas and the northern ones join the Sacramento River and the southern ones flow into the San Joaquin River. So thats kind of the schematic of the fwee geography of california. So its important that you get a sense of what that looked like, and the gold is here, sort of in the foothills of the valleys. Okay . Now lets just first of all here, about the how the news got back east. Allen, can you come up and read first of all have you all heard of William Sherman . He was a famous Union General during the civil war, you see him on the right as a young man, at this point he was a lieutenant in the u. S. Army and witnessing what was happening when the gold was discovered. So here is lieutenant sherman. Off you go. As the spring and summer of 1848 advanced the reports came faster and faster of the gold mines of sutters mill. Stories reached of fabulous discoveries through the land. Everyone was talking about gold, gold, until it assumed the character of a fever. Soldiers began to dessert. Citizens were fitting trains of wagons to go to the mines. We heard of men earning 50, 500 and of thousands of Dollars Per Day and for a time, it seemed as though somebody would reach solid gold. Great. Thanks very much. The news gets out and heres an army officer reporting back to seniors whats been going on. And then the president made a speech. Youve got the president here, james k. Polk, so this again, this is just a few months after the initial discoveries were made by James Marshall. It was known that mines of the Precious Metals existed to a considerable extent in california. At the time of its acquisition. Recent discoveries render it probable that these mines are more extensive and valuable than was anticipated. The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory is of such extraordinary character is beyond belief. There are those who have visited Mineral District and derived facts were stated from personal observation. The explorations made warrant the belief that supplies very large and that gold is found in various places in districts of the country. It appears also from these reports that mines of quick silver are being found in the vicinity of the gold region and one is being worked and believed to be among the most productive in the world. The effects produced by the discovery of the rich Mineral Deposits and successes which attended the labors, has produced a surprising change in the state of affairs in california. All other pursuits that of the searching for the Precious Metals are abandoned. Ships arriving are deserted by crews and their voyages suspended for want of sailors. The Commanding Officer says soldiers cannot be kept without a large increase of pay. He recommends those who shall withstand the strong temptations and remain faithful should be rewarded. This abundance of gold and the all engrossing pursuit has caused in california an unprecedented rise in the price of the necessaries of life. Great. Thanks very much. Thats president polk and hes making this declaration that the way in which the economy of california is being transformed. People are pouring in and nobody wants to do any work except dig for gold. Ships arriving in San Francisco, the crews all dessert because they want to go to the gold diggings. Psychologists are interested in this. Gold fever takes people over. The curious thing about gold it isnt really particularly useful. I dont know if you thought about this very much, but i mean, today, its possible in things like semiconductors there are uses for gold and in heat shields on space ships, but then it was useful mainly for decoration and also sometimes as a unit of currency because its chemically inert and doesnt rust. If you make coins out of iron eventually they rust away where a gold coin persists. Its not really useful. Nevertheless it was incredibly valuable. Its one of the many things which have been so important to American History like gold and tobacco, which great fortunes were made even though they werent actually essential. Worth thinking about. All right. Now people started pouring into california from all over, and back east and even around the world in england and in france and in germany and in south america, even in china, there was an enormous amount of enthusiasm about finding ways to get to california. And lots of handbooks like this began to be published. You can see this one was published in boston. An account of california and the wonderful gold regions with the description of the different routes to california. Information about the country and the ancient and modern discoveries of gold. In other words, help for travelers on thinking about how theyre actually going to get there. Now one of the and there were essentially three ways of getting there, and what they had in common was that they were all incredibly difficult. Its unbelievably difficult. This is 1849, still another 20 years were going to pass before you could get there by rail road. The first railroads had been invented but they were very short lines, all right. So one of the ways of doing it was by going in a ship, a new type of ship with a lot of sail and capable of sailing fast. One possibility was to sail from the east coast all the way down through the south atlantic and then around cape horn, whats that like . Horrible. The stormiest waters in the entire world, when coming into the teeth of the roaring 40s and can take weeks to get around and get shipwrecked on the way. That was one way of doing it. Lots of people tried that. And this is an ad for it, a ship called the california. With henry barber. What the artist implied is from the gold diggers you can see the coast. It wasnt really true. The artist rearranged the topography for that. Thats one possibility. The second possibility was to go by steam ship instead of going all the way around the tip of south america, to sail from the east coast into the caribbean, to the place where the crossing is narrowest, and then either at the place we call panama or further north in nicaragua, to go across by land across the narrow part, and then take a second ship which would also take you up to San Francisco. Now the advantage of doing it that way was that the journey was a great deal shorter. But the disadvantage, is that just about the best place in the world in those days to die of malaria or yellow fever was there. This is an incredibly difficult place just to live, even going across it. A few years, in fact three or four decades later the people who successfully built the suez canal in africa tried to build the first panama canal and failed because all the labor force died of these horrible diseases. That was a risky business. People were trying it. The incentive was so great. For california direct, extraordinary endeucements, nicaragua, thats the point, quickest, cheapest and safest they claimed, whether its true is another matter. Now the third way was to go on the over land trails and of the three routes taken, this was the one which was done most frequently. As you know, from what we said previously in the course, the oregon trail really opened up in about 1843 or 44. Five or six years previous to this. And from trial and error they worked out the best way to do it was start in independence missouri, go up the platte river, and then across on to the sweetwater river, across the rockies at the lowest point at south pass, then pick up the head waters of the snake river north until it meets the Columbia River and down the columbia as far as portland where the river reaches the columbia. Between 1843 and 49 lots of people had done that. At this point that various cutoffs were established, the california trail, with a cutoff down here towards sacramento itself. This is approaching it over land, rather than going by sea. The oregon trail was difficult in itself and if you took the california trail it was worse because by doing that you have to go into northern nevada to a place called the hum bolt sink. Theres a river called the humboldt river which is usually a dry riverbed and only has water a few days of every year. Mostly its just bone dry. You have to cross this hot, pitless desert and all along the way, people died from various things. To make matters even worse you have to cross the Sierra Nevada mountains themselves and theyre very formidable. It was Hard Crossing the Sierra Nevadas than the rockies. Great skiing country today, but we live in softer times than they did. Already by then, one of the most famous ins dentz in the history of american cannibalism had taken place there. The donner party was a group of immigrants who set up from independence, missouri, took the california cutoff, were partway up the Sierra Nevada mountains when a very, very severe blizzard snowed them in. They werent capable of Going Forward any further, but neither could they get down the mountains because the snow was too thick. Many of them died, and the survivors ate the bodies of their relatives who died in order to survive. Of course news of this spread very rapidly. Anyone who was going to the gold rush over the socalled donner route, its the route taken today by interstate 80, you still go that way if you cross the mountains, its hard, but its relatively the easiest way, knew this was the kind of territory they were crossing. And so, very, very rapidly, between the first discovers between early 1848 and early 1849, Something Like 80,000 people poured into this area around sacramento and just up river from there, coming by the various routes and the migration carried on over the next five or six years. Heres something to think about. Its easy to forget. It was only in 1848 that california became part of the republic. Until then it had been part of mexico. Most americans didnt know where it was. Suddenly it becomes part of america. And suddenly it turns out also to have this incredible abundance of wealth. How ghouling must it have been to mexico not only had they lost the war they hadnt noticed that the previous 350 years that they were sitting literally on a gold mine. Thats one of those historical ironies where it can prompt meditations about the nature of realty and good fortune too. All right. Na now we need to talk to talk about rivers. I said during this diagram its in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas that most of the gold was found. In other words its in the place where rivers flowing rapidly downhill are beginning to flow out into the plains or into the flatter land of the Central Valley so if you imagine the same thing, thats the birds eye view. Think of it looking at it from the side. Its Something Like this. If this is the Central Valley and thats the high sierras, the area where the gold was found was kind of this area. Now why should that be . Tell us why you think its found here . Maybe because thats where the Mineral Deposits were. The geology of the area. Well, its connected in the river. The place where they started looking for gold was in the river itself. What happens to a river when its flowing out of the mountains and into the low lands . It deposits sediment . Yes. It starts depositing things, carrying sediment. Why does it deposit it there . Because thats the most level part, that the sediment cant move with to the water. Which carries more sediment, fast flowing river or a slow one . Fast. Exactly. This is the area where it starts to slow down. A river starts to slow down and as it does so, it starts to drop its the sediment its carrying and does it first drop the heaviest or lightest things . The heaviest. Yeah. Such as . Rocks . Gold. The gold, because gold is very, very dense. Thats right. So in other words, fast flowing rivers carry a lot of sediment, but as they slow down as they flow into the low lands, they lose some of this energy and they begin to deposit their load, they deposit the gold first because its the heaviest element. Thats right. So thats why its such a good place to dig. Sure enough, if you looked at that map with the red and yellow things it was. Heres now look at this photograph. Can you see the river is meandering, isnt flowing in a Straight Line, hardly ever do, its flowing in a curve. Kelly, when a river is flowing around curves is the current fastest on the outside of the bend or the inside . The outside. The outside, why . Im not quite sure why it flows faster on the outside. Youre right. Its the simplest thing in the world. Because a water flows in a Straight Line until something stops it, straight downhill until it hits the bank and turns and flows in a Straight Line until it gets stopped again. Whats happening all the time in the rivers is that the bends are tending to become more exaggerated. Again, if youve had a window seat in a plane and looked down, you can often see where the course of the river used to be. Which isnt there any longer. You have things called ox bows, which looks like this, and see it more clearly, it used to be there, a bend, and then eventually it was cut off and the river straightened itself and then the process starts again. All right. So then think about what this means in terms of the deposit of gold, it means not only that in this transitional area coming out of the mountains, its also that the very, very best place to look is on the inside of the bends. Because thats where the current is flowing more slowly. That means thats where its going to be dropped. You can actually see on the photograph here, theres a little beach, isnt there, on the inside of the bend where the water is hardly flowing again, and you can imagine paddling across and see it flowing more rapidly. So the Perfect Place to stake a claim if you were one of the california miners was on the inside of the bend at the place where the river levelled out. Sure enough, thats where they found a lot of gold. Now one of the great things about the early days of the California Gold rush is that it was a very democratic kind of thing, anybody could do it. You have to get there, which is hard, but once you were there, all you needed was a shovel and a pan, a pan that looked like a work. Anybody ever pan for gold . Just like this miner is holding, what you do is you shovel into the pan some of the sediment from the river bank and put in water and then gradually swirl it around so you make a suspension of the lighter particles with the water, and let that flow over the sides of the pan with the heavier particles staying behind. If you carry on doing it gently and methodically, need care and patience, what youre left with is a bed of gravel with gold flakes in it you can pick out the flakes of gold. Thats the way in which it was done. Its a very, very lowtech business. But incidentally, when we look at the history of who got rich in the California Gold rush, what we discover it was mainly the people, not who actually dug, but who sold shovels and sold pans and sold donkeys and sold tents and sold food. That was the way to make money, a fortune. Whether or not the diggers found the gold, you would get paid for the provisions. You could charge a very high price because the stuff had to come a long way, it was an incredibly high demand and you could get top price for the sale of it. Weve got illustrations of people using very, very primitive recovery techniques, usually working in gangs of five or six. A slightly more sophisticated device called a rocker. What happens here is that a mixture of gravel and water is poured in at the top and it filters down through a series of sivs, each one that is finer than the area before, pour the water, the coarser gravel on top and the lower level down here you have a piece of rough bur lap sacking or maybe an old bit of carpet and the little particles of gold catch in the fabric so after youve put the water across it youre left with particles of gold you can pick out. This became the currency in the gold district. Now eventually it starts occur to some people that if the gold is there, it must have come from further upstream, so doesnt it make sense to go upstream to actually find it and, of course, the answer was yes, and heres how that works. So back to the tie gram of the hillside you find lots of it lying about in the water down here. That means that somewhere up here, theres actually a vain of gold or a vain of gold baring rock that is exposed to the surface and its being eroded over hundreds of thousands of years. The gold is formed in the earth under high temperatures and pressures by a geological process we cant go into here. When you get tectonic thrusts sometimes you get the rocks, and it can bring to the surface one which was a long way below. Thats why gold is usually found in mountain districts because of the irregularities of the earths crust. Imagine this is where the gold vain is. If you decide to look fort gold vain itself, heres how you do it. You go upstream and you test the water here, and then you go upstream again, and test it here, then you go upstream again and you test it here. Now in each of these places, you find some gold, but less than you had down here, because of the pace of the river. But eventually you get to a place where you find none at all, why do you find none . Because youre gone above the vain, so that tells you, so you do some much closer testing, here and here, its hardly ever selfevident, it just looks like rock, but then you can work out where its come from. Then the possibility of digging out or trying to dig out the gold itself. Its very, very difficult to do, but thats the logical conclusion the miners came to. Lets look for the origins of the gold itself and why we have so many photos in the mountains. Go ahead. Its called a vein or a drift, theres lots of miners terminology and depending on which mines there tends to be a different rhetoric to go with it. All the techniques for digging for gold actually required access to water. So again, a group of entrepreneurial miners realized Water Supplies itself are a highly lucrative business. Theres a place where theres a stream and diverting the stream where the people are digging. Usually by building a flu, a primitive above ground canal, wooden channel to guide the water to places where people are digging. In other words, the very first strikes are here, on the river, on the main part of the river. But eventually people start saying, look, for a long time the river flowed here, thats a great place to dig, but we cant do it if its dried up, unless we have a water supply. But then the fumes, an entrepreneur is building a flume to this area, so lots of very entrepreneurial men were building flumes to diverse the rivers to bring it down to the gold bearing country. And in this picture, you can actually see the process going on. Theres a small stream here, they built a very, very primitive rock dam, but its good enough they can channel the water into the area where theyre going to be exploring for the minerals. Then, of course, it occurs to somebody its pretty good getting it from the side of the river, think how much better its going to be is if we actually dig into the bed of the river itself. How do we do that . We can only do that by damming and diverting the river. This is a period where lots of illustrators went to do pictures of what was going on and so we can reconstitute it very well. A place called murderers bar, a place presumably because somebody was murdered there. Thats my deduction anyway. You can see whats happened here, they built a dam across the river itself, here we are in the foothills and they built a diversionary channel. So what was once the bed of the river has now become dry, so they can dig down in it and get up the sediment that has been accumulating over hundreds of thousands of years. But theres a catch, and you notices also that theyve introduced water wheels here. As the flow of the river is narrowed it gets faster to get energy and turn the water wheels attached to winches that go up and down in the earth to bring up mechanically the stuff thats being produced and a steam engine here. Some technology has been brought in. As you can imagine this is all expensive. A guy with a shovel cant afford this. Its only people who have got capital who can do work like this. Very early on by 1851, 52, its people with capital who are making money at mining because they can do these big earth shifting operations which are necessary to really make it pay. So gradually what tends to happen the people who had come out hoping they would be independent gold diggers, actually become employees of Mining Companies working for wages and projects like this. They realize the value of going quite a long way down into the earth, you can see here, its becoming mining, but theyre still mining into the gravel which is underneath the bed, the old bed of the river itself. Now it wasnt long after that before somebody invented this method, hydraulicing, a method of the 1850s, they said look, the river has been gradually eroding the mountain, lets speed up the process, by firing against the Mountain Side a very, similar High Pressure jet of water to in effect accelerate the erosion process hundreds of times over. Dont let it happen gradually. Happen all at once. And again its matter of getting a flume upstring and fwigd the water down until you bring night like bigscale fire hoses. You ever seep the fire hoses, the High Pressure they have, put your fingers in front it will break your fingers. And you shoot it out of narrow gauged nozzles with great pressure against the mountainside. When this washes down sediment, out of which its possible to gather the gold in the same way, hydraulicing. The very first environmental law was passed by the state of california in the 1870s to ban this practice. What it meant was ta tons of debris was coming downstreams and stifling the farms. Bad from the Farmers Point of view. In the 50s and 60s and 70s the mining was more important than the farm. When all these other methods had been tried and gradually exhausted, then its a question of actually digging into the mountainside and trying to follow the vein into the interior of the mountain itself and we give it hard rock mining where what youre bringing out of the mine is an enormous quantity of which there are small elements of gold. Again, at first little groups of fellas tried it but bit by bit they were edged out by people who had enough capital to do it on a large scale. This is what the big mine looked like by the 1860s and 70s. Luckily by then the technology of photography was good enough, started in the 1830s and getting steadily better we have pretty good pictures of what it looked like. Miners become mine laborers. Heres what happened inside a working hard rock gold mine. You usually have teams of two working at a technique called double jacking. This is where one guys holding a chisel against the rock face, and the other ones hitting it with a sledgehammer, it means a very high degree of trust among friends. One holds the chisel, the other hits it, turn it slightly, hit it again, turn it slightly to dislodge the gravel and over the course of an hour of hard hammering, youve cut a hole maybe this deep. If you can imagine youre working against a rock face which is more or less semi circular, you cut one there, one there and so on all the way around. Then fill them with gun powder, lead fuses to each one of them, light the fuses, retire to a safe distance, and then let them explode. And if you have done it right, if the holes are this deep, an arc of explosions will dislodge the rock in that arc and when the dust and smoke have cleared, you can go and clear out all that rock, bring it to the surface and repeat the process again, yeah. Its incredibly dangerous work. For about i think maybe right up to the present, being a miner is the job which youre most likely to be killed at work. You can imagine that the roof can cave in, you can get caught by charges which didnt explode which then sparks from a hammer will set off. Methane gas will sometimes explode. Sometimes there are suffocating gases that you cant breathe and you can die in the mine. Theyre horrible, horrible working environments. In those days they didnt have electric light. They had smoky candles. In every way a deplorable way of life. Gradually, improvements were developed. One was the invention of an improved explosive called nitroglycerin, a liquid explosive, more powerful than gun powder but more volatile f it gets too hot it spontaneously explodes. We have very sad stories of that happening. The invention of drills in which High Pressure water is this power source, instead of simply guys with hammers. The problem with those is they also created enormous great showers of dust so the miners tended to be breathing in a dust heavy atmosphere and tended to die young of mining related diseases. Horrible way of life. Little underground railroads built so that you can load the ore on the wagons, take the wagons to the pit shaft and then have them drawn up to the surface. When the hard rock gets to the surface, how do you get the gold out of it . Its no longer any good to use the panning techniques because the parts per million are very, very small and there was not much gold and theres a lot of rock. Instead, you had to use what was called various names, this is a crusher. On the right you can see a water wheel, so you imagine the fast flowing water turns the wheel, and its attached to this device, which is an axle bearing cams, and as the cams go past these rods, these are attached to great stamps, great heavy weights so the ore itself is fed through here on a conveyor, and these devices stamp it to reduce it to powder. Thats the way in which a stamping mill works. Then next thing is to combine the powdered ore with mercury. Who has seen any mercury . Its a metal thats liquid at room temperature. We now know its another of these sources another way to get poisoned at the gold mines. Its very toxic. You must not work around mercury compounds because theyre too dangerous. That wasnt known at the time. This reddish rock is mercury oxide in the space read earlier on he said it appears from the reports that mines of quick silver are found in the vicinity of the gold region. Quick silver another name for mercury. That mining becomes as important as gold mining. This is the process of separating the metal from the ore. What happens is you mix the powdered ore with water, make a kind of sludge, then you pour in mercury and the mercury and the gold combine chemically and theyre very heavy and so by sending it across a gently sloping gradient, youll cause this gold and mercury compound to fall to the bottom. Then you heat the whole thing, and because the mercury is already so volatile, it gets vaporized and driven off and you are left behind with the gold. Usually in a highly concentrated pure form to turn night gold bars. Thats the way its done as a commercial mining operation. I did want to show you this lovely, lovely photograph. Again this is about 20 years after the first invention of photography, but it perfectly illustrates the point that lieutenant sherman made. This is San Francisco bay in 1850. Ships would come in from all over the world, but very often they would never set sail again because the crews all deserted. Everyone had gone for gold. Up to the hills. Gold in them hills literally. This photograph of the whole city and the whole harbor i should say, with these abandoned ships. Its dramatic, isnt it . So much so that one of the things that shop keepers started to do was to drag the ships up on land, see this one and this one, they have just converted them into stores because theyre big containment areas, ideal. Thats one thing, but theres other interesting things, theres a lot of good clo mow lithographs, this style of picture at the time. Shirley, tell us about this picture, if you would, please, wait for a second while the boom comes over to you. A lot of people inside and i cant is this a bar or a gambling saloon . People are trading for gold, i think . Thats right. Yeah. What are you meant to be surprised by as a viewer . Look at the clothes. Everyones pretty well dressed . Not just well dressed. Who do you think these guys are . Farmers . No. What country do they come from . Look at the hats. I cant really tell. Theyre chinese. And how about these who . Are they from another asian country as well . Theyre meant to be mexican. What artist is doing is showing us the traditional dress of all the different groups of people who have come from different parts of the world. Thats the idea of it. In other words, this is americas first multicultural environment where there are people from china, chile, mexico, england, switzerland, all sorts of people have gathered and its very unusual. People werent used to that kind of thing. Who is this one . This is a stereotype. Yeah, irish. Its the irish drunk. Yeah. The its the irish drunk. People come from all over the world and when the irish get here what do they do . They get drunk. Its one of these old stereotypes. Whats it like in chinatown when suddenly a chinatown develops in sacramento . Chinese life, three exclamation points. The idea is, whoa, how weird is that that Chinese People are living here in america . Thats what the artist is getting at. And similarly in this one. This is meant to a be a horse market in sonora. In the background you see the saloon. Southerners would take their slave tuesday the gold mines a great concentration of people coming in from all over the place around the world, and the idea of a picture like this is to say what a weird world is that. It resulted in very, very rapidly this is a history written about 40 years ago describing the way in which gold accelerated the process of american settlement. The little grains of bright yellow metal threw a bridge head across the desert established a civilization across the Rocky Mountains and drew men from the east farther out onto the plains and convinced men that no matter how great the barriers they could be surmounted. After the men came their baggage both material and cultural. Freight wagons brought not only necessities but the trappings of civilization. Printing presses, the refinement of books and out of their spending came roads, civic development, churches, schools and above all women. When the family unit came or was locally assembled Permanent Assembly was normally assured. With the floating scum gone those who were serious about the new land settled down to extract their own kind of gold. Grain or cattle in another section of the United States commenced. Normally if you look at the history how communities developed they started out as agricultural and later on became urbanized and after the mines have played out gradually people began to disperse. The farming population in california was an aforethought. It was going to prove even more lucrative than the mining had itself. For reasons of time ive got to stop now. The next time well talk about the origins of the history of the oil industry. Weeknights this month were featuring American History tv programs as a preview whats available every weekend on cspan 3. Tonight we visit georgeten university for a class on the progressive era. She explains how politicians and reform groups in the early 20th century attempted to improve social and Economic Conditions through trust busting, interstate regulation and prohibition. We also hear about the policies and campaigns of thedoor roosevelt, the periods most dominant political figure. Watch tonight beginning at 8 00 eastern. Enjoy American History tv this week and every weekend on cspan 3. American history tv on cspan 3, exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend. Coming up this Labor Day Weekend, saturday at 6 00 p. M. Eastern on the civil war historians discuss how we remember the civil war and whether to remove or contextualize confederate monuments. And at 6 00 p. M. Eastern well preview artifacts of nativeamericans from the Smithsonian National museum which includes more than a half million images. At 8 00 p. M. On the presidency, a look at president ial retreats including abraham lincolns summer cottage, herbert hoovers shenandoah mountains fishing camp and stories of the kennedys, kwiptens and obamas in marthas vinward. And august marked the 75th anniversary of the bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki. Look back with arthur ian toll. Exploring the american story. Watch American History tv this Labor Day Weekend on cspan 3. Youre watching American History tv. Every weekend on cspan 3 explore our nations past and brought to you today by your television provider. Now on American History tv from gillferred Technical Community college in North Carolina a history class about civil war