Golden Days

This article was originally published in Investigator, Vol 4 No 1 February 1969

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Golden Days

The ordinary visitor to Europe generally takes the precaution of brushing up his knowledge of history and of reading a little about the orders of architecture and the types of building that he is likely to see. In the same spirit, it is a good idea for the person who drives out to Steiglitz one Sunday to “have a look at an old mining town” to examine a few of the prints of S.T. Gill and to familiarize himself with some of the terms and procedures peculiar to mining. It will make intelligible much that would otherwise be meaningless and draw his attention to much that he might otherwise miss.

The prime matter to understand is the mode of occurrence of gold. Broadly speaking, the country which one sees in the old fields on this side of the State is of Ordovician age, which means that its foundation is composed of slates, shales and sandstones which have originally been deposited by the sea. These rocks extend to many thousands of feet in depth and, in the course of ages, have been forced into huge folds which often leave their originally horizontal layers arranged at a slope or even vertically. In the fissures and interstices of these strata often appear the veins of quartz, known to the miners as “reefs”, which may contain gold. Moreover, through the ages, the face of the country has been vastly altered by the erosive action of water and wind, so that hilltops and mountainsides have been ground to sand and gravel and deposited in huge layers in the valleys beneath. With the sand and the gravel has gone the gold contained in the quartz which has been eroded with the rocks in which it is bedded. Naturally the gold, being, for its bulk, extremely heavy, has settled to the very bottom layers of the sand and gravel in the company of which it has been washed down.

From the above it follows that gold is found in two quite distinct situations. It may be in its original veins or reefs of quartz, requiring for its extraction the crushing of the matrix. On the other hand it may be found free, having already been gouged from the quartz by the various forces of erosion. In this case it will be found in the beds of existing watercourses, in the very lowest layers of sand and gravel, or on the hillsides between reefs and streams, or even in old stream beds which have been covered over by such subsequent great change-makers as flows of lava or deposited beds of sand, gravel or clay. This gold that has been freed from its matrix and transported is known as “alluvial” and may appear in many guises, ranging from fine dust to the masses known as “nuggets”.

It was natural that the early miners should first find alluvial gold. Shepherds noticed the shining specks in the creeks and quickly the word spread to men who knew from experience in California how easy it was to separate these specks from the sand. Quickly, too, others followed the lead, until there were thousands upon thousands of them, rushing creek after creek and locality after locality, to dig and wash the sand and gravel down to the very bedrock, beneath the surface of which they knew there could be no gold.

The means of extraction were simple in alluvial mining and all depended on the fact that gold is of such high specific gravity. The basic principle was to mix the gold-bearing material – “the wash” – with water and so to agitate it that any clay was broken into the finest mud and the gold could settle to the bottom of whatever container was used. Then the higher levels could be skimmed or washed away until the shining fortune was left revealed. The simplest of all the devices was the humble dish – “pan” is an Americanism – pretty well known to anybody who has even the merest nodding acquaintance with mining or prospecting. Next up the scale, able to cope with a much greater bulk of material in a given time, was the cradle.

Still greater quantities of auriferous clays and gravels could be put through the “horse-puddlers”, the “machines” of the early days. Here the material was dumped from drays into a circular trench, where it was violently agitated in water by an arrangement of rakes drawn by a horse.

Where water was plentiful, which was never the case in our own goldfield at Steiglitz, recourse was had to various forms of sluicing. Water was brought, often from great distances in “races”, to be used, first in tearing down the upper layers of soil and then in washing the auriferous layers in long boxes with removable ripples on their bottoms.

Gold that lay in quartz lodes was for some years neglected by the early miners. They knew that it was there, but could hit on no ready method for its extraction and so neglected it in favour of the more easily won alluvial. In the end it demanded attention, a stage that came very early in Steiglitz which was never a great alluvial field. A first primitive attempt was made with a roasting arrangement that was quaintly called a “machine”. The remains of one of these are to be seen in Sutherland’s Creek. There are several bowl shaped depressions in which the quartz was strongly heated so as to melt and set free the gold which it contained.

By the sixties much more sophisticated methods were in vogue. Many mines used great steel bowls in which wheels or giant balls were rolled over the quartz to crush it to powder. The great majority, however, from very early times used the stamp mill, or battery. Tall shanks with steel-shod feet were rapidly raised and dropped over steel boxes which held the quartz and from which a flow of water washed the stone when once it had been reduced to powder. The gold was separated from the crushed sand partly by the use of quicksilver, which dissolved it, and partly by the ordinary action of gravity when the water washed it over sloping, blanket-clad tables.

As has been said, the first miners found the gold-bearing gravels at the very surface, waiting to be shovelled into their dishes and barrows. Those halcyon days soon ended, the auriferous material had to be hunted deeper and deeper below the surface and the raising of it presented a new set of problems. The windlass was one of the first answers. A bole with one or two handles was set up over the shaft, to carry a rope from which dangled a bucket, and with this simple arrangement a couple of men could manage a shaft fifty feet deep, or even more.

For greater depths a “whip” might be used, where the rope passed around two pulleys on a sloping pole and the horse which provided the power raised or lowered by moving forwards or backwards.

More effective was the “whim”. Here, too, a horse did the hauling, but in this case his power was applied to a great horizontal drum, which carried a double-ended rope so that two buckets could work in counterpoise.

In larger mines and for hauling from greater depths steam hauling was soon employed. Over the shaft a strong tower, the “poppet head” was built to carry two “gin wheels”. Nearby was the engine-house in which stood the two bobbins from which the heavy wire cables went over the gin wheels and down to the shaft, each of them with a steel cage attached, capacious enough to hold several men and a truck or two. The shaft was timbered to provide three compartments – two for the cages and one for the pumps and emergency ladderways. The cages were arranged to work in counterpoise, one going up as the other descended.

At Steiglitz can be found traces of most of the operations that are mentioned above. Along some of the creeks can still be seen the shallow holes of the alluvial miners of the early days. There are traces, too, of a little sluicing and perhaps of a puddler or two.

Not far from the present Youth Hostel there were till recent years a few rotting parts of an old whim, and in one or two gullies one may find tunnels by which men sought an easier access to the depths than that offered by the digging of shafts. By and large, however, Steiglitz was a reefing field. The spectator who now stands by the old church and looks at the grey mullock tips of the Steiglitz or of the Follow the Leader must imagine to himself the tall poppet heads and the spinning gin wheels, he must picture the men descending in the cages to work with drill and explosives in the tunnels and stopes hundreds of feet below the surface, he must hear again “the voice of the whistle’s warning” that calls the shifts to their work, he must listen to the roaring thunder of the stampers and go into the engine house to savour the unforgettable smell of engine oil and “see the steam to the black roof clinging”.