California Gold -- Mining Techniques: the Cradle and the Rocker
Andrea Franzius
The first Argonauts of 1848 used quite primitive mining tools: knives, spoons, a shovel, and a pan for washing the gold. Since these miners could only dig out bigger nuggets with such primitive equipment, they had to work on rich gold deposits. In the same year, technical improvements such as the cradle, the rocker, the long tom, and river damming, basically all known since the Middle Ages, were introduced by the more experienced Mexicans.
The Cradle and the rocker both worked on the same principle: wooden boxes with the top and front piece missing and a sieve on the bottom side through which the dirt containing gold was washed. On the bottom horizontal wooden bars slowed the incoming water down and helped to separate dirt from gold. With a handle on the side of the box, the whole mechanism could be rocked.
The rocker required 3 or 4 people to work, one to shovel the dirt into the machine, one responsible for the water supply, and a third one to move the handle. Contrary to the individual washing with the pan, this more efficient technique required miners to find partners, thus establishing small mining groups of 3 to 9 people.
Bibliography
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Andrea Franzius
(agf2@acpub.duke.edu), November 1997
in collaboration with The Digital
Scriptorium, Special
Collections Library, Duke
University
http://web-directory-where-this-project-lives/