Chapter 1
My first dredging experience
As I recall, it was early summer of 1960. I had a friend/neighbor in Bishop, CA that I’d visit with often, in the evenings after work.
One of those evenings, I happened to mention that I had read about people dredging for gold, and some of them doing pretty good at it. He told me; “Heck, if you want to try it out, I have a three inch dredge in the garage that you’re welcome to use”.
It didn’t take me more than a few seconds to decide that yes, I’d like to see if it was all that it was cracked up to be. (lol)
He then led me out to his garage and showed me a “thing of beauty”, (at least to my novice eyes). It consisted of a Briggs&Stratton engine with a water pump and diaphragm compressor mounted on a big truck inner-tube. The suction part was a 3 inch tube, with a 45 degree angle on one end and a small sluice box snapped onto the other.
He then explained how to connect everything up and the basic operation of the gold dredge. (He wasn’t much more than a novice himself, since he’d only taken it out once, then stored it in his garage for a couple of years). But to me, he was the local expert on dredging for gold. (lol)
He had me back my pickup into his driveway, and then helped me load it into the bed. This was on a Thursday, so I had already determined I could leave over the weekend and see what I could do with it.
Later that night, since I had never panned more than a few specks of gold in the vicinity of Bishop, I spent a while looking over a California road map, looking for a place to try my luck. I had read about gold mining in the area of Tuolumne, and when my eyes strayed across the ‘town’ of Tuolumne, I noticed a bridge crossing a river right at the town. Aha! That should be easy to access. And, as a bonus, I’d be within walking distance of hamburgers and Pepsis. (lol)
Skipping ahead a bit
I arrived at the area about 10am Saturday morning and after inquiring at a rock shop near the bridge, I was directed to a dirt road at the other end of the bridge, that would take me up river about a quarter of a mile.
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So, I got back in my truck and drove across the bridge, then made a right turn onto the dirt road. I only drove a couple hundred yards when I spotted a nice flat area that looked perfect for parking and camping. And, was out of sight of the highway, which was good, as I would have to get undressed to put my wet suit on. I could have put the tent up and changed inside, but wasn’t sure if I would be staying overnight. Besides, the sun felt good on my back-side. (lol)
I got the dredge floating at the edge of the river, then suited up. I filled the tank and started the engine. (Man, over a couple of years, I learned to hate those old style foot valves), It took me a couple of tries to get the water pump primed and the suction to going. But, after a little cussing, I finally got it primed. Then, I put my mask, regulator and weight belt on and stepped off into about two foot of water.
Being a novice at this, I decided to keep fairly close to the rivers edge, which was nothing but sand. Hey, don’t laugh too hard, remember, I was totally new at this game. (lol)
I sucked up the sand to a depth of about four inches, and then hit a layer of grass. I ripped out the grass to a circle of about three feet as I was sucking up the resulting sand and small tufts of grass. So, imagine my surprise when I found another layer of grass, about four or five inches under the first layer. I wasn’t quite as exuberant about going through that layer, so I only ripped out about a 12 inch circle this time. I dredged down a couple or three inches and hit another layer of grass. By this time, I was totally mystified about what was going on. (Actually, I didn’t figure it out until I made a trip down to Bagby the following July. But, that’s a later story). (lol)
Flood gold
About this time, the dredge engine ran out of gas, which allowed me to preserve my sanity. (lol) I carefully removed the bottom of the sluice with the concentrates and washed the cons into my gold pan. Since the gold trap in a three inch underwater dredge is only about 8 inches long and less than that wide, there wasn’t a large amount of materials to pan down, so, it wasn’t much over five minutes when I found myself staring at about a cup full of black sand, with so much gold in it that I couldn’t pan the black sand out, without losing some of the gold. So, in utter disgust, I dumped it all back into the river.
In explanation; I could see mercury mixed in with the gold, and though the largest flakes might have been a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, I could see that a lot of the gold was coated and partially coated with the mercury. In those days, with gold at $35 an ounce if mercury was used to extract the gold, you could only sell it to the government. (For $32 an ounce) That was the law! So, since I didn’t know beans about separating the mercury from the gold, I felt it was better to just return it to nature than to hold on to it.
And, a half hour later, I was loaded up and ready to return home for the next phase of my adventures.
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