![]() ![]() In the 1950s and 60s, the dredge was beginning to fall into disrepair but was quite a sight to see in those days. My father worked as a logger in the area, and I remember this site well. I lived at the old town of Tiger when I was young. These boats ravaged the area around Breckenridge as they followed the river and stream beds, chewing up the landscape and creating huge rock piles in their wake in search of gold. Linda Gilmer Polhemus, Frisco: Ben Revett owned this and other dredge boats in the later part of the 1800s and early 1900s. ![]() The irony for this boat is that it sank as internal water pumps failed and the river won! Very destructive process as they moved upstream processing the stream for gold. These dredge boats were built on their own pond, consuming the pristine stream bed ahead, and disgorging river rock behind. ![]() This is an old gold dredge boat located on Tiger Road outside of Breckenridge. ![]() Retorting involves heating the amalgam in a crucible until the mercury vaporizes then the gold can be melted to remove impurities and poured into a mold to create a gold brick.Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu After removing the riffles and scraping the amalgam out of the box, the process of retorting can begin. In order to capture as much gold as possible, dredge operators and small-scale placer miners alike added mercury to their sluice boxes because gold and mercury bond chemically to form what is called an amalgam. The orderly piles of waste rock the dredges left behind as they moved across the landscape are called tailings. They did the same work as earlier placer techniques but on an industrial scale, scooping thousands of cubic feet of gravel each day, washing it in revolving tumblers with water from all angles, and running it through multiple sluice boxes. The earliest gold dredges in Alaska arrived in the 1910s, and by the 1930s several dredges were imported to mines along the Yukon River. Moving gravel by hand is arduous work and often placer gold exists in very small quantities, so it is no surprise that gold miners turned to steam-powered and then diesel-powered machines to make poor ground profitable. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |