Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining
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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• During the gold rush, gold was worth 16 dollars
  an ounce.
• How much is an ounce of gold worth today?

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• For most forty-niners, finding an ounce of gold
  took a day of hard work.
• But in the busy mining towns, forty-niners found
  that their 16 dollars did not buy much.
• One man reported paying 43 dollars just for
  breakfast for two.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• There was so little food in California that the
  restaurants could charge whatever they wanted.
• In addition, clothes and supplies cost a lot of
  money.
• Of course, a few miners found much more than an
  ounce of gold a day.
• But most were not so lucky.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• The first thing a miner had to do was to find
  some land to mine.
• When a miner declared that an area belonged to
  him or her, the land was called a miners claim.
• Forty-niners looked for their claims along the
  many rivers flowing down from the Sierra Nevada
  Mountains.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• Most of the mining land was owned by the Indians.
• The miners chased the Indians away.
• Some miners even killed Indians to get their land.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• A claim might be anywhere from a few feet wide to
  hundreds of feet wide.
• To keep others away, miners placed stakes around
  their claims. They called this staking a
  claim.
• Once the miner found and staked a claim, it was
  time for hard work.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• The earliest and simplest method of gold mining
  was panning.
• To pan, a miner filled a flat-bottomed pan with
  dirt and water from the riverbed.
• The miner then swirled the water around.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• Panning for Gold

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• The heavy gold would separate from the sand and
  dirt.
• When the gold settled to the bottom of the pan,
  the miner could collect it.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• The rocker was another early piece of mining
  equipment.
• Forty-niners could mine much more earth with a
  rocker than they could with a simple pan.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• The Rocker

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• To use a rocker, miners often worked in pairs.
• First, the miners dumped dirt into a small tray.
• One miner then poured the water over the dirt
  while the other moved the rocker back and forth.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• Much of the gold mined in California was taken
  from the earth by three methods panning, the
  rocker, and the hydraulic method.
• With the panning and rocker methods, the heavier
  gold would separate from the soil when swirled
  with water.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• Water was also used in the hydraulic method to
  force the gold out of the soil.
• Hydraulic mining allowed miners to get at gold
  buried deeper in the ground.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• Hydraulic Mining

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• No matter what method of mining they used, all
  miners found it difficult to take gold from
  Californias mountain streams and cliffs.
• By the mid 1850s, most of the gold had been mined
  from the rivers.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• When a miner caught gold fever, he would do
  anything to get rich quick.
• The Maidu living around Sutters Fort were the
  first to feel the effects of gold fever.
• Whites hired them to mine gold.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• Later, some of the mining companies made
  thousands of dollars from the gold the Indians
  mined, but the Indians received only food,
  clothing, or other trade goods for pay.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• Thousands of miners from around the world and the
  eastern United States came to the gold country.
• Most of the newcomers did not like Indians.
• Miners did not care that the Indians had lived on
  the land for thousands of years.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• By the mid-1800s, over 100,000 Indians had been
  killed.
• Other groups of miners were mistreated too.
• Some miners were jealous of experienced Mexicans
  who were more successful at digging for gold.
• And Chinese miners were forced to live apart.

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Unit 3 Chapter 5 Lesson 4 Gold Mining

• Miners dreams of getting rich faded quickly.
• By the mid-1850s, many miners had gone back to
  their former homes.
• They often had little to show for their hard
  work.
• Others stayed in California to work on farms, on
  ranches, or in stores and businesses.