Gold Mining · The Basics
Gold Panning & Placer Mining
The oldest methods: recovering loose gold from gravel and water
The pan, the rocker, the long tom and the sluice box, the simple tools that let a single miner turn a creek into a living.
All gold mining begins with a simple fact: gold is heavy, nearly twice as dense as lead. Every hand method for recovering loose gold exploits that one property, using flowing water to wash lighter material away and leave the gold behind. This is placer mining, the recovery of gold that nature has already freed from rock and concentrated in streambeds.
The pan
The gold pan is the icon of the rush and the slowest, most patient tool. The miner scoops gravel and water into a shallow metal pan, then swirls and tilts it so the current carries off sand and mud while the heavy gold settles to the bottom. Panning rarely made anyone rich, but it was cheap, portable, and remains the way prospectors test a stream today.
The rocker and the long tom
To process more gravel, miners built machines that were really just amplified pans:
- The rocker (or cradle) is a box on rockers with a sieve on top and cleats, or riffles, inside. A miner shovels in dirt, pours water, and rocks the cradle; the riffles trap gold as the slurry washes through. It handled far more gravel than a pan and needed less water than the methods that followed.
- The long tom is a longer trough, ten to twenty feet, with a perforated screen. It needed a steady flow of water and let a small team process gravel quickly.
The sluice box
The sluice box scaled the idea up again: a long inclined trough with a row of riffles along the bottom. A continuous stream of water carries gravel over the riffles, which catch the gold. With enough water and a few workers, a sluice could process many times what a single panner could, and it became the workhorse of the placer diggings.
Allowing five for each cradle... the population within a radius of five miles must be a population of several thousand men.
The catch: mercury
To capture the finest gold dust that riffles missed, miners often lined their sluices with mercury, which binds to gold to form an amalgam. It was effective and catastrophic: mercury escaped into the rivers constantly, and its toxic legacy is discussed in our piece on the gold rush's legacy.
Placer methods are ancient and were largely unchanged for centuries because they are elegantly matched to the problem. A pan and a strong back still recover gold from a creek exactly as they did in 1849.
