Much is written about the gold rush and how men became rich or died poor searching for this elusive dream. The following shows the other side of this romanticized gold rush era..
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Thompson and West History of Placer County, 1882 page 191The gold and some gravel would settle in the riffles, which at night would be taken out, the matter remaining carefully gathered and washed in a pan, leaving the gold clean and pure, with the exception of a small quantity of black sand, which was afterwards removed by a magnet, being ferruginous and quickly attracted, or blown away by the breath. If quicksilver were used, this would be gathered in a similar manner, strained through a piece of canvas and the resulting amalgam heated, either openly or on a plate of iron ore in a retort made for the purpose and all the quicksilver adhering to the gold burned or evaporated away.
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Auburn Journal article by Gus Thomson, Jan 22, 2007, Pond Mine in Foresthill targeted for mercury cleanup.The U. S. Geological Survey has estimated that eight to nine million pounds of the element
remain in the western Sierra foothills from gold mining use, with much of it buried in sediment or flowing in waterways.
/From USGS California Water Science Center
Miners used Mercury (quicksilver) to recover gold throughout the western United States at both placer (alluvial) and hardrock (lode) mines. The vast majority of the mercury lost to the environment in California was from placer-gold mines, which used hydraulic, drift, and dredging methods. At hydraulic mines, placer ores were broken down with monitors (or water cannons) and the resulting slurry was directed through sluices and drainage tunnels, where gold particles combined with liquid mercury to form gold-mercury amalgam. Loss of mercury in this process was 10 to 30 percent per season resulting in highly contaminated sediments at mines sites. Elevated mercury concentrations in ;present day mine water and sediments indicate that hundreds to thousands of pounds of mercury remain at each of the many sites affected by hydraulic mining.
/Excerpts from article by Rebecca Solnit in Orion Magazine, Sept/October 2006 issue
The real movement of wealth and poverty through an economy, or at least our economy, might better be modeled by the movement of gold out of the California ecosystem during the Gold Rush and by the release of deadly mercury into the same system during the same rush.
The gold was the point. The mercury was the secret. The former yielded a one-time profit and was thereafter mostly sequestered, made into coins or worn as ornaments, not even much of a speculative commodity during the century and that the price of gold was fixed. The latter was dispersed in all the streams in which and near which gold was mined, mercury being useful in securing the gold with the old technologies of ore refinement. More than a century and a half later, the mercury continues to spread. . .