Old timers trash and new gold.

[lemons]

Just wondering about the amount of trash you are dealing with in your search for gold.

AUSTRALIAN diggings from the 1860/1890's are littered with old food cans and rusted metal of all descriptions.
Towns like Coolgardie in WA are dry and water was 'created' by condensors during the early days; resulting in lead-solder spills and corroded condensor plants and their components.
The real mess came from food cans. Things like 'tinned-dog' (meat) which used an early method of canning requiring the use of a coin-sized tin disk soldered onto the top of a 1-lb can. Thousands of the disks remain whereas, the cans are rusted and disintergrating.

Dry-blowing (dry-washing) screens are still giving off their metalic signiture even after a hundred years. These contraptions continued to be used until the 1960's.

Early mining was all by dry-blowing (dish to dish) and dolly-pot. Early dollying used food cans to contain the rich mine-ore and many thousands of tons were treated this way in areas surrounding the Coolgardie goldfields; the fines were bagged and packed to water for treatment. Modern, steam-powered, machinary needed water that was impossible to obtain during the first years.

How does this compare with the American experience?

As a footnote: I was able to dig into the old trash-dumps of Coolgardie during the early 1970's in a search for relics. The most common material, I was surprised to find, were rock=oyster shells. Apparently the diggers celebrated their success with fresh oysters. . . delivered on ice, in sawdust, by train from Perth. Ice was almost as valuable as gold I suppose in that hot, hell-hole before the turn of the century.

The trash areas are worth a go nowadays. The massive 'Kanowna Belle' gold mine just out of Kalgoorlie was found under the old Kanowna towns 'nightsoil' area. . .

lemons

 

[Digger Bob]

Since no one else is of a mind to answer this, I'll give it a stab.

The amount of trash encountered over here, as there, is highly dependant on where you are hunting. Out in the Nevada desert, say around Rye Patch, there is virtually no trash. If you get a signal out there and there is no evidence of old digging, then chances are 90% it's a nugget.

However, in hunting the Mother Lode of California, it's an entirely different story. I imagine it's the same everywhere the old timers dug for any length of time. Everything they had no further use for, they tossed on the ground. As with you, the most common trash is iron from cans and nails from the sluice boxes. In the hydraulic pits there is also LARGE pieces of the water pipes used to transport the water to the monitors. Small bits have flaked off over the years and scattered about. Large pieces have become buried just under the soil. I have found old axes, shovels, chisels, hammers, pry bars, pans, spoons and knives.

It never ceases to amaze me how some of these small iron bits can become so deeply imbedded in the bedrock. One would never think that something so "new" could be so deep in ground that is not under running water.

Square nails are the most common trash followed by bullets. In my VLF days, birdshot was the number one enemy, sounded just like a little nugget. Now the Minelab ingnores most of the small birdshot when using a big loop. I rarely hunt in the stream beds or washes that see running water during the winter. Those are gathering places for all the trash washing down off the hillsides. Yes, I'm missing some gold, but 100 trash bits to 1 nugget is just not good enough odds when there are easier places to hunt.

I know of a ton of places that have good gold buried under a foot or two of sediment. But to detect that would require weeks of digging up every trash target to get down to the good stuff. So far, I've been able to find easier pickin's elsewhere.

On the other hand, some of my biggest nuggets have been the result of digging what I was sure was a trash target only to be proven wrong. That's why I've always said that the machine is only telling you to pay attention. It's up to you to decide what to do with the information it's giving you.

Hope this helps...

Digger Bob

 

[lemons]

Thanks Bob, sounds pretty much like most areas here. A mate of mine did a strip of an area in a small creek and ended up with a pile of rubbish you couldn't jump over. It took a couple of days and he collected a large specie with three oz of gold in it for his trouble.
I've not been that lucky, but I can't help eyeballing these places and wondering what lies underneath if you only lived long enough to clean them all up. . .

lemons

 

[FlakMagnet]

D. Bob,
your quote: " That's why I've always said that the machine is only telling you to pay attention. It's up to you to decide what to do with the information it's giving you. "

Is one of the best descriptions of what a detector does that I have ever read. A valuable thing to remember after digging all the incredible junk that we all encounter. Thankyou.