The amount of the gold that has been mined in Alaska has been obtained from the placers that can be found in great quantities that mainly occur close to all of the major rivers and tributaries. The most important placer mining area is the Yukon River basin. The Yukon River basin goes across the center of Alaska from Canada and also consists of the big deposits that are in Fairbanks. A great amount of gold has been dredged in the Fairbanks district and this area has rendered more gold than any other district in Alaska. Even though for the most part this consists of a placer area, it is also one of the main lode regions. Dredging turned into one of the one of the most important forms of operations because of the operational efficiency it provides. Dredging was a major breakthrough because it provided a way to be able to handle big amounts of material and was is not an expensive form of operation. The first thriving operation of the bucket line dredge in the United States occurred in 1895 on the Grasshopper Creek in Montana. This new trend caught on to others as well until it increased to a good amount of operations in the California. There were over 140 dredge operations going in 1940; however these operations were interrupted when the Second World War occurred. The costs went up over the profit levels after the war and only some dredging operations continued. The beach deposits that were located in the area of Nome, which is in the southern central area of the Seward Peninsula, are in the second place of the placer deposits that was productive in the state of Alaska. There have been other discoveries of productive placers in the drainage basin of the Copper River and the Kuskokwim River. In fact, in Alaska, the occurrences of gold were said to have occurred as early as 1848 and gold was discovered in the Yukon region around 1878. However, the very rich finds were discovered in 1897 and 1998 in the Klondike of Yukon, which is located in the border of Canada and this is when the placer miners started exploiting the deposits in Alaska extensively. Soon afterwards, the gravel punchers rushed to the very rich discoveries in Nome in 1898 and a few years later in 1902 they turned to the country around Fairbanks.
