Gold Hill in Nevada County

By 1850 the rich loads situated in Gold Hill in Nevada County were also discovered and miners continued working on them for the next hundred years.

In the Mother Lode the quartz veins that bear gold are normally found in metamorphic rocks on the edges of granitic rocks. On occasions some rich veins have been found on the granitic rocks as well however usually the metamorphic rocks are the ones that produce the most.

The Mother Lode is divided into two areas by miners, these areas consist of the mines in the South and the mines in the North and to divide the line they use auburn. Geologists on the other hand separate it into three different parts that consist of the Mother Lode Gold Belt that occupies the whole north area of Calaveras County, the East Gold Belt and the West Gold Belt that are located in the lower counties.

The most substantial and richest lode gold deposits located in the northern and central areas of the Mother Lode.

There is a region that is around ten miles long in between Plymouth and Jackson that has been one of the best areas and one of the most productive.

The Mother Lode varies in width however its greatest width is located at the north end reaching almost seventy miles in the Butte, Plumis County area. If you continue going down to the south, it becomes much more narrow until almost vanishing in Fresno and the Tulare Counties and then starts to increase in width again in Kern County.

In 1852, two men whose names were Joe Wood and John Payne were working on some gravel for a long number of hours and were not doing so well at it. They though up a way they could bring the water to the gravels instead of having to do it the other way around. They then decided to build a big sluice box underneath the gravel area they were working in. then they built a pipe line out of big wooden planks from a dam that was higher up from the area they were working on. They then attached a canvas hose to the pipe line and then opened the gate of the dam which caused the water to stream down the pipe line. The strength of the water was so strong that it made the bank fall and the gravels fell on the sluice box below.

This process is what is known as hydraulic mining. The process was carried about by diverting water into ditches and wooden flumes at high elevations, and gravity did the rest of the work. Channeled through heavy iron pipes, the water blasted out from a nozzle very below with the strength of five thousand pounds.

These were practically water cannons and it had enough strength to blast the mountains to pieces, causing gigantic craters. It was very efficient way of getting to the gold. The first monitors were small, with canvas hoses. Then miners decided they wanted to make it bigger. The gravels were then washed through huge sluices, and the heavy gold settled behind riffle boards and the remainder of the mountainside was washed down into the streams and rivers.

While it is true that hydraulic mining was definitely an efficient way of mining, it caused some major problems. Hydraulic monitors blasted one and a half billion cubic yards of soil and rocks from the hillsides of The Sierra. It was washed through sluice boxes and was then discarded into the nearby creek or river canyon. This immense amount of debris literally buried the streams in the Sierra, which had trout, salmon, and other wildlife, under one hundred feet of gravel. This caused there to be a permanent change in the natural habitat.