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The gold rushes of the 1800’s spurred immigration, migration,
settlements and businesses of all kinds in several areas of the United States
(and the world). Gold mining actually proved unprofitable for the majority of
miners and mine owners, however a few became extremely rich by it, and that was
enough to keep men and women dreaming and searching for the mother load.
Merchants and transport companies made huge profits and often mines that were lucrative
enough, expanded to include these other services, therefore double and tripling
the money they made.
Mines were often started by an individual panning for the gold.
A simple process of washing the gold out of the sand and gravel with a ‘pie pan’
shaped wash basin. Once it was determined there was significant findings, the
individual would set or file a claim and perhaps build a sluice box or rockers,
and most likely hire or partner up with other miners. Though the investment at
this point was relatively minimal, the work was hard, usually too much for one
man to handle. The gold in the stream beds would usually be gathered rather
quickly, leaving the miner to search for the vein that had fed the creek bed
findings, or move on.
When searching for the feeder vein, more men would be needed
to tunnel into the earth, find and transport the ore. Here more capital was
needed as well and miners often sold out their claim to larger operations who’d
then oversee the extraction of the ore, delivering it to stamp mills, where
they’d crush the large rocks, and eventually to the smelters where the gold
would be extracted from the other telluride minerals. Sometimes these minerals
proved more valuable or plentiful than the gold. Many once gold mines evolved into
silver mines, or even lead, zinc, or copper mines.
Though many advertisements lured folks to the gold mines
with promises of nuggets lying on the ground like apples falling from trees, that
was far from the case. Mining towns of the old west were some of the roughest
places, Tombstone,
Deadwood, Telluride. In many of those places it wasn’t the miners causing
trouble, it was those striving to ‘make it rich’ by relieving the miners of
their hard-found gold.
In March of 2013 Inheriting
a Bride will be released by Harlequin Historicals. The story is about Kit
Becker who travels to Colorado
to claim the gold mine she’d inherited from her grandfather. There she not only
meets Clay Hoffman, her grandfather’s partner, but learns family secrets that
tear her apart. I dedicated that book to Chris Ralph, a man I will most likely never
meet in person, but after I stumbled across his blog, he and I conversed through email and phone conversations, and he taught me more about
gold mining than I could have ever hoped to learn.
