Gold Prospecting: Sluicing for Gold (1/2)

Of the many ways to acquire gold from nature's storehouse, sluicing is one of the most cost effective ways for the average person who does it for fun or profit. A good store bought sluice can be purchased for under $100.

You can process twenty to forty times more gold bearing gravel with a sluice than with a gold pan, and it much easier on your back. Just what is a sluice box, and where did they come from? When the forty niners first came to California, the rivers and streams had been concentrating gold for millions of years, and miners were able to get many ounces of gold a day with nothing more than their gold pans. But as more and more miners arrived from all corners of the world, the easy pickings were soon gone, as it became harder and harder to earn a living with a gold pan, especially since prices of food and supplies were five to ten times what they cost back home. Miners put in long hours in freezing water bent over panning in the streams. What they needed was a more efficient way to get the gold. And the sluice box came into being.

Original boxes were made of wood, wood was cheap, it was available and wood sluices could be built on the spot with a minimum of effort. And the biggest plus was they processed many times the gold bearing materials that a man with a pan could do in a day.

The sluice that was the most popular was the long tom. It was anywhere from twenty to forty feet long, and could keep four to six men busy shoveling gravel into it. Panners were mostly loners and were often robbed and killed by robbers or Indians, but sluicing required many men to work it and in numbers was safety. The only drawback was the sluice needed lots of water to operate efficiently. This was no problem in the Calif.
mother lode, but in semi arid areas like Southern Calif. many waterways dried up in the summer.

Today sluicing is very popular with the recreational prospector, people who mine for fun and recreation more than as a source of income, much the same as fishermen fish for fun, not for money. Most prospectors keep the gold they find as trophy's, to show their friends and family more than to sell. There are prospectors who use prospecting to supplement their income but they are the really good ones who know what they are doing.

By now I can tell you are chomping at the bit to get out there and find some gold of your own. Lets say you have spent some time panning the area you have chosen to prospect, and you have found some nice color in your test pans, so lets get to work and get some gold. To work properly a sluice box should be four inches lower at the bottom where the water empties out. I set the sluice up at home first, I set it up on a flat surface and make the front exactly four inches higher than the end, ( set it on a four inch piece of wood) then using a level I make a six inch line on the side of the sluice with a magic marker, now when I set the sluice up in the river I use the level on the side to make sure its exactly a four inch drop. The sides of the sluice are four inches tall and you want about two inches of water entering the front of the sluice.

Make sure the sluice is level side to side or it will not work properly, the level is good for this too. You will need a long handled shovel, two five gallon buckets, and a large metal scoop. You will also need an eight meshclassifying screen to remove all the larger rocks from your gold bearing gravel, these can be bought at miners supply stores ( type gold mining supplies into your search engine and you will find many places where you can get everything you need on line) The classifying screen fits into the top of the five gallon bucket, you fill the screen with dirt and shake the bucket round and round until the smaller dirt has fallen in the bucket, then throw out the rocks and do it some more times until the bucket is full.

Now carry tthe bucket to the sluice and use the scoop to dump the dirt a little at a time into the front of the sluice, too much at once and your riffles will get loaded up with black sand and your gold will wash out of the sluice. Put one scoop in and when it has washed through put in another. Running the sluice is a good job for your wife or children as it gets the whole family involved in this fun gold mining adventure.