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If the dam and flume be commenced too early in the season, they may be carried off before they are finished; and it frequently happens that they are destroyed in the fall just when the miners are commencing to reap the reward of their summer's labor. River-mining has many disadvantages, as compared with other branches of mining.
These disadvantages, and the exhaustion of most of the river-diggings in the state, have almost put an end to river-mining in California. In a few cases, extensive fluming enterprises have proved profitable; but, as a general rule, river-mining in this state has cost more than it has produced.
River-mining is now never undertaken by an individual, but always by large associations, generally called "fluming companies," sometimes composed of miners exclusively, sometimes of miners and all the principal business-men living near the place where the work is to be done.
River-mining is mining for gold in the beds of rivers, below low-water mark. The only practicable method of doing this is by damming the stream, and taking the water out of its bed, in a ditch or flume. It has been proposed by persons who never saw the mines, to get the gold by dredging, or with a diving-bell; but such schemes are absurd in the eyes of miners.
The work of river-mining can be done only during the summer and fall, while the water is low, and while the miner can have confidence that it will not rise. It may be as low in January as in August, but the winter is the season of rains; and when the flood comes, it sweeps dams, flumes and every thing before it.
The shaft is dug by one man in the hole, and one or two are employed at a windlass in hauling up the dirt. Mining-shafts in placer diggings are rarely over one hundred feet deep; but one was dug in Trinity county to the depth of six hundred feet, for the purpose of prospecting, but it found neither pay-dirt nor the bed-rock. River-Mining.
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