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Updated: May 19, 2025
Icicles, as long as one's arm, formed in stalactite fashion, hung from the sluice-boxes in the small hours of the morning; but, nevertheless, aided by the light of lanterns, the work of mining went on as regularly as clockwork.
Of course, Frank Shaw was still in charge of the Wild Goose Company's interests on claim No. 15 Ophir; and he had under him about a hundred good men, opening up the claim, shoveling the pay dirt into five strings of sluice-boxes, and some of them, teamsters, carpenters, etc., daily bringing supplies from Council over the primitive roads, or doing other necessary work about the camp.
Sundry war-whoops and divers indications of activity showed that work of a very lively and energetic character was being prosecuted that afternoon on the bar; and when the sun sunk to rest behind the purple mountains, and the blue mists of evening rose in the valley, they had their sluice-boxes and "riffles" in order, and were ready to commence washing at sunrise.
And yet some of the mines on Anvil Creek even then, and with only a few men shoveling the pay dirt into the sluice-boxes, were turning out from ten to fifteen thousand dollars a day. To be sure, this was for the very few only, but, at the same time, it went to prove that the country was not a fraud.
Bruce surveyed the whole with intense satisfaction as he stood by the sluice-boxes looking down the long grade. It was his work and he knew that he had done it well. He had spared no labor to have it right nothing had been just "good enough." There was cocoa matting under the riffles of the first six boxes.
Where there are no Sunday School books boys are so apt to swear and chew tobacco and rob sluice-boxes; and once a boy begins to do that last he might as well sell out; he's bound to end by doing something bad! I knew a boy once who began by robbing sluice-boxes, and he went right on from bad to worse, until the last I heard of him he was in the State Legislature, elected by Democratic votes.
The quicksilver, thus fastened in the wood, catches particles of gold, which must be scraped off when the time for "cleaning up" comes. Double Sluices. Sluices are sometimes made double that is, with a longitudinal division through the middle, so that there are two distinct sluice-boxes side by side.
The creek is diverted so as to send a stream of water into the "head" of the sluice-boxes, and the gold, by virtue of its greater specific gravity, is caught by one or several of the contrivances the stones, gravel, and dirt being carried by the current out of the boxes, and constituting the "tailings."
The reverse was this: the earth everywhere torn and disfigured by prospectors, whose picks had produced the effect of some huge snout of swine, applied with the industry characteristic of that animal in forbidden grounds. Rude cabins were scattered about, chiefly in the neighborhood of the stream. Rockers, sluice-boxes, and sieves strewed its borders.
They have over fifty pounds of gold-dust and nuggets hidden under the floor of the old mill. "'Well, says I, 'that hadn't ought to worry you so. "'But that isn't all the story, she continued; 'we have discovered a plot on the part of Mr. Sanson to rob papa of the gold and burn the mill and sluice-boxes, to hide the crime.
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