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Updated: May 19, 2025
"I warned him about the grade he was givin' them sluice-boxes I went to him first off, didn't I?" Yankee Sam looked around for confirmation. "Do you mind I said at the time he wasn't warshin' that dirt fast enough?" "Anyhow," declared the Judge querulously, "he ought to 'a piped it off. T'were a hydraulickin' proposition. He could handle it just twice as fast at half the cost.
When we reached the top of the divide we took a south-eastern course for the famous Paint Rock country, near Shell Creek and its tributaries. Our route lay through the sage brush of the Bad Lands, and some of the party were very anxious to stop at a mountain stream and catch some trout. There were some old sluice-boxes and deserted cabins, which were very interesting to the average sightseer.
In every gulch and ravine are to be seen broken and decaying sluice-boxes. Bare, whitish-looking patches of washed-out gravel show where a "claim " has been worked over and abandoned.
After a certain number of hours' "run," the water is temporarily diverted, and the "clean-up" takes place; that is, the sluice-boxes are cleaned out, and the gold separated from the black sand and iron substances which usually remain with it. Water, therefore, is absolutely essential.
"A night or two later the old prospector's shack burned down, and the next morning he found a notice pinned to a tree near one of his sluice-boxes. It was a polite invitation for him to put distance between him and the Timanyoni district. I suppose you can put two and two together, as I did." Again Lidgerwood said: "It looks pretty bad for Hallock.
"I didn't mean anything," Banule mumbled, temporarily cowed. Bruce heard Smaltz snicker as he walked away. The sluice-boxes upon which Bruce was putting the finishing touches were his particular pride. They were four feet wide and nearly a quarter of a mile in length.
"Slumgullion" was the name given by the miners to a certain soft, half-liquid mud, formed of the water and finely powdered earth that was carried off by the sluice-boxes during gold-washing, and eventually collected in a broad pool or lagoon before the outlet.
Now, as he stood by the sluice-boxes looking their length, he allowed himself to dream for a moment of the days when the mercury, turned to amalgam, should be lying thick with gold behind the riffles; to anticipate the unspeakable happiness of telegraphing his success to Helen Dunbar.
Find followed find Sixty Mile, Miller, Glacier, Birch, Franklin, and the Koyokuk. But they were all moderate discoveries, and the miners still dreamed and searched for the fabled stream, "Too Much Gold," where gold was so plentiful that gravel had to be shovelled into the sluice-boxes in order to wash it. And all the time the Northland was preparing to play its own huge joke.
The creek caught it here and there, until, in grim irony, it seemed to bear their broken sluice-boxes and useless engines on the very Pactolian stream they had been hopefully created to direct and carry. But by some peculiar trick of the atmosphere, the perfect plenitude of that golden sunset glory was lavished on the rugged sides and tangled crest of the Lone Star mountain.
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