Quote:
Originally Posted by on2wheels52
They work for $36?
Dave, who is paying x2 (or more) for specimen value? Are you talking about nuggets & placer gold?
Jim
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I talked to a guy back in the 70's who had been panning and sluicing for Gold on the Middle fork of the Yuba for 20 years. He said the biggest nugget he ever found was 3/4 of an OZ..Big Gold nuggets are very rare and are worth many times the bullion price..Back when Gold wa s$300 an OZ a one oz Gold nugget would be worth north of $2000.00
There Is 2 types of Gold mining Hard Rock where you follow a vein and Placer mining...there are various types of Placer mining..digging in the current stream bed ..using a pan, sluice or dredge, Hydraulic mining where a big stream of water from a hose or pipe is used to wash away a mountain (where a Tertiary stream bed once flowed), the gravels are run through sluice boxes. This type of mining was basically outalwed about 1870 as it was very destructive. Finally there is Drift mining in which a tunnel is dug into the mountain along the pay streak. Most of the commercial Placer mining ceased at the begining of WW2, hwever there were a very few mines that never really ceased even if they were run on a very limited scale.. The 16 to 1 in Alleghany, CA is one of the more famous..and produced som big nuggets.
The biggest nuggets to come out of CA during the Gold Rush weighed some 500 Troy Pounds.. Theywere found in the Chico area of CA. Other big nuggets came out of the North Fork of the Yuba River..The little town of La Porte CA in Sierra County shipped some 60M USD of Gold at $20 a Troy oz during the Gold Rush...This equates to about 3,000,000 oz of Gold. Slate Creek was one of the biggest producers in the area.
What is ironic is that the 49er's would be digging on a claim, hear about a strike somewhere else and abandon their claim for the new diggings without playing their current claim out. Combine that with overlapping claims and there is still virgin dirt to be dug..Now if the Chinese came in you can just about forget about finding any Gold as they would literally use a toothbrush to sweep the bedrock..So there is a real potential of some really big nuggets being left in CA.