Digging for GOLD, Fairbanks style

Books can be written about Alaska and gold, there are many. As much as I have enjoyed those stories since I was a kid, standing on the ground and imagining what winter must have been like with no modern conveniences and having to work outdoors all year long gives those stories of panning gold a new meaning.
 Fairbanks is a city built on gold and oil.  What a start in life.  Originally there were sourdough miners in small numbers panning gold out of the gravel around here.  In 1902 Felix Pedro found gold on what is now known as Pedro Creek.  He and a couple of others were nearly starving when they saw smoke on the horizon and headed down to it. On the banks of the Chena River they found Captain E.T. Barnett and the steam boat Lavelle Young.  The Captain had wrecked the boat in the shallows of the river.  He had intended to set up a trading post on the Tanana River, but couldn't get there with his boat.  Pedro told Barnett that they had found gold.  Barnett in turn sent two people down to Whitehorse with the news that there was a major gold strike.  There wasn't, but people poured in and Barnett outfitted them with supplies and equipment.   That was the beginning.  Check out this web site.

It's Saturday, July 11 and we set off to visit Gold Dredge No. 8, a tour for visitors.  We learned a lot and had good fun.  Here is the story.

The tour was a class act tourist thing. They have the last of the dredges built to strip gold from the gravel beds around Fairbanks. It is a behemoth. But in addition to letting you aboard this huge gold separator, they gave you a good understanding of how gold mining developed here and why it did.  We learned a lot about the history and methods of gold mining up here in a short time.



Miner operating a rocker box used where water was limited.

After Felix Pedro found gold, it became increasingly obvious that all the gold here was placer gold, i.e. washed in over the eons of time that this land was formed.  Initially the methods of separating gold from the gravel were panning and various forms of sluice boxes. 


Panning for gold, a demonstration

Around Fairbanks the land is a cover of soil on top of as much as 200 feet of gravel and rocks that is permanently frozen down to bedrock. The permafrost has to be melted before gold can be extracted.  During the summer, when the surface thaws out and streams are available, methods such as panning and sluice boxes were useful, but as soon as things began to freeze, gold mining stopped.  The permafrost prevented mining by simply digging up the gravel. 

Running a steam powered jenpole lift to bring ore to the surface

In spite of these difficulties, Miners started making shafts down to the rich gravel that lay close to the bedrock, thawing the permafrost by building fires and scooping out the melted material. Then they built another fire and scooped out the melted material, repeating this process over and over. They quickly learned that doing this in the summer led to disaster as the walls of the shaft they were creating caved in when the sun melted the sides. So they took to doing this in the winter. They went down as far as 35 feet this way to get below the permafrost. Then they dug lateral shafts sideways, loading buckets to bring to the surface. Shortly after this started, steam engine hoists were used to pull the loaded buckets up and carry the material off to a pile. All winter long they did this and spent the summer panning the piles of gold ore. This went on for years until people realized that they were only getting the large gold pieces and leaving gold behind.

 Two men, formed the Fairbanks Exploration Company (FEC) and set out to systematically search for gold. They brought steam hammers to the gold fields and 2-inch pipes through the permafrost and assayed the cores. They did this in a systematic fashion and developed logs that mapped out the gold deposits. All this took wood and water, both of which were in short supply. They built water pipelines and diverted water over mountain ridges and built railroads to haul equipment and wood. As you can see gold mining quit being a guy, a mule, and a pick.



Demonstration of water injectors to melt permafrost

The fields were extensive to stay ahead of dredging

To reach the gold, they stripped off the soil until they reached the top of the gravel beds. Then they pounded pipes into the gravel in square arrays of pipes that were connected to a water supply. All these water pipes were riveted iron sheet. They pumped water down into the ground until the permafrost was melted over several acres then mined it. This was enormously labor intensive. FEC decided to build dredges to "automate" the process.  These were huge floating barges that contained the ore refining machinery as well as a machine shop capable of repairing anything on the dredge.  They were built at Bethlehem Steel at Pittsburgh and disassembled there.  They were shipped to San Francisco and loaded on freighters.  From there they were shipped to Seward and loaded back onto the railroad and taken to Fairbanks.  At Fairbanks they were transferred to the local gold field railroad and taken to the gold fields.  At least 8 of them were built.  They were powered by electricity, so FEC built the largest power plant in Alaska to power them.  Since the dredge used so much water, they built a pump station in Fairbanks and a water pipeline over the mountains to the gold fields to supply the needed water.  Today the pump house is a really neat restaurant where we had an excellent dinner.

Dredge front showing bucket conveyor

Side view of front of dredge

Dredge No 8 is last one of these. Here is a link to an explanation of Dredge #8.  The front of it is a giant belt of buckets that picks up the gravel from the bottom to the top of the thawed layer. The gravel passes through a separator that washes the fines into a set of sluice boxes that run from the center to the sides of the dredge. The coarse gravel passes to the rear and is discarded by a conveyor belt to the tailings pile. This thing used 9000 gallons of water an hour. The sluice boxes worked like gold pans to separate the gold from the gravel. 

Once every two weeks, the dredge sluice boxes were cleaned. A separate crew of men disassembled and collected the gold from the sluices.  Gold collection extended to using mercury amalgamation to capture microscopic gold.

Gold ore storage boxes

The collected gold ore was put in iron boxes and stored in the company office. In 32 years, the dredge collected more than 7.5 million ounces of gold.  At today's prices that's more than $7,500,000,000!

Retort furnace used to melt gold.

The collected gold was melted and cast into bars. At that time the US was on the gold standard and gold could only be sold to the government at $35 an ounce. Here is the amazing part. After they made the gold bricks that weighed 90 lbs. each, they wrapped them in brown paper, addressed them, put postage on the package and mailed them to Fort Knox. They never lost a single brick!

Here is a water nozzle used to wash gravel loose

The other way to collect gold was to use water pressure to loosen the permafrost and some mines used the pressure developed by bringing the water over thousand foot tall mountains to wash the rock and gold loose with giant nozzles at the ends of pivoting iron pipes. We didn't learn much about this.

All this ended with World War II. During the war, all gold mining was suspended and after the war ended people went home, not to their work at the gold mines. Labor supplies dropped and operating costs became so high that they quit. They drilled holes in the dredges and sank them. The No 8 dredge was pumped out and the holes sealed so it sits in the water where it was left.

Pat striking it rich

You'll never forget how that gold looks as it appears through the gravel

After all of this, they taught us how to pan for gold. (Thanks, Glenn for your lessons. Its exactly what they did.) And we practiced on gold pokes they gave us.  We combined our fortune and bought Pat a locket to hold our gold.  It will double as a Christmas Tree ornament.

Since the Alaska Pipeline goes right through their property, they also gave us a lecture on the pipeline. That is a story for another post.

Finally, we went up on the Steele Highway to where there is a monument to Felix Pedro.  Across the street is the creed where he found gold.  You can pan on his original site, well worked over by now.  Prospector Bob gave it a try!  I am a few flakes richer now