The World Turned Upside Down: a history of mining on Coal Creek and Woodchopper Creek, Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve
Beckstead D. 2003. The World Turned Upside Down: a history of mining on Coal Creek and Woodchopper Creek, Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. National Park Service. Fairbanks, Alaska
Gold mining is an important part of the cultural and natural history of Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. The Preserve's enabling legislation specifically identifies it as one of the reasons Congress deemed the area worthy of protection as a national preserve. Early exploration and discoveries in the vicinity predate those made in the Klondike by as much as a decade or more. For many years, early miners confined their operations to working small placer deposits. Here they used a variety of means, including drift mining (digging a shaft down to bedrock then following the "pay streak" horizontally), open cut methods (working a cut laterally) and hydraulicking (using water, under pressure, to wash gold bearing gravels through a sluice). Because they lacked the capital to bring in the equipment necessary to exploit their claims to their fullest extent, many simply continued working their claims with fairly simple tools, scratching out enough money to pay for a grubstake that allowed them to keep mining the following season. In some cases, solitary miners worked over the winter, stockpiling the "pay dirt" until the following summer, when water again flowed, allowing them to run it through a sluice recovering the gold. With the exception of activities around Dawson on the Canadian side of the border, and on Mastodon and Deadwood Creeks, south of Circle, mining on the upper Yukon River basin continued in this manner until the early 1930s. Small operators, working several claims by hand, season after season.
- Type
- Book
- Authors
- Beckstead, D
- Date of Issue
- 2003
- Publisher
- National Park Service
- Units
- HIST , YUCH
- Keywords
- ehistory, Mining, Yukon-Charley Rivers