Dredge Number Four

What is a Dredge? It is a huge machine that digs up the creeks to find the gold in them. This is the last one to operate in Dawson City, actually until the 1950's, when it sank to the bottom of the lake. Lake? Creek? They dammed up the creeks and these dredges floated on the lakes that were created. Large companies came in after the gold was actually discovered via an individual man and his pan.


These piles of stone were created by the dredge "spitting out" the unwanted stones. If you go back to the gold mine picture in the last page of the blog, and enlarge it, you will see the worm-like things at the bottom of the picture. It's these piles of rejected stones. They are everywhere.


Sometimes there are ponds created by the stones. There's no soil, so not many plants.



These next 2 pictures kind of describe how the dredge works. Digs it up. Drops it on the sluices, and then out the unwanted stones go on the conveyor on the back.





These are the buckets, still buried in the mud from when it sank in the 1950's. It remained untouched and buried for 30 or so years until they decided to restore it as a museum.


Some of the gears.


The gravel was put on this, the large stones ended up on the conveyor and discarded.


Everything else went down the sluices. The gold is much heavier than the stones (about 20 times heavier) and was trapped in the sluices. They had material (like burlap...today they use artificial turf) to catch the small flakes of gold, and hopefully lots of nuggets.



More gears.


Handles to operate all the gears.


Front of the dredge.


Rear of the dredge where the discarded stone came off the conveyor. Now you know all about gold mining. Don't forget to add in the permafrost...all the gravel was frozen...no gold unless you could thaw it (even in the summer), or the -20 to -60 degree winters with many feet of snow.