FEBRUARY 2025 Ghost Towns and History of Montana Newsletter From The Daily Missoulian, Feb. 4, 1909 Bannack– Part 4 Accessed via: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ Bannack placer mining picked up again in the spring of 1866. Because water was needed to flush out the placer deposits, the first miners in the gulch ignored gravel that was too far from the creek. Now, ditches were built to extend the workings beyond the streambed. Prospectors could access more rich earth by sluicing the hillside and upper gulches. Gold mining continued for several more years. But miners working manually couldn’t reach the deposits on the bedrock, which were anywhere from 10 to 50 feet beneath the surface. A mere sluicebox and shovel wouldn’t do. According to Dave Alt: “During the spring of 1895, the first gold dredge in the United States, an electrically driven model, started work at Bannack. Another followed in the fall of the same year, and two more machines arrived in 1896.” Eventually, five dredges labored in Bannack. A gold dredge sits on a barge and uses a long chain of steel buckets mounted on a conveyor belt to scoop the gravel bed of the stream down to bedrock. The gravel is then flushed through sluices to recover the gold, and the leftover gravel is dumped. As it bites its way along, the barge floats on a small lake of its own making. Ponds created by this method of mining are still visible on Bannack’s south side. It didn’t take long for the dredges to remove most of the remaining deep placer gold from the Grasshopper Creek area. In some places bedrock was too deep even for the dredges to Wagons of a by-gone era stand silent in Bannack (Photo by Rick and Susie Graetz)
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