The Chisana Story

[Jim_Alaska]

On 8/31/2018 at 5:25 PM, Bob(AK) said:

Very good Steve, I remember the party line. Also started with a 3” dredge bought from your store around ‘79 or ‘80, was on an inner tube.

This post brought back memories. It was probably around the same time frame, maybe a bit earlier in 1978. I bought my first dredge, a Keene 2 1/2" on an inner tube from Steve's store.

Wanna hear something crazy? I still have that dredge and it is not because it was little used, I have used it to death and everything is still original, with the exception of the inner tube.

I have used it as a dredge and also made temporary conversions to be used as a high banker. The old engine still runs strong.

[IdahoPeg]

Love the story and pictures! Must have been a wonderful time, for sure!?

[Steve Herschbach]

More on "Booming" from the U.S. Bureau of Mines I.C. 6786 (1934)....

Booming

Booming utilizes the increased cutting and transporting power of water under flood conditions. As pointed out, water is stored in a reservoir and then released, flowing for relatively short periods. At the beginning of the season, when high water prevails, the booms may occur frequently, and each one may last relatively long. As the supply of water fails booms occur less often until finally there is not enough water to operate. Booming is the most important type of ground-sluicing. A much larger duty can be obtained per unit of water by booming than by other forms of ground-sluicing. The increased volume of water carries boulders into the sluice that otherwise would have to be moved by hand or by power and breaks down the banks against which a smaller stream would be ineffective. Larger sluice boxes must of course be used when booming than when utilizing only the natural flow of the stream. Booming is used in running development cuts as well as in strictly mining work. Of the three strictly mining operations listed under this head a side cut was used in two and an overcast at the end of the pit in the third.

The average number of booms per day at the five mines (excluding Ravano) ranged from 2 to 24. The duration of booms was 1½ to 30 minutes.

The duration of a boom is governed by the size of reservoir and the flow of water. The capacity of the reservoir should be governed by the character of the ground. In heavy, rocky ground a short period with a correspondingly larger surge is more effective than a longer period with a smaller stream. In other ground, such as that at the Camp Bird mine, longer periods of washing, with correspondingly less water, give the best results. Reservoirs usually are constructed by building a dam across a narrow part of the stream bed or canyon and backing the water up behind it. Ordinarily, earth dams with a board facing on the upstream side are used. Reservoirs with capacities of ½ to 1¾ acre-feet (table 7) are used at the mines listed. Automatic gates have a double advantage in that no labor is required to operate them and the booming in the pit can continue 24 hours each day. Automatic gates are shown in figure 7. Although the water is not as effective when unattended as when the miners are on shift it accomplishes considerable work during off hours.

Figure 7: Automatic gate boom dam

[Leighton]

I am at work and waiting and biting my nails for the next episode! Game of thrones ain’t got nothing on the story of Steve!

[Bob(AK)]

Great sketch of the boom dam

[Steve Herschbach]

I noted earlier that the first metal detectors I owned were before ground canceling capability was available. The detectors were next to useless for gold prospecting, and for a long time I only used a detector to hunt coins and jewelry.

The first commercially available detector with ground balancing capability was the White's Coinmaster 5 Supreme. I purchased one of these new units in 1976. It was a very low frequency detector, and I found to my dismay that it really liked nails. One nice thing about the very old detectors was that they pretty much ignored nails, They Coinmaster 5 loved them and I was finding so many nails I took a dislike to the detector. But the depth of detection was amazing for the detectors of that time.

I sold it to a friend who was a heavy equipment type miner. He found a gold nugget weighing several ounces with it at his mine. This should have clued me in, but once again I chalked it up to being a lucky find of a very large nugget. The kind that were lacking in my nearby hunting grounds. I went on about my dredging, sluicing, and panning.

Finally in the 1980's I was selling Compass detectors in addition to White's, and I hauled a Compass X-80 up to my claims on Stetson Creek and gave it a try. It had the capability, as my tests on smaller gold nuggets revealed it was pretty good. We were selling them now as nugget detectors, and some finds were being made with them. Unfortunately, I was not lucky enough to find any gold with the X-80 the one time I gave it a try. And it just reinforced my feeling about detectors as being a waste of time.

Steve Herschbach with Compass Gold Scanner Pro

It was not until June 18, 1989 that I decided to give metal detecting for gold another try. Compass had repackaged the X-80 as a nugget detector called the Gold Scanner Pro. Here is my log entry for that day:

"Went to Crow Creek and used Compass Gold Scanner Pro. Found my first gold nuggets ever with a metal detector! Two nuggets within 10 feet of each other between Area #1 and Area #2 below old tailing pile at lower end. One nugget at 9 grains and the other at 4 grains, total of 13 grains. Also found two bullets."

I COULD find gold with a metal detector! It only took me 16 years to find my first nugget with one!! I was also reading a lot about the gold nuggets being found in Australia and the western U.S. with metal detectors, and realized the technology had come up to the task while I was not paying attention. My thoughts turned to places I might do well with a metal detector, and Chisana came to mind. I did some checking, and it turned out that the daughter of one of the original group of partners married a guy who then went about buying everyone else out. That made things easier as only one person now to get permission from, and I did just that.

Plans were made and my father and I visited Gold Hill that July. I was also selling Fisher detectors along with Compass and White's. I set my father up with the new 19 kHz Fisher Gold Bug that had just come out. I was set on the machine that had already found me a couple nuggets, the Compass Gold Scanner Pro.

Bud Herschbach with original 19 kHz Fisher Gold Bug and 3-3/4" coil

We spent quite a bit of time on bedrock along Bonanza Creek before heading up to try the bench areas. We only found a few nuggets, and I now attribute this to the fact that most mining activity goes on near the water. People pan and sluice the material along the edge of the water, and dredgers work in the water. The area nearest the creek is the area receiving the most attention. One of the first things an experienced miner must do when getting into metal detecting is to lose this natural desire to stay near the water. What really makes detectors great is you need no water to find the gold, and so working away from the water actually will increase your odds of making finds overlooked by others. You have no choice in desert areas, but in stream valleys do not let the water distract you. Any exposed bedrock or material from the highest ridge on down has potential.

Bonanza Creek has several ancient stream levels high above the current creek level. These are remnants of stream deposits left high and dry as the stream eroded deeper into the valley bottom. They can often be spotted as flat areas on the valley sides above gold-bearing creeks. In some areas there is more gold in the bench deposits than in the creek itself. The problem for the oldtimers was in getting water up to these locations to work the gold deposits. Ditches many miles long were often dug to bring water along the valley walls from places father upstream to the deposits.

Bud Herschbach with original 19 kHz Fisher Gold Bug and 3-3/4" coil

The old timers usually used "giants", a term for very large water nozzles fed by pipes with water from the ditch systems to wash the gold free of the hillside gravels. Large areas could be worked in this fashion, with the material being funneled into sluice boxes running down the hill. A lot of gold was lost in these sluicing systems due to the large volumes of material being washed through the primitive boxes. However the best target for the metal detector operator is not the tailing piles, but the large areas of bedrock exposed by these operations. Nuggets lodged in cracks and crevices as the material was being washed down the hill, and small concentrations of gold in the bedrock were often missed.

The only way for the old miners to get this gold would be to tear up all the bedrock and process it. The amount of gold to be had for this extreme extra effort was not much compared to what they might get by just going on with their large scale washing operations. And so that gold is left to this day, waiting for someone to find it. Trying to scrape and pan crevices can produce some of this gold, but it is a needle in the haystack kind of search. Metal detectors are the perfect way to locate deposits of gold left in these old hydraulic workings and bench deposits.

There are bench workings all along Bonanza Creek and we started detecting some of these. We started finding gold, but it was one particular hump of a dark slate bedrock that really started producing some nuggets. My years of coin hunting paid off as I had much better detecting habits that my father. I carefully scanned every inch of the bedrock hump. The bedrock was nearly vertical at one point, and as I scanned the face I got a nice signal. My father was about 20 feet ahead of me when I yelled at him to look at the flat 4 pennyweight nugget I popped out of a crevice in the rock! It turned out to the largest nugget of the weekend, and in fact the largest nugget I had ever found up to that point prospecting for gold.

Results of Steve and Bud's first real nugget hunt!

Gold Found by Bud & Steve - from my notes:

Large Flat Nugget - 4 dwt 2 grain
Fat Pendant Nugget - 2 dwt 8 grain
Dad's Big Nugget - 1 dwt 5 grain
Sitting Bird Nugget - 16 grain
Chunky Nugget - 16 grain
Long Flat Nugget - 14 grain
plus others total of 11 dwt 6 grain
Grand Total 1 oz 4 dwt 12 grain

"Great weather, great gold, GREAT TRIP!"

I had a fantastic time, probably the most fun I'd ever had looking for gold. I was finally able to put my metal detecting and gold prospecting together into one activity. And now that we knew there was gold to be found at Chisana with metal detectors we were sure to be back soon.

To be continued...

Old bench workings above Bonanza Creek

[jrbeatty]

- - - also a late starter to gold detecting (mid 80's) and seriously enjoying this post - - -

[strick]

Great Story...I think you still need to write that book.. Digital stuff seems to get lost over time. The book will always be there. 

strick 

[mn90403]

Steve,

Thanks for your story.  It is well told.  I have just a few years on you having been born in 53 but the wildness was definitely still in your areas up there.  We still had a little bit of wild in North Florida at that time.

My dad spent time as a pilot in Alaska in the 50s.  Most of it was in or associated with the Navy but all of it was cargo flying.  I never did determine much of his Alaska adventures or make it there until 1986 on the Kenai for salmon.  He and my mom met out in the Pacific after the battle of Midway in the 40s.

I'll be waiting for the installments as they come in.  Do you write them offline and then copy and paste them to your forum?

Mitchel