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U.S. History 1877-Present Videos 173 videos
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U.S. History 1877-Present 5: Hydraulic Mining 208 Views
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Description:
Today we're learning about hydraulic mining, which was all the rage in the mid 1800s. Unfortunately it caused a lot of slickens, which meant slim pickens for farmers, which quickened legislation that eventually banned its use. Womp womp.
Transcript
- 00:00
Edited at https://subtitletools.com When
- 00:00
When
- 00:05
most people think of gold mining,
- 00:07
they imagine some guy named Toothless [Toothless panning for gold in river]
- 00:09
Sam peacefully panning in
Full Transcript
- 00:11
a crystal-clear California river.
- 00:13
If Sam sifts a nugget
- 00:15
from the water, he does a happy dance.
- 00:17
And unless he steps on a snail, [boot avoids squishing snail]
- 00:19
nature remains unscathed.
- 00:21
Of course, gold mining
- 00:23
might have started with guys like Toothless
- 00:25
Sam, but, uh, people quickly
- 00:27
figured out that panning for gold was like
- 00:29
looking for a needle in a haystack.
- 00:31
So folks started innovating techniques
- 00:33
like hydraulic mining.
- 00:35
And wouldn't ya know it? It worked like a charm.
- 00:37
Over three decades,
- 00:39
it yielded a cool 100,000,000 dollars'
- 00:41
worth of gold, which is worth about
- 00:43
7.5 billion dollars today.
- 00:45
Man, they're lucky they didn't
- 00:47
summon Smaug.
- 00:49
But despite all this
- 00:51
glittering success, the government put an end to the
- 00:53
gold party. Now why would the government
- 00:55
do something like that? Sheer
- 00:57
meanness? Bling envy? Well, probably
- 00:59
not. See, hydraulic mining
- 01:01
blasts water at rock or sedimentary
- 01:03
material to get it moving,
- 01:05
and then runs that water-sediment
- 01:07
flurry through gold separating devices.
- 01:09
Sounds nice and clean,
- 01:11
right? Like a high-powered shower
- 01:13
that gets you gold. Where can we buy
- 01:15
one of those? Sharper Image, perhaps?
- 01:17
Well, the problem is that hurling
- 01:19
high-pressured water at any land
- 01:21
scape, even one made of solid
- 01:23
rock, causes serious
- 01:25
erosion. Then there's the small
- 01:27
problem of millions of tons of water,
- 01:29
gravel, and sand streams
- 01:31
ready to run but with nowhere to go.
- 01:33
Well, thanks to hydraulic mining all over
- 01:35
the West, water systems got, uh,
- 01:37
a little scrambled. And a few
- 01:39
were probably even poached. For instance,
- 01:41
California's Sacramento area had
- 01:43
streams and rivers that were filled with
- 01:45
gravel and rocks. You know what
- 01:47
Pocahontas likes most about rivers?
- 01:49
Besides the whole, uh,
- 01:51
"can't step in the same river twice" thing?
- 01:53
She likes to have,
- 01:55
uh, what's that called? Yeah,
- 01:57
water. Yeah, water
- 01:59
in rivers. Well, waterways were
- 02:01
diverting, overflowing, and being
- 02:03
halted in their tracks. This
- 02:05
clogging-slash-overflowing situation
- 02:07
deprived people of water
- 02:09
and made it way harder to
- 02:11
navigate the area by boat, or
- 02:13
uh, pool noodle. All
- 02:15
the flooding that was happening wasn't
- 02:17
too cool either. A flood is
- 02:19
bad enough on its own, but these floods were
- 02:21
particularly destructive for farmers
- 02:23
because the waters were filled with silt and
- 02:25
sand. And you know the old saying:
- 02:27
"when a fellow's farm floods with sandwater,
- 02:29
he might as well become an accountant."
- 02:31
Uh, we might have made that
- 02:33
one up here at Shmoop, but it proves
- 02:35
the point. Yeah. Anyway, many farmers'
- 02:37
farmers quickly became unfarmable
- 02:39
after being doused in the
- 02:41
silty water known as slickens.
- 02:43
There's an appropriately
- 02:45
disgusting name, if we ever heard one.
- 02:47
Well, farmers started giving their local elected
- 02:49
officials an earful and filing
- 02:51
lawsuits left in right. Well, finally,
- 02:53
in 1884, federal circuit court
- 02:55
judge Lorenzo Sawyer mandated
- 02:57
that the mining industry stop
- 02:59
discharging its debris.
- 03:01
In plain English, he said,
- 03:03
"Hydraulics are off the table,
- 03:05
boys." With the Sawyer
- 03:07
injuction, the industry collapsed
- 03:09
and hydraulic mining became a thing of the past.
- 03:11
So the government didn't step in
- 03:13
to crush an industry just for the fun of it.
- 03:15
They stepped in to protect peoples'
- 03:17
private property. And even though
- 03:19
this wasn't pure environmental protection,
- 03:21
it planted the seeds for laws to
- 03:23
come. Also, it put Toothless
- 03:25
Sam back in the game, and somewhere,
- 03:27
he did a toothless jig.
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