| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Hydraulic Mining in California: A Tarnished Legacy. By Powell Greenland. (Spokane: Arthur H. Clark, 2001. 320 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendixes, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. $42.50.)

In March 1853, near Nevada City, California, miner Edward E. Matteson attached a metal nozzle to a canvas hose and blasted water against the ancient channel of a Yuba River tributary, forever changing placer gold mining technology. In Hydraulic Mining in California, Powell Greenland provides the first monograph-length treatment of this, the "only true invention of a completely new method of mining to be introduced in the California gold fields" (p. 31). 1

After the initial phase of the gold rush, after the easiest to remove stream-bottom gold was found, miners turned to the deeper gravels along the river banks. Hydraulic mining, perfected in the 1850s, used a jet stream of water to cut down the banks, which then flowed into sluice boxes where the gold nuggets and flakes were washed out of the gravels. Because the Sierra foothills provided a perfect landscape for the water driven process, gold production by hydraulics rapidly increased during the 1860s-1870s. Corporations, not the romanticized miner, would dominate hydraulic mining. . . .

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