Know anything about gold mining?

[44minimum]

I have no idea what part of the forum to put this question in, but at least you can melt gold and cast bullets with it if you have the desire to. What I'm wondering is, how many ounces of gold could you expect get out of a vein of quartz? Like, if you have 10 pounds of quartz that you had knocked off of a rock wall and it was pretty rich in gold, how many ounces of gold could you expect to get from it? I know that it's going to vary depending on 145455687 different factors, but what would be a realistic range?

[waksupi]

You would need an assay to know for sure. I've see what I thought was rich rock, and it turned out to be pretty skimpy.

For a test, pulverize a weighed amount, and then wash it out in a pan. Then weight the gold, and you should have a ball park idea.

[W.R.Buchanan]

I would think yo could ask the Gold Rush guys on the Discovery Channel. I bet they could tell you.

If you do watch you will see every concievable thing that you shouldn't do, so it would be a good place to start.

I have wanted to do it for my entire life and I hope to at least get to try it for real once before I croak.

Randy

[Love Life]

I would send it in to be assayed.

[44minimum]

The reason I'm asking is that I'm going to be writing a story about an old man and his grandson going gold mining, finding a vein rich enough in gold that it would set them both up for life if they lived rather modestly. On their way to the assay office, they are ambushed, the old man is nearly killed and his grandson and the gold are kidnapped and gone. He wakes up and sets out to get both of them back.

The story will be set sometime around 1900 or so in Alaska. I was wondering if they had 40 or 50 pounds of really rich quartz, would that be enough to last them?

[Frank46]

There used to be a show on the outdoor channel with two brothers who did panning, dredging and some hard rock mining. Darned if I can remember the show name. They used to take a bunch of folks up to their place on cripple creek for a few weeks and they could mine using dredges, panning and sluce boxes on the beaches. Sometimes you could see the show late at night or in the wee hours. Hope this helps. Frank

[geargnasher]

There are plenty of books out there on hard rock mining. I've read a pile of them myself on mining in the San Juans of Colorado. We have a house within a couple of miles of some of the richest hard rock mines in the world, one of which just got reopened. As I recall, the Camp Bird mine had been worked for silver and was considered to be close to exhaustion when somebody bought it for a song based on a gold hunch. He made a fortune on several tons of spent tailings that hadn't been checked for gold. The gold was in a compound form, telluride I think, that you wouldn't recognize it as gold by looking. It took many tons even of that stuff to make a fortune in 1900 dollars, I'd say that even the richest quartz vein will only yield a few ounces per ton, most decent, profitable ore not even an ounce. There are extremely rare lodes that have an occasional pure nugget in them every once in a while, but most of those are so rare as to be in museums. If you need some documentable facts, go to your local library and skim through some books on the subject, facts such as ore yields per ton from various mines from 130 years ago are easy to find. Something else to consider about the timeline of your story is the value of gold around 1900. Many mines went broke sometime in the mid 1890s due to the crash of gold prices when the Gold Act expired and the mint quit buying contracted amounts per year (or something like that, memory ain't what it used to be). Anyway, gold wasn't worth mining from quartz by an individual in 1900.

Gear

[waksupi]

The reason I'm asking is that I'm going to be writing a story about an old man and his grandson going gold mining, finding a vein rich enough in gold that it would set them both up for life if they lived rather modestly. On their way to the assay office, they are ambushed, the old man is nearly killed and his grandson and the gold are kidnapped and gone. He wakes up and sets out to get both of them back.

The story will be set sometime around 1900 or so in Alaska. I was wondering if they had 40 or 50 pounds of really rich quartz, would that be enough to last them?

Considering the price of gold at that time, they would need a bit more. They could have blown through that amount in San Francisco in a month.

[starmac]

There used to be a show on the outdoor channel with two brothers who did panning, dredging and some hard rock mining. Darned if I can remember the show name. They used to take a bunch of folks up to their place on cripple creek for a few weeks and they could mine using dredges, panning and sluce boxes on the beaches. Sometimes you could see the show late at night or in the wee hours. Hope this helps. Frank

Sounds like you are talking about the guys that started GPOA, iirc the old man died off, but the boys still run it I think, as far as I know you can still go work the cripple creek mine or off the beach, which ever you like the best. I had an uncle that went twice and brought back enough gold to pay for his trips (vacations).

[44minimum]

Good information. Thanks guys. Looks like I've got some more thinking and considering to do before I start writing.

[Frank46]

Think the show was called gold fever. Frank

[Sergeant Earthworm]

The amount of gold contained in ore is measured in grams or ounces per ton (one troy ounce equals about 31 grams). One ounce per ton of ore would be a very good grade of ore, more typical is something on the order of 10-15 grams per ton. Unless somebody has a lot of money behind them it is almost impossible to turn a profit with conventional mining for gold or any other metal because high grade ore is very rare these days. Industrial mining operations turn a profit with lower grades of ore (about 10 grams or less per ton) because they are processing dozens or hundreds of tons of ore daily. Unless your fellows were/are extremely blessed, the amount of gold in ten pounds of ore would be measured in fractions of a gram.

I only happen to know this because I grew up in a mining area in Colorado.

[W.R.Buchanan]

Yes Gold Fever is on usually on Saturday mornings on the Outdoor Channel which Mr Massey founded and his sons now own and run.

Not a bad result for digging around in the dirt. I wish I owned a TV channel.

Randy

[terraformer]

I spent 18 months in my youth near Paradise CA sleucing/panning for gold. Two summers and a winter. Lived in a hole in the ground, drank water straight from the creek. All of that backbreaking work yielded me... wait for it.... 1.4 oz. Sold an ounce to a dentist in Chico and made a pendant with the rest. Good memories now, but couldn't make a living from it.

[Plate plinker]

GOOOOLLLLLLD FEEEVEEERR......
What a fun show.

I tried a little panning in Alaska for an hour or two with the wife. One gets some real appreciation for what the old timers did way back when. That water was frigid.

[wv109323]

In about 1989 I escorted some South Africans that were in the Gold Mining business. Their ratio of profitable mining at that time was 1 gram of gold for 10 tons of ore mined.
Another thing that I remember was that the miner's work clothes were washed at the mine site and the waste water was screened for gold dust.

[bucklind2]

Just watching Gold Rush on DC it looks like a lot of work for not a lot of reward.

[sdcitizen]

Working at a gold mine we consider high grade now a days to be tenth ounce per ton gold. But historic mines in the black hills area did have some veins as high as 3 ounce per ton, with one that may be coming back on line in the coming years. I believe one of our canadian mines had a pocket of quartz gold in the neighborhood of 30% gold, they have a 400lb chunk of that in the main office, came from pretty deep down, but it does exist.

[Pb2au]

LOL, from what I have read, gold mining seems to be the slowest way ever to get rich.

[Wal']

Depends where you're looking, check out this latest find down here in Oz.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-17/lucky-prospector-strikes-huge-gold-nugget/4470016