Destruction Caused by the Gold Miners To sa

To say that the gold miners in California of the 1800s had a devastating impact on the land is a great understatement. As Robert Kelly says in his book, Gold vs Grain, "They tore up the underbrush, stripped off overburden, and even uprooted soaring pines in their search for gold." The miners pitched camp anywhere and everywhere, never mindful of the precious and fragile environment which they encountered. All forms of their mining contributed to the destruction of woodland, including sluices, booming, placer mining, dredging, drift mining, mercury and chloride processing, and hydraulic mining. Even their sheep took a toll on the vegetation of California.

Droughts and floods increased because of miners' damage to the land. Miners would callously divert streams for their use and then dump their tailings in them, clogging the remaining mountain streams with mud. They erected log and earthen dams to curtail the problem of waste control, but they knew little about the ecology of the land and did more harm than good. During the 1800s, about 75 million troy ounces of gold were taken from California, but in the process the miners carved deep permanent wounds in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Of all the methods of mining, hydraulic caused the most damage, ruining farms and orchards, clogging streams and rivers, and even destroying entire cities. Whether hydraulic or not, mining coupled with the environmental effects of min

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during this era for the containment of chlorine gas were primitive and often leaked chlorine gas, and the mercury vapor was probably one of the first forms of air pollution besides the smoke from fires they burned at night so they could work around the clock. Most gravel-mining pits had the richest ore at the lower levels; thus, large amounts of water were used in a single pit. The demand for water led to the construction of enormous flumes and later pipes. At first, miners mined near rivers, then they carried dirt to the streams, and eventually they built troughs to carry water to wherever they were mining. The process of using wooden troughs led to the use of canyons as natural waterways. The water traveled down a canyon, eroding it further along the way, then entering large sluices where the miners were working. This method created a constant deafening roar because the sluices often measured 3 to 6 feet wide, 3 feet deep and sometimes hundreds of feet long. An example of this practice in 1868 was the Little York Mining and Water Company based in San Francisco, from where in Bear Basin the miners had constructed hundreds of acres and 50 miles of ditches. The building of flumes and ditches riddled the land with canals
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3893
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)