Dredge #4

Sorry! I am posting several blogs while I have Internet and this one is out of order! We did this while in Dawson City!

We took a tour of Dredge #4 this morning – out on Bonanza Creek – the largest dredge still in existence. The guy (I almost called him a kid but that made me feel too old!) that did the tour loved history and did a great job explaining how the dredge worked and how world events impacted the gold rush.

The front of  Dredge #4 - the buckets attached to this end

The buckets that dug the gravel

The back where the left over gravel was "spit" out

The control room with levers and the only heater!

The dredges were actually, boats that floated in water, dug up the gravel, agitated and filtered it, then washed out the gold. Men cleared the land ahead of it and as the dredge moved slowly along it dug out the gravel, which made a deep hole that filled with water that they recycled after washing the gold dust from the gravel. As it moved along the water just filled in the new hole and the discarded gravel, called “tailing's,”  made hills on each side of the dredge.

Amazingly, it only took 4 men to run the dredge. Special employees of the mining company came and picked up the gold dust in locked buckets. Gold flakes and dust were more valuable than nuggets and the “sieve” prevented bigger pieces of gold from being washed into the sluices. They were just thrown out with the tailing's. During the Nixon era our country went off the gold standard and the price of gold escalated. Some prospectors then got rich from staking claims on the hills of tailing's left over by the mining companies!


There are current reality TV shows that document mining in and around Dawson City.

We came back and ate delicious tacos at "Aloha Tacos!"