Yuba Goldfields - History

History

They were created during the California Gold Rush. The first Yuba-area miners panned for gold in stream beds in the valley but within a decade large-scale industrial processes replaced solitary prospectors. Mining companies moved from the valley floor into the Sierra Nevada foothills, where miners blasted gravel hillsides with high-pressure jets of water—a process called hydraulic mining. After the miners extracted gold in long wooden sluices, they dumped the gravel back into the mountain valleys. Rivers and streams carried the flood of sediment—called slickens—down to the Sacramento Valley. Upwards of 685,000,000 cubic feet (19,400,000 m3) of debris was deposited in the Yuba River. The mine waste carried by the Yuba River ended up raising the riverbed (by up to 100 feet (30 m) in some cases), causing floods that buried farms east of the town of Marysville with gravel, mud, as well as mercury and arsenic (byproducts of the mining process). As the Yuba River is a tributary of the Sacramento River, much of that debris then found its way to the San Francisco Bay. In Sacramento, the I Street Bridge had to be raised twenty feet (6 m). Lawsuits by farmers curtailed hydraulic mining in 1883, but the gravel remained behind in the Yuba Goldfields.

In 1893, the California Debris Commission began to dredge the Yuba near Marysville to mitigate the environmental damage, and piled the gravel along the river's banks, creating the irregular hills seen today. The dredgers also created over 200 ponds, which are fed by a network of underground rivers, which in turn were formed due to the porosity of the ground. The water in these ponds is usually clear blue, the impurities having been filtered by the gravel.

In the twentieth century, a series of mining companies reprocessed the slickens, extracting gold that was increasingly difficult to separate from the gravel. Even though the ore had already been processed, it was the principal source of gold in California for some time. By the 1970s, it was economically impossible to retrieve any more gold, and the debris became a source of aggregate, an essential ingredient of concrete. It has been estimated that up to $15 billion worth of aggregate lies within the goldfields, although the mining industry disputes this figure.

The environmental damage caused by the dredgers is enormous. The top 150 feet (46 m) of many square miles was turned upside-down. The soil and the rocks were separated with the rocks stacked on top of the soil.