The Gold Mines Of Beale Air Force Base - Part 2 of 2

Part 1 of the series on the gold mines of Beale AFB can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i1F-_541mc

By the fall of 1850 every ravine and gully in California’s Sierra foothills was filled with miners working their forty-by-thirty-foot claims. Every road and path was crowded with itinerant miners wandering from place to place looking for a claim.

The land at Beale was no exception. Considerable “free” gold was found in the ravines that come off of Albion Hill (the large hill behind Beale’s housing area), but the place most worked was on the east side of the hill in an area called Albion Ravine. The rock and earth dams that, as you saw in the video, remain today indicate the fervor with which these early miners pursued their golden dreams…

It is impossible to know how many of them hit pay dirt. A claim was regarded as “breaking even” when it produced “only” an ounce of dust (fifteen dollars) a day. Anything less was “Chinaman’s diggings” since only a frugal Asian could make enough to eat on less than an ounce a day, gold rush prices being what they were.

The mysterious mounds of earth around the flight line at Beale Air Force Base are supposed to be the result of Chinese miners’ diggings. Each hill is said to be what a Chinese miner mined in one day.

Some of these miners set up arrastras and, supposedly, some of these arrastras can still be seen today at Beale AFB or the grounds of the former Camp Beale, but we were unable to locate any.

The Good Hope Mine was the most recently worked mine as it was worked intermittently up through the 1950s. The shaft at the Good Hope Mine dropped down for approximately one hundred feet, with a drift to the north of about fifty or sixty feet.

Peggy Bal interviewed a former employee of the mine, Aden Wright Jr., and he recalled, “There were three of us working there. Mr. Carder was the boss, and a man by the name of Massey was doing the mining. Mr. Carder fell down the shaft and was killed. The mine wasn’t worked for a long time after that.”

The above information is sourced from Peggy Bal’s book, “Pebbles in the Stream: A History of Beale Air Force Base and Neighboring Areas”

*****

All of these videos are uploaded in HD, so I’d encourage you to adjust your settings to the highest quality if it is not done automatically.

You can see the gear that I use for mine exploring here: https://bit.ly/2wqcBDD

As well as a small gear update here: https://bit.ly/2p6Jip6

You can see the full TVR Exploring playlist of abandoned mines here: https://goo.gl/TEKq9L

Several kind viewers have asked about donating to help cover some of the many expenses associated with exploring these abandoned mines. Inspired by their generosity, I set up a Patreon account. So, if anyone would care to chip in, I’m under TVR Exploring on Patreon.

Thanks for watching!

*****

Growing up in California’s “Gold Rush Country” made it easy to take all of the history around us for granted. However, abandoned mine sites have a lot working against them – nature, vandals, scrappers and various government agencies… The old prospectors and miners that used to roam our lonely mountains and toil away deep underground are disappearing quickly as well.

These losses finally caught our attention and we felt compelled to make an effort to document as many of the ghost towns and abandoned mines that we could before that colorful niche of our history is gone forever. But, you know what? We enjoy doing it! This is exploring history firsthand – bushwhacking down steep canyons and over rough mountains, figuring out the techniques the miners used and the equipment they worked with, seeing the innovations they came up with, discovering lost mines that no one has been in for a century, wandering through ghost towns where the only sound is the wind... These journeys allow a feeling of connection to a time when the world was a very different place. And I’d love to think that in some small way we are paying tribute to those hardy miners that worked these mines before we were even born.

So, yes, in short, we are adit addicts… I hope you’ll join us on these adventures!

#ExploringAbandonedMines
#MineExploring
#AbandonedMines
#UndergroundMineExploring

Видео The Gold Mines Of Beale Air Force Base - Part 2 of 2 канала TVR Exploring