Gold Panner's Dream

Panning works because gold is heavy. It is about nineteen times denser than water and roughly seven times denser than ordinary sand, so when a miner swirls a pan of creek gravel underwater, the light material washes over the lip and the gold settles into the bottom crease. What is left after a few minutes of tilting and shaking is a line of black sand and, with luck, a few yellow flecks. Miners called that showing color.

It was slow. A skilled man could work about fifty pans in a twelve-hour day. Within months of the 1848 discovery at Coloma, California, miners were building rockers, wooden cradles that washed far more gravel, and then long toms and sluice boxes run by whole crews. The pan stayed in every outfit anyway, because it was how you tested ground before you committed to digging it.

Most who went west for gold never found much. The pan was cheap, and it let a man keep checking.

This prospector kneels on wet rocks at the edge of a clear mountain stream, bearded, in a blue shirt and red neckerchief, tilting a pan of gold-flecked gravel. Behind him a loaded pack animal waits on the slope beside a shovel and a bucket, under dark pines and a sunlit ridge.