Pounds and Pounds of Gold: I Mined Gold at Sterling Creek Mine | Glenn Wadstein

[Music] Kable my name is Glen watch Dean and I moved up from the Salmon River search bar to California I know it's fairly close by as far as the eagle flies and I mind most of my life mining played a part in my life as far as childhood and anyways after years of mining on federal ground I had pretty well given up got done fighting the Forest Service and all the other agencies to be and gave up and moved up took the last of the money I made mining and moved up to the Applegate of McKee bridge organ and in doing so I was going to to make money I was going to build a a washing plant to mine gold with it would be cheap enough that a starting miner would be able to afford and so I built this plant and we needed a place to prove it up and fortunately there was a group of people that were mining at the Sterling mine but they they really weren't doing they were just kind of playing but it was a perfect setup for me to test my plant well after testing the plant for the day we shut off the plant and for the heck of it decided to pull the riffles and see if we gotten anything just by chance we pulled the riffles and lo and behold gold and I'm talking nuggets as big as your thumb so well needless to say that started it all and I cut a deal with the property owner and we started to get serious about money and I had a partner at the time guy by the name of George Reid he's since passed one of the best partners I ever had and him and I did the mine in there for years and then he eventually went his own way and the price of gold dropped and so I just maintained the mine on a yearly basis to cover the property owners taxes so we'd mine for a couple of days a year and I take the loss but as long as the property owner got his cut and it covered the taxes it was fine the last year that we mined was 2001 that would be I think early July 2001 was the last day of operation it was just for a short couple of days and then after that the property owner sold off the property and and I pretty well quit mining so if she's gonna fire off some of this all kind of narrate these short little clips [Music] in a mining it isn't just it isn't just panning or any of that there's an awful lot involved you have equipment you have to maintain and fuel and weld it's a whole big operation and what you do mind then you have to clean up the gold you have to separate the gold from the sand and you gotta trap it for sales it's so it's it this this shows earlier the plant a couple of the girls we had working for us and that's the plant that I built this is very early on this is the some time during the first month of operation and this is the main box and then on each side is it what you call undercurrents and that gets to find gold dust the main box there is able to swallow a rock 30 inches in diameter and you don't want to get gold dust to that kind of deal so right where the second set of jets are is a punch plate that will drop out the sand and put it in the side currents so that the fine gold will have the chance to drop out this is where were right close to the Sterling Ville cemetery and at one time there was a town called sterling Ville and had quite a few people on it I've heard in excess of 2,000 people were in that area in the town had a couple of saloons it was your basic gold rush Talent the sterling mine had been in continuous operation since the 1800s on and off it last main continuous operation was in the 1930s just before the Second World War and oddly enough we we ran into one of the guys that used to mind in those days and he was a big help that showed me what they did and where they had your plant set up this shows the surrounding hills and the road it's actually it's a very beautiful area right a little bit you see that where that road takes off to the to the left right over that little rise right here in frontier there's where the mine would be right on the rice ah that's true Griffin Lane and Sterling Creek is the junction this here show the ore body and then the overburden that covers the over body the ore body being the river rock and what we like what we do is we take off the overburden we lay the overburden off to the side take out your body and to put the overburden back where where the the hole was - here we are taking one a we had several cats do to push off the overburden then once the ore body has been pulled out then the overburden gets spread back over to make a fill and what we've done is we've took ground that was actually kind of a cliff that was surrounded by tailings and you couldn't do anything with it and what we've done we dropped the elevation of the land to make it mesh with the tailings we leveled the tailings and spread the overburden over the top of it and ended up with a big meadow so on private property there's a lot of different rules that you have to go by and also the property owner it's pretty strict on what what is to be done and not done you know he sure doesn't want to be left with a mess and that's never our intention anyways the piece of ground that were mining right there was if you could imagine a piece of flat ground with a spine in the center of it surrounded by rocks that's what it was in fact a good example was a couple of frames back you saw a little piece of ground that looked like a pyramid with a tree growing on top that's what this would have been except it was bigger no that little pyramid was actual piece of ground that they didn't mind because they used it for to hold a piece of equipment so they mined around it the piece of ground that are mining right now they had a meal set up on which is why they didn't mine it but they mined all the way around it and so it was circled with tailings and the ground is worthless you can't do anything growing you can't build on it there's nothing so once we pulled out the overburden then once we pulled out to our body then the overburden was spread over all of it it was levelled and he ended up with a nice metal so you're knocked down the tailors exactly yeah yeah yeah that's what's covering the channel the channel is the or body that we're after yeah yeah I counted a million years old oh it's the current creeks channel was almost a quarter-mile away now you can see the the little individual undercurrents each little thing is adjusted to jig to slow the water down to let the gold drop in that little punch plate that let the let the gold drop through and then those are the ripples that were made out of small railroad iron and to be very tough to be able to take the beating that went through it yeah I built there all the parts of it and everything at one point in my life I worked for a company that was up in the Arctic Circle and they have a plant called a skid plate and up in the Arctic Circle everything requires fuel has to be flown in and stuff well this particular plant has no moving parts so it doesn't need to be fuelled it doesn't need to be maintained you just put water in it and go that's why they like it up there in arc circle you don't you know this big machine here we'll take the overburden or the K leans and it was spreaded over area where we'd knock down the old-time tailings and it spreads it foot foot tick at a time this is it drag line drag line buckets [Music] well there this particular drag line is feeding the plant and no that's that's Dec ground we peel off the old over Channel and we we stockpile it and we add water to it so that it melts it down we built know we built ponds and in fact we built almost a three acre pond and it is fed by Springs and it was a coarse seasonal you know it it's drying to summertime which works out fine because that's when that's when we clean the pond so that big hole there you can see the cat started pushing dirt up there to stockpile for the next day's run what this drag line here was feeding this stuff that have been fed the day before it soaked in water overnight there shows some of the ponds yeah a 12-hour 12-hour soak melted it down pretty good now see one drags line feeds the plant in the second drag line picture right now I'm seeing two big pieces of equipment yeah there's a cab just off the side how many how many people are on on the job yes five two operators - on the plant one on the one on the cat yeah the idea is you have to move the ground and you also have to figure that when you're all done mining that things have to be cleaned up you know and so that that's figuring the cost so you've got to make enough money so that your cost of yardage did you make a profit and we made anywhere from a 15 to a 30% profit but of course it is all dependent upon the world price of gold - in the middle 90s boy the gold just the market just fell out I think this was 88 I believe now it might be 86 but yeah now gold was 460 something like that an ounce and you have to remember that $460 there's a lot different than two dates 460 dollars diesel was 35 cents a gallon back in those days yeah well will it's going to show the plant has to be fed a certain way will was shown that in the meantime this particular piece of machinery is backing up over an area that we're making a fill did at one time had been nothing but large rocks left over from the 1930s in the 1920s that has to be low bedded in anywhere goats now you can see how runny the material is because you just came out of the sluice box and it takes less than 12 hours for it to stiffen up and then you can see now he makes the fill and he can put it up to a foot thick it looks like right there he's late he made an 8 inch 8 inch pad yeah the mind bought it yeah we started out with just a dragline and somebody's old a little old cat and as we progressed we kept buying more equipment but now here's where we were talking about the guy that runs this cannon here he's not beating up pieces of mud with it he's feeding the plant and the guy that it's ready to drop the material in the plant you can't just this has to last until the bucket comes back again we do about a bucket about every 57 seconds so the guy running the cannon has to make that material last until he comes back again if that material is gone before that bucket comes back and there's nothing Washington's a plant the plant will clean itself out and you don't want that to happen so it will actually blow the gold that you've saved out so it's very important the man that runs that cannon actually runs the layout if he doesn't do a good job we lose money so basically that guy is the most important guy on the job so the water going into that lower pond be recirculated yeah yeah yeah it's all recycled absolutely oh yeah yeah we know no no no no it's all recycled nothing gets we nothing leaves the mind the growth the gold will be trapped inside the sluice box that was their talisman yeah yeah that's our talisman that's a good luck talisman oh yeah absolutely we you're gonna see that now Here I am I'm suddenly Here I am I'm cutting out the channel and I'm decking it next to where that drag line is digging I'm decking it so that when they're done with the run that I could shove it in the hole they can add some water while the crew is cleaning out this loose box and then that stuff will sit the next day and we should put in between five and seven hundred yards in that hole and so here I am I'm just putting this in it yeah the machine runs the plant was designed to run about 55 yards an hour it's about sometimes more sometimes less yeah we tried to get no less than a 6 hour run in we see you have two hours worth of maintenance while all this equipment this equipment is all very old this I mean that cat pillar is older than I am it was built in like 1952 so and the scraper the same thing was in all the equipment except the plant was very old so it required constant maintenance and we set aside 2 hours a day for maintenance and then 2 hours a day for cleanup and stuff like that so actual operations was about 6 hours a day partner yeah well the crew did the screening and stuff like that the claim the the actual cleanup took place in law in a laboratory I was a quartz vein that ran through the ran through the pit did further up on the hill about a half a mile away the the old timers had tunneled into it and extracted free gold out of it in the pit it was it turned into a sulfide telly right thing where it probably carried gold but not enough value for us to mess with quartz is a good host for gold yeah I like to name all my equipment that dental dozer there his name was Christine yeah if any of you guys have read a Stephen King you would know and then the one dragline that did had the skull on it that was Pam and then the big rubber tyred scraper that is old ugly no this is what happened we had some guys working for us and you know this may not be equipment you you can't be fooling around you have to be pretty serious about it police guys were showing up this smoking pot or drinking beer so you can't have that so my partner and I got really angry and we said to hell with it we fired all the men and hired women they were great men my favorite yeah I'll tell you they were great for the work we even had a deal where we helped him out with child care one of the ladies had children and my favorite employee was Pam that she's a redheaded woman she was the hardest working great employee great employee I ran cat and then did all the errands made supplies and stuff like that I laid out two days work a foreman and made my partner to all the physical labor oh yeah yeah now generally the last operation would be first week in July or last week in June but usually by then we're off on our other jobs yeah lack of water and and we want it we wanted two Springs to dry up because all the silt you know would start talking to spring and you've got it you can't handle wet filt no wait handled it so you have to let it harden up and then you then you can handle it you mix it with your tailings and then spread it over a ground that had previously been mined yeah it was a long day sometimes it was 12 12 and 14 hours I lived in McKee bridge this is sterling Creek so it is about 20 minutes away not not too bad but yeah he's long hours and you know and you got to do that when it's your own you know you do anything you can to make it go if there was a breakdown or something like that man you know it's time to break out the lights and start welding no we were really really fastidious about anybody being in any kind of danger absolutely absolutely deaths on that being a former logger I've experienced and there's no way that we're gonna let anybody take any chances whatsoever everything what's that no no that was equipment stayed straight straight there actually it was very old equipment it was just patched together you know I mean we literally had to patch it every day to keep it operating you know we we didn't have a lot of money this equipment literally came out of junkyards that we put it together and made it run did you notice a lot of variation one day to the next what part of the thing that you were pulling up pulling material yeah you know in two different ways in in values and in geology you can there were sand deposits that didn't throw any what they're doing here those little square things those are screens and he's screening the stand into that trash bucket and he's looking through for any little obvious nuggets and you know he pick up nuggets of stuff this fella here you're gonna see him in a minute he's taking apart the undercurrents and washing those out and and then all that will get screened and all the sand that gets screened is gonna go through another process so like I was saying it's just not to mining there's a whole lot more to just mm to gold mining then there is the actual act of mining and you have to gear up for it if you're gonna do it so he slide out a train everything was made the whole plant was designed for ease of operation easy to tear down easy to put together at first it was but after a while it was just yeah I mean I used to get excited when I find nuggets and stuff like that and then after a while it was just go good you know I made payroll yay or oh boy we can order up more fuel you know that kind of thing he's unscrewing the screen and underneath that screen is a carpet and he's gonna wash the carpet out the special carpet designed to trap gold dust and we would trap gold dust so find that if you put it on your finger and then wiped it off you would have a solid gold fingerprint yeah well he's going through it looking for little nuggets some of them were the biggest nugget we got was about the size of a golf ball walnut golf Boston like that there were some bigger ones but they generally got tore up because of the equipment Oh lots of those the gold did came on a sterling Creek kind of looked like corn flakes it was kind of flat it was really pretty very very pretty lot of character to it but back to the boring of the clean-out it got the cleanup got to be so boring but every once while I get a coin and I got a 18-49 dime once and the best thing I ever found was a 1793 Spanish rial I got it in the sluice box during Sterling Creek and I'm thinking to myself what the heck is this I took it down the road coin and this is what they told me back in the gold rush days silver was silver didn't matter who or where it came from yeah yeah now I'm gonna show you something here that's me and my big belly now I'm going to show you something here this is a special carpet I'm gonna take a little corner of this carpet and I'm going to pan it out so anyways let me finish telling you about that that Spanish reel it back in the early days of the gold rush most of the people on the west coast were Spanish so that was the predominant coinage and even and even after the gold rush for for almost a decade the money was predominantly Spanish so it was not unusual to see a Spanish rial but also to get some context the 1793 I think is a year that we Antoinette lost your head is that correct I think that matter yeah okay there you go there's 100 bucks with a gold right there left yeah all that topic talk dear yeah yeah I shook it up in that upper corner yeah plus you know I've been panning for so long I know how to move the gold around some of these old timers they could walk a nugget right out of the sand I've never been able to do that but I've seen him do it that's some of the giant corn flakes no no that's all that that's all going to go to the laboratory and you'll see what goes on there pretty soon you're gonna see right now you're gonna see right now this is uh this is just a fine gold okay and then and then she's gonna go over this is some of the coarse gold you see that larger nugget there is about this almost the size of a golf ball now that's River gold that's what you'd find like in the Applegate River you sell round that is and smooth that is yeah it's been traveled it's been beat up by the river and stuff like that but you see how rough that is that hasn't traveled hardly at all then it's formed right there right literally on top of the Sterling mind that particular pan right there oh that big nugget was was with ounce and three-quarter ounce and a half ounce and three quarters something like that now this is the concentrating table all that stuff that went through the screen that you asked about and it was in the pan well that big trashcan held about 200 pounds for the stand and there's no way I'm gonna pan that hot button so we have a concentrating table and that's what this is you put it under the table is about six feet long it's about four foot wide and it's tilted down into one side and depending on how you do that tilt is how how you recover the gold and what we're doing here you can see the blonde sand walking off to the side but what you see here here this is all gold this is two blonde fan that's walking off to the side and you get eight lines that'll be running gold and when you get lines like this running gold for ten or twenty minutes you're talking up powerful bunch of gold this is all tailings here but this bucket here it's going to catch this stuff and the black sand and that bucket it's gonna hold what we call super cons the super concentrated gold and that goes into the laboratory how much material do you start with at the front end when you're doing whatever that process is well it came out of out of that trashcan you saw the guy screening into Oh No geez about two hundred pounds so about about this much at the bottom of that trash can so maybe maybe three five-gallon buckets oh no no that probably takes you feed it it literally a spoon at a time the probably takes an hour and a half to run those so you see the table is shut off there so that you could see so that you could see the gold dust and then the tailings rope well well so what's running the shaker it's a wheel that has a weight on one side yeah yeah yeah that electric distance this was we rented up a place to do this this isn't on site yeah we had we had to set up an actual laboratory complete with a furnace and all the chemicals and stuff that it takes to extract the gold and you see quite a bit of gold running down there it doesn't take much of that to make an ounce our clean ups were anywhere from just under a pound to two and a quarter pounds well we went by hours so it'll be four 12-hour shift so that'd be a two-day run a two six hour day run well no mining mining generally started in December is when those spring started being active again and until until early June and on rare occasions that that's the that's where the the gold drops into we're still getting black sand with it and that's what was billed as the super cons super concentrates so who's concentrating this now one two three types of a super concentrate is really the third task well the super concentrate yeah basically and then once once we have the super concentration that's what goes into the laboratory and you'll see that that'll be coming up no not yet some will beat some won't be yeah a little over a pound of gold yeah yeah John without you're late there were ice I counted five six pieces of equipment overhead cheese yeah yeah oh you're here to tell you and like I say it'd be an old equipment the expensive of working on it daily the accountants of welding rod my god the main operation ran for about four or five years and then after the price of gold dropped we just kept up on a yearly basis for a couple of days just to pay the property owners property tax as long as we prayed the property tax he was happy to let Mike Whitman sit there [Music] you got a cut of the gross yeah I do but I'm not gonna say yeah [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Stories of Southern Oregon

Views: 192,926

Rating: 4.7049742 out of 5

Keywords: Sterling Creek Mine, Applegate Oregon, Jackson County Oregon, Southern Oregon, Glenn Wadstein, Gold Mining, Gold Mines, Mining for Gold, Stories of Southern Oregon

Id: XAPmv1prLPo

Length: 37min 53sec (2273 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2017