This gold loaded creek changed Victoria forever

this is Yellow Creek and back in the 1800s they pulled millions of dollars of gold out of its soils in 1852 gold was first discovered where the current Township of beechworth sits today it's known as pennyweight flat and the side note is it was called pennyweight flat because you could find one penny weight of gold in every dish you washed the discovery of gold on pennyweight flat would last for just a single year until one of the richest gold fields in the southern hemisphere was discovered some six kilometers South in the woolshed valley home to the now famous Reedy Creek and over the next nine years multiple Creek systems carrying alluvial gold were discovered eventually leading to the discovery of hard rock mines in the early 1860s and today I've got you on one of the most fascinating Creeks that we've discovered back in the 1850s Gold Rush Yellow Creek now you might think that Yellow Creek gets its name because gold was discovered here but it actually came from the sludge produced by the mining operations They removed over 20 feet of river gravel along the entire length of this Creek in fact there was so much sludge coming out of the mining operation here that it destroyed the farmlands downstream and therefore brought about the creation of the Victorian waterboard the Victorian water board is still in place today because of this Creek and their job is just to look after the health of the Water Systems across the state but there was another very interesting thing about Yellow Creek my mining partners and I all use 10 inch pans to prospect with because if you get a good show of color in a very small pan it means that you're going to be onto a very good spot because if I get 20 colors in a pan like this there's four of these that fit in a regular sized pan like that so bear that in mind when I show you this gold so much of gold prospecting is about scale can you scale your production level up and still be profitable hydraulic mining was amongst the cheapest method of extracting dirt out of an area and processing it to recover the gold you can see evidence of their hydraulic mining operation left in the ground today I'm currently standing up on an earth and Mound we've got the current Creek bed the mound comes up which is man-made and it dips back down into a secondary Channel this was so they could divert the creek or the sludge and separate the two they would set Channel panels up like this to deviate the sludge that was coming out of their operation they'd have a man up in the hills there with a water cannon and he'd be blasting the banks apart and channeling that slurry down sluice boxes and into a run like this so they could discharge the sludge into a settling pond we've got the discharge Channel just here and just behind it we actually have one of those sluice runs still in the Bedrock today wood was at a premium on the gold Fields you needed to Timber shafts especially down in the Deep lead areas such as Chilton you'll need it to power your steam engines for your rock Crushers and you would need it for cooking and heating so to build a Timber sluice box out here when all the trees were cut down for other purposes was very expensive and instead you would just Blast One into the Bedrock if we follow those loose boxes up to their head they're going to come to the working phase this is where the creek suddenly got unprofitable at any rate using a water cannon was very fast at removing soil and because you're processing the dirt in sluice boxes right next to your water cannon you didn't have any overheads the only problem was that you had to have mineable ground and that meant shallow ground by today's standards 20 feet deep with a hand shovel would be considered insane but back in the day 20 feet was very yellow and that's why Yellow Creek was known as a poor man's gold field not because there wasn't any gold here but because it was cheap to mine this Creek was amongst the cheapest mining in all of the northeast of Victoria and that means that you can come up here buy a claim for a couple of pounds and possibly make a fortune on the gold sitting just under your feet let's see if there's any gold 170 years later most of the gravels that we work today out on Yellow Creek are just tailings the old mine has got pretty much all of the gravel worked but they didn't get all the gold because their sluice boxes were very inefficient losing up to 50 of the gold that passed through them and that just means that there's plenty of gold left for the hobby prospector and what you're going to see in this 10 inch pan is a small taste of what they were getting because they were moving thousands of cubic meters of soil every single day the gold on Yellow Creek is extraordinarily fine you can see that line there with a couple of nicer large flakes but there's plenty of it to make the amateur prospector very happy that is about a typical pan from Yellow Creek let me show you what a good pan looks like that mound of Earth up there is actually a tailings dam the water board forced the miners to put these dams in to prevent damage to the farmlands downstream so these literally hold millions of cubic meters of soil and it's soil that was discharged straight out of the sluice boxes that were losing 50 percent of oh on Yellow Creek if you work anywhere next to these dams particularly where there's a break in the wall then you find really good gold because it's discharging out of their tailings dams back into the creek but by the time the Victorian water board was created the damage had already been done in fact today Farmers still have to plow every single winter to turn over the soil to get rid of the sludge that was discharged onto their farmland and you can tell when you're working near tailings dams because this fine-grained gray silt is what was causing all the problems on a scale like this today it's going to have no environmental impact but back then when they were moving tens of thousands of cubic meters a day using the creek as the Water Source it polluted the waterways to the point where it ran as a thick yellow sludge you can see that yellow coloration already in my pan oh but this is what they were really after decent sized gold remember this is coming out of their tailings they lost this over 150 years ago at the end of this loose boxes and this is what it was all about finding good pans of gold because if I get this much gold in one pan could you imagine how much more gold you would get running a hydraulic sluice box with a Hydraulics loose box you'll be moving 20 times the amount of dirt I just did in seconds however the result like that I think I know where I'm going to be working for the rest of the day so yeah Yellow Creek the creator of the Victorian waterboard and you can still find gold here today

Channel: Vo-Gus Prospecting

Views: 23,717

Keywords: gold, gold panning, sluicing, gold mining, gold rush, gold prospecting, how to find gold, gold fever, panning for gold, sluice, gold nugget, gold hunting, flour gold, placer gold, prospecting for gold, mining, river gold, where to find gold, metal detecting, gold price, treasure, lost gold, pirates, gold ore, coin collecting, rare, Dan hurd, crypto minin, gold stacking, pioneer pauly, jeff williams, shorts, trending, gold rush 2022, parker schnabel, service dogs, boxer dogs

Id: EpyK79FQtbM

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2023