In the vicinity of Fairbanks, Alaska, a tranquil pond houses a silent dredge, a relic of a bustling gold mining era. This film, "Alaskan Gold", captures the essence of that period, showcasing the intricate processes involved in gold extraction. TIt unfolds with the solitary prospector, panning for gold in a serene setting, juxtaposed against the mechanized operations of the Fairbanks Exploration Company. The company's large-scale endeavors, spanning over 30 years, employed a significant number of Alaskans and fundamentally transformed the region's gold mining landscape. The film details the complex procedures, from surveying and prospecting to the construction of the Davidson ditch, a monumental engineering achievement that facilitated water transport for mining operations. It further elucidates the challenges posed by the Alaskan terrain, necessitating the thawing of frozen overburden and gravel before dredging could commence. The film offers a glimpse into the lives of the hardworking crews who manned these operations, their stories becoming an integral part of Alaskan folklore. As winter approached, the dredges fell silent, only to roar back to life in the spring, with the ice-clearing process being a spectacle in itself. The film concludes by illustrating the final stages of gold extraction, culminating in the production of pure gold bricks, each a testament to the arduous journey from raw earth to precious metal.

Full Transcript of the Video:

[Birds chirping] About 10 miles south of Fairbanks near Esther, Alaska is a serene, retiring pond.

[Birds chirping] Days pass without comment or care.

[Birds chirping] The solitude here is uninterrupted.

[Birds chirping] An earlier age of constant activity is marked by a machine resting in the middle of the pond.

[Birds chirping] The machine is an electrically driven stacker dredge used to extract gold from the rich gravel of this area.

[Birds chirping] It is as silent and as much a part of this scene as the trees and rolling hills around it.

Yet it is ready to work again, missing only its human operators.

They have died, retired, or moved on to new endeavors.

The dredge seems incomplete without the sounds of boots on the metal decks.

There is constant flow of workers through these doors.

Instead, there is silence.

[Birds chirping] When dredges like this one were in their prime, a film was made documenting that busy moment in the gold mining history of Alaska.

Produced as a silent film over 30 years ago, a soundtrack has been added to clarify and amplify the intense life of this now silent machine.

Alaskan Gold was filmed and edited by Alan Probert, an employee of the U.

S.

smelting, refining, and mining company, primarily to show stockholders living on the east coast of the United States the Alaskan operations of the company.

Fairbanks in 1949 was long past its infancy as a temporary boom town.

It had survived good times and bad, maturing to a growing concrete city of 5,700 people.

The log homes of those first settlers were still much in evidence, mixed in among newer frame houses.

Elaborate gardens provided positive evidence of the roots their owners had planted in this center of government and population.

It was also the center in 1949 of gold mining activities in Alaska.

Then, as now, the memory of Felix Pedro, the first to find gold in the interior, remained strong.

Fairbanks was born because of gold, and the abundance of the metal turned the settlement into a town and a city.

In Felix Pedro's day, extracting gold was a solitary process.

One man could work the streams in sand beds on his own muscle power.

The prospector put the gravel into a rocker.

The rocking motion separates the sand and any gold from the larger rocks.

The separation is done through slots or riffles which are placed at right angles to the flow of water.

Everything is carefully rinsed to wash any flakes of gold to the bottom of the rocker.

The sifted material is transferred to the traditional tool of prospecting, the gold pan.

Productive panning is an art form.

No two miners do it alike.

It consists of two motions, shaking which shifts the heavier gold beneath the lighter sand, and rinsing which washes away the top layers of sand.

Through repeated shaking and washing, the miner hopefully ends up with a few specks of gold.

Unlike the famed beaches of Nome, most of the gold in interior Alaska was in gravel buried beneath the surface layer of silt, ice, and soil commonly called overburden or muck.

This necessitated digging a shaft down through the overburden and gravel to bedrock.

Then the miners tunneled out from the shaft, removing the gravel in a large bucket which deposited the material in a pile at the top end of a sluice box.

The method is known as drift mining.

The process required mechanization and manpower.

Gold mining in interior Alaska was no longer a solitary process.

The gravel was run through a sluice box which acted like a giant rocker to separate the gold from rocks and gravel.

After a few years, the heyday of drift mining was passed in the Fairbanks area.

There had been profit, but the effort often required more resources than a small operation could afford.

Enter the United States smelting refining and mining company known locally as the Fairbanks Exploration or FE Company.

In 1925, under the direction of Norman C.

Steins, the company began a massive project that would last over 30 years and provide a major source of employment for Alaskans.

It began with surveying the land to locate sample points on a grid pattern.

Many of the areas surveyed had been worked by the drift miners.

Using a churn drill, the sample points were prospected to determine the volume of muck to be removed to reach the gravel beneath and the amount of gold contained in that gravel.

Always there was water for washing and panning and sifting.

Placer mining, the type of gold mining done in interior Alaska, is quite simply the process of obtaining the metal by running water through the ore-bearing gravel to separate gravel and sand from gold.

Once again, the final sifting of the gravel was done by panning.

The FE Company knew they would need enormous amounts of water to be successful.

J.

M.

Davidson had an idea how to get the water moved to where it was needed in the valleys and hills surrounding Fairbanks.

His idea became the Davidson ditch, a major engineering feat.

Water traveled over 90 miles through pipes, some of it larger in diameter than the pipe used on the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

The water flowed through a network of man-made ditches and, when necessary, through hills in tunnels and caves.

Construction of the ditch system took five years, from July of 1924 to July of 1929.

This is what much of the water was needed for.

Before the gold-bearing gravel could be dredged, the top layer of frozen overburden had to be removed.

The depth of this overburden, or "muck" as the miners called it, varied from a few feet up to 200 feet.

Often, the ghosts of early drift mines were uncovered in the process.

This log cribbing was built by some miner to support the shaft he dug through the muck and gravel to bedrock.

The water bursting from the nozzle between pressures of 60 to 100 pounds per square inch often uncovered not only old cribbing, but fossils of musk oxen, mammoths and mastodons.

These were carefully removed to the safety of museums.

The nozzle was counterbalanced so one man could control it with deadly accuracy.

Since the muck had been permanently frozen for eons, the job of removing it was tedious.

One nozzle would operate for about two hours, removing only a few inches of thawed muck.

The operator would move on to work other nozzles, and 24 hours later would return to the first nozzle to wash away three or four inches of newly thawed muck.

As many as 48 of these hydraulic giants were set up to strip away 30 or 40 acres of land that a single dredge would mine.

In 30 years of operation, 275 million cubic yards of silt and muck were removed.

The stripped material was drained away to streams, eventually ending up in one of interior Alaska's many rivers.

There was little if any ecological damage caused by the silt.

Deposits caused by man were minor compared to the deposits in the rivers from melting glaciers.

Once clear of the overburden, it was often necessary to remove a top layer of gravel if prospecting had indicated the gold-bearing rock was lower down.

This was accomplished by scrapers in a monolithic dragline such as this one.

In 1949, it was the largest dragline in operation in the state.

Its massive bucket could hold 12 cubic yards, about 40,000 pounds of material, in one bite.

The top, or barren gravel as it was known, was transported out of the mining area.

Much of the barren gravel would one day become the foundation for the highway connecting Fairbanks and Anchorage.

Like some prehistoric dinosaur, the dragline would move around in seven-foot steps.

Slowly shifting its weight from a load-bearing plate under the main body to pontoons on either side, the dragline could maneuver itself wherever needed.

Considering it weighed over 750 tons, its movements were almost graceful.

The top layer of the gravel was a bit too small, but it was a bit too small.

The bottom layer of the gravel was a bit too small, but it was a bit too small.

The final step in preparing an area for dredging was thawing the frozen gravel.

This too was done with water.

Points were driven through the gravel to bedrock.

Water was forced through the hollow points, slowly thawing the surrounding ground.

The points formed a series of equilateral triangles 16 feet on a side.

Driving the points by hand was a tiring process.

Repeatedly using the force of a 24-pound hammer, a man could drive down through about one foot of frozen gravel in a day.

To expedite the process, he worked 30 to 60 points at one time, moving through all the points before returning to drive another few inches deeper at the first point.

Using 10-foot sections of pipe, hand-driving methods could thaw down to 60 feet.

Around 1945, a point-driving machine was developed which would drive the point all the way to bedrock without waiting for the ground to thaw.

It still took about as long to drive all the points by machine as by hand, but the machine saved considerable wear and tear on the men.

The necessity to thaw the gold-bearing gravel before dredging made Alaskan operations unique.

It also extended the time to prepare an area for dredging.

From first surveying to first bar of gold could take up to seven years of hard, persistent work.

A point doctor made sure water was flowing through the points at all times.

The water would enter the pipes at a temperature of 50 degrees.

Thawing the ground, it returned to the surface 15 to 20 degrees cooler.

The cool water was pumped into shallow ponds where it warmed up to be used for more thawing.

Once the gravel was thawed, the points were removed by one of two methods.

By hand, or with the aid of machines.

It was easy to spend your entire summer thawing out 30 acres of gravel.

Next to water, electricity was crucial to the dredging operation.

This power plant, fueled by coal, was built and operated by the F.

E.

Company to provide that electricity.

Later, the plant was purchased by Golden Valley Electric Association to provide electricity for its members.

When last heard from, the building and its generators had again been sold, disassembled, and moved to Oregon, where it is still providing power.

Crews maintained the vital power lines that snaked through the hills to the dredge site.

The lines provided power for the pumps, the drag lines, the point driving machines, and most importantly, the dredges.

To reach the dredges, which were in the middle of a pond, poles supporting the power lines floated on rafts.

In 1949, there were five dredges operating within a 30-mile radius of Fairbanks.

Each dredge was freely floating, except for one strong shaft near the stern that was sunk down to bedrock.

The characteristic piles of tailings so common around Fairbanks were formed by the dredges, as they methodically went about extracting the valuable yellow ore from the gravel.

Once in operation, the dredges were perpetual motion machines.

Three shifts of men were needed to keep the machinery operating around the clock.

The size of the dredge was determined by the capacity of its never-ending loop of buckets.

For instance, a six cubic foot capacity per bucket was a six-foot dredge.

It swallowed up 6,000 cubic yards of gravel in 24 hours.

To provide the buckets with a constant supply of rock, the dredge pivoted on the shaft that was its one contact point with solid bedrock.

The giant turned from one side to the other, spilling out tailings and water used to wash the gravel on one end and taking in gold-rich gravel on the other end.

And it was bucket, after bucket, after bucket, until bedrock was reached.

Camps were built to house and feed the crews who worked the dredges.

The stories of these hardworking men became part of the rich fabric of fact and fiction of life in the north.

Men like Deep Hole John, Lightning Shorty, Rough Lock, and Little Napoleon.

As winter approached, the dredges began to shut down for the year.

The dredging season lasted only eight or nine months.

Activity outside slowly came to a halt by early December.

The dredge ponds began to freeze over.

Ice formed on the cold metal.

There was still some work to do.

Once shut down, major repairs on the dredges were made until winter irrevocably stopped everything.

Then, as now, Alaskans found other ways to occupy their time.

Winter in Fairbanks also provided time for quiet reflection, a pause, a moment to rest.

But by mid-March, the pace of outdoor activity was increasing in preparation for a new season.

New pipe was laid, slip joint fashion.

The end of one section was slipped over the end of another and pounded into a tight fit.

Although drained in late fall, portions of the Davidson ditch filled up with spring ice that had to be removed.

Using steam, points were driven into the ice.

Dynamite was placed in the holes and a small channel blasted through the ice.

After the channel was cleared by hand, the remaining ice quickly melted when water began flowing through the ditch.

One of the more spectacular spring events was clearing the ice from the dredge pond.

Using steam, blocks of ice weighing up to 5,000 pounds were cut from the pond.

As the block was hoisted up, its three distinct layers told its history.

The dark ice in the middle was the first to freeze when the pond was full of silt.

The clear bottom layer second to freeze and the white top layer the last frozen.

The ice block came to an abrupt end.

As much as 15,000 tons of ice were removed from a pond each season.

Once thawed, the gravel never refrows completely.

However, two to seven feet of surface frost formed each year.

This was quickly thawed using steam.

Clearing the pond ice and steam thawing the surface frost allowed the dredges to start up before the spring break up of the river ice.

In 1949, break up was still a breathtaking sight around Fairbanks.

Though the dredges operated around the clock, once every two weeks they were shut down for cleanup, which meant removing the gold.

It was a tightly scheduled event, usually lasting no more than four hours.

Minor repairs were made while the riffles, very similar to those riffles the lone prospector was using at the beginning of the film, were cleaned.

By the time the gold-bearing sand reached the riffles, all larger pieces of gravel had been washed away.

The top riffle was two-thirds filled with mercury.

As the sand washed over this riffle, the mercury and fine gold formed a solid amalgam or mixture of the two elements.

The riffles were removed and practiced strokes with a paddle separated the remaining material into three parts.

The liquid mercury, which was used again after purifying, a residue of black sand which was stored for later reworking to extract any gold, and the amalgam.

The amalgam was collected in what else but a gold pan.

It was washed, stored in strong boxes, and taken to town.

The final stage of this long process transformed the solid amalgam into bars of gold.

The amalgam was placed in a combination retort melting furnace.

Not a speck was left out or wasted.

The furnace was tightly closed so there was no possibility of the deadly mercury fumes escaping.

The first stage of heating separated the mercury from the gold.

The gaseous mercury was condensed to liquid form in this bucket and recovered for reuse.

Once the mercury had been removed, a mixture of soda ash and borax was added and the temperature increased to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Slag containing impurities rose to the top and was poured off first.

Then the gold, pure liquid gold, was poured into brick shaped molds.

The cool brick weighed about 1,000 ounces worth nearly one half million dollars by today's prices.

Each brick was cleaned, weighed, stamped, tested for purity, and sent by first class registered male to the mint in San Francisco.

Between the years of 1928 and 1964 at a now unbelievably low price of $35 an ounce, 125 million dollars worth of gold was recovered by the dredges.

The next stage of heating was the gaseous mercury.

The gaseous mercury was added to the gaseous mercury.