The Alluvial diggings

Hi
I was just wondering how did the early diggers determine where to dig,how deep or when to stop and how did they extract the gold at that time.They obviously left a lot of gold in the mullock heaps and some in the tailings.I can see a lot of puddlers around but not in all locations so how did these work.Sorry my search is not working on the forum at the moment just gives a blank page.
Steve

G'day Steve, Not a simple answer to your question, firstly the diggers determined where to dig by the process of 'loaming' or panning the gravels for colour or by picking up sunbakers I guess. many nuggets were left behind in mullock heaps for probably a few reasons, like lack of water or they may have gone through a false bottom that contained gold and didn't realise so they didn't process that wash.
Puddlers needed water, this is why you don't see them everywhere, not everywhere had lots of gold either so puddlers were not set up there and the wash from those diggings would've been carted to the puddler.

I have just bought this book....LIFE ON THE GOLDFIELDS it is a good read and contains many good photo's from the diggings. There are plenty of books that will explain what happened on which goldfield, not all of the goldfields were the same for many reasons.

Thanks for that Goldstalker.

some of the old timers followed creeks and they would do little test holes just off the sides and panned them, they would get so much gold in a pan and do a few more test holes until they had a good amount of gold in there, then they would drop a hole. when they done the hole they would have a shovle off dirt and bounce it up and down to check how heavy it was and throw it, if it felt heavy enough they would check it out. this is one reason they missed a lot of small gold and sometimes the bigger one. it would take one day to dig 4 foot hole and if they hit gold in that hole they would keep digging until they new nothing was left, then they would do another hole right beside that and just kept going. as Goldstalker was saying about the water was a big thing as there's a lot of unwashed dirt as they couldn't pan or do anything with it. i have found a lot of unwashed drt that i'm going to run in the sluice soon...
cheers
stoppsy

Most of the pock marked country you see was just exploratory holes to see if they bottomed on colour, my brother in law had a block at Amphitheater Vic and all the holes were 10' deep.
This I was told was as deep as a man on his own could shovel out gravel without it all falling back on him.

If only they had of gone that extra 2' down they would have got nuggets, and big ones too, a mining company went through recently and cleaned up.
My BIL's son worked a loader for the same company on the same block so I know its a fact.