Potatoes were used in the klondike for separating gold from mercury. First mercury was mixed in the rocker with the feed until it had mixed together to a gold coloured hard ball, of mercury and gold alloyed, called an amalgam. (it sometimes needed to be cleaned with nitric acid in cold water to get it to coalesce) It was then put in a hollowed out recess in a potato half and the two halves wired together to be buried in the ground with wood or charcoal fuel. The potato was covered with tinfoil wrap (real tinfoil, as aluminum was far too expensive in those days.) and the fuel burnt to coal, and then the potato put in and covered over with earth. About 8 hours later they dug up the potato and unwrapped it. The amalgam ball of mercury had decomposed and the pure gold remained in dust in the hollow, with the mercury absorbed into the potato. (Do not eat the potato at this point. Mercury will do you no good, as you make a lousy thermometer.)
People frequently underestimate the amount of supplies the miners had in Dawson or Alaska. A steamer would arrive at regular intervals with fresh food in the summer and fall. Canned goods were plentiful as were limes, ascorbic acid tablets and all sorts of medicines. (from hashish and heroin tablets (legal then) to aspirin, whisky and mercury salts for venereal disease.) Nobody was let over the pass at Chilkoot with less than he needed for the winter. (About one ton of supplies) Canned bacon was common, and all sorts of dried and preserved fruit. You could buy a complete aluminum tent hut with self-contained stove in Seattle for use in the gold fields. Aluminum. Today most people think they would not have had the metal let alone the technology to work it.
The large amount of supplies necessitated the miners travelling each mile of the trail up to 20 times. Progress was at the most 1 miles per day overland unless you hired packers. They carried up to 150 pounds in a pack, but on the steep passes in the line ups, they would only take one step per minute. The Chilkoot was easier to negotiate in the winter than in the summer as it was a bad boulder field without snow. It is steep enough that in standing straight up, you can put your arm out and touch the slope. Few people slid or fell, though.
It is recorded that during the Yukon rush, 60,000,000 dollars in gold were taken out in 4 years. Spent on supplies and outfitting were 60 million dollars. People point to that sometimes as evidence of the futility of man's dreams of striking it rich. In fact this is a good result. It is duplicated by most of man's effort. An economy never makes a profit. There is no surplus capital retained in society from investment in it, by government or industry. That would require surplus capital to be loaned by the banks, and we all know they don't do that without inflation.
Today the gold mining industry; coal, iron, copper and most other mining industries put equal capital in exploration, development and pay to what they extract. There is no net profit, industry wide.
It turns out that that is true of all industries, when you take the whole of man's efforts into account that make the industry possible. You would have to factor in the cost of roads to make cars possible, but car companies don't pay for that, the customer does. A profit, therefore, is temporarily sequestered capital nnly. If you take the net depletion of all earth's resources as a cost, then there isalways an actual loss recorded. We could break even if we survived, but we won't.
The only four industries ever recorded to have made a net profit industry wide, were, pornography, placer mining in California, software production in the US, and diamond mining of raw diamonds. Of these the most profitable were placer mining on the investment, software on the book value, and diamond mining on the throughput.
Diamonds are still 80% profit, and that is on the raw stones alone, not the cut gems. Few people realize that it is the Russians who produce the most raw gems, not the South Africans. But they make 5 times less revenue than Hollywood does on films, 20 times less than the US does on porn, 30 times less than the US illegal drug market, and 40 times less than the US coffee revenues. Caffeine is still the biggest drug of all.
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