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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldsheet who wrote (89203)	9/1/2002 9:10:03 PM
From: long-gone	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116753

so you still out or back in? btw did your trading cost you any dividends from the S.A. miners or...?

To: goldsheet who wrote (89203)	9/2/2002 6:28:13 AM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 116753

I don't remember the name of the San Francisco man who sold shovels to the 1849 miners, but he did make more than any single miner, it is true. Alex McDougall, or McDonald (?) made more than any miner buying and selling claims, and some hotel owners made more too. A company selling flour in Vancouver made more than any mine did. On the other hand there are many miners who never told a soul what they made on their claims good or bad. In the Cariboo, it is not recorded what the take was until ten years after it was started. In the Klondike it is calculated that good and services supplied were even with the gold mined in dollars. This is common for most industries actually, and makes sense. If the industries are viable, the take will be spent, or costs incurred at least nearly equal if you include all companies involved. In fact, most gold rushes had good income for a good percentage of the companies or individuals, at least on the basis of making a living. The 1849 rush started many American industries including GM and Studebaker, and the Klondike rush had many "spin-offs" and nascent entrepreneurs that saw fame and fortune in other fields. The focus and energy created by these great ventures ends up being a positive drive for a great number of individuals. In the case of the 1849 rush, the resulting industry of low grade placer gold mining helped to make industry innovative in the field of mechanical earth moving equipment, valves, seals, pumping, pipelines and other areas of large scale engineering. The US became the world leader in pumping technology as a result of the 1849 gold rush and its latter day development, so that today pump flows are routinely measured in US gallons per minute throughout the world. A point that is often overlooked about the 1849 rush and the Klondike rush is that once the rich diggings seemed to peter out, companies with large scale methods came in and worked for many years after, ostensibly making very good profit. The average profit in the gold fields for a dredging company in the Klondike was 50% on throughput. Some ran as high as 70% overall including capital cost. Few hard rock investors realize that a well engineered placer operation makes a higher profit than any other industry or enterprise known, with the possible exception of mining and selling raw diamonds, which reputedly runs 80% profit. Although gold mining on a large scale saw two setbacks, one in 1890 and later in 1920 with court decisions, and placer mining almost totally ceased in California, the Klondike continued to produce almost unabated with many small operations continuing up until this day, producing almost 13 million ounces total. By 1901 the Klondike had produced 3% of the world's gold. (Now since far surpassed) You would think that the large dredging companies, moving millions of yards of gravel would outproduce the small miner, but in the Klondike the small scale operations produced equal to what the large scale did. EC<:-}

To: goldsheet who wrote (89203)	9/2/2002 7:19:23 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116753

I supposed it bears some explaining that the photo of the people lined up ascending the snow field are not in fact waiting to get the last popsicle at the 7-11. Nor is it a run on the Bank of Snowdrift, Alaska. The famous picture is of the miners ascending the Chilkoot pass on the trail into the Klondike in 1896. They carried 70 pounds or more up the pass on their backs, about 30 trips in all, as they were required by the RCMP to have at least a ton of supplies to enter the Klondike. The line moved at one step a minute, and many dropped out, having to go all the way back down to the bottom to start over, if they could not make the next step. It is far steeper than it looks in the photo. If you fell, you slid quite a ways. Later a railroad was built, the White Pass and Yukon, in order to access the gold fields. The Klondike rush was instrumental in establishing the Yukon-Alaska border, which was arbitrarily drawn by the RCMP when they mounted a machine gun at a pass where they could handle immigrants into the fields. (The easiest way to get to Dawson City was by boat up the Yukon River from Alaska some 1800 miles, but it took a while.) Most of the miners who accessed the fields where Americans fresh from a depression in the Pacific Northwest, and they had established their own government and claim system long before Ottawa got involved. They had to make their own boats to get down Lake Bennet and the Yukon River, and there on the shore they whipsawed timber or rip sawed the logs by hand with vertical reciprocating saws to make planks. The gold rush was not the first finding of gold in Alaska or the Yukon. Mining of placer ground had been going on in BC nearby and in the Yukon to the south since 1870. It was simply a better find. The discovery at Dawson was initially known to be very rich by the pan. That fact quickly became important to the placer miner who was knowledgeable of the importance of even a single discovery of coarse gold. The cockroach theory hit home fast. Gold is like cockroaches. You find one biggie gold thing, and sure as shootin' there are more around. This fact about the spread of the discovery is overlooked by many historians, as it is hard to see that it would not appear to be a fallacy to rush into an area where only one rich discovery had been made. How again did everyone hear so fast how rich it was so soon? The gold mining grapevine was operating fairly efficiently. It is also instructive to realize that only a short distance away from where Skookum Jim and his partner made their strike there was an experience placer miner prospecting and he did not find a thing! There is a lot more skill and luck to figuring the stuff out than at first it may seem. Gold miners have become blase of late. The find in Alaska of the Pogo deposit, by Teck corporation has not stirred much excitement. The Pogo is in the Tintina Trench, which runs right into the Yukon, and is known to host about 70 gold deposits or various types and sizes. The Pogo itself is the richest large deposit found in North America in the last 20 or so years since the Hemlo discovery in Ontario. It is 20 feet wide and runs a continuous half ounce per ton. That is rich and wide. Yet the resulting Alaska "rush" was a yawner, coming as it has on the heels of the great gold price and mining meltdown in Canada, which many mining people say is the worst contraction of the industry in living memory. EC<:-}