Deep Shafts Gold Mining

At various depths they dug tunnels coming out from the downward shaft in order to look for leads. These tunnels were called drives. One man would work down in the shaft, shovelling dirt into a bucket, which was hoisted up by a second man. The buckets were hauled up using a windlass, which wound the rope around a log as the man turned a handle. Any dirt containing gold was called washing stuff because it had to be washed to separate the gold from the dirt.

Deep shafts and drives had to be dug, and all the rock dug out had to be hoisted to the surface. Big engines hoisted lifts for the miners and buckets of gold from the shafts. A structure called a poppet head was built at the top of the shaft. A big wheel, called a gin wheel, at the top of the poppet head wound steel cable to hoist the buckets in and out of the shaft. Gold contained in quartz rock had to be taken to a battery where the rock could be crushed to release the gold.

Deeper shafts would fill with water, and had to be pumped day and night to stop the mine from flooding. Another problem with a deep shaft was that the air got bad. A windsail was used to get clean air into the shaft. It looked like the sail of a ship and worked with a scooping action, being turned to face the wind and funnelling air into a canvas tube and into the shaft.