Bearmouth Dredge Piles

Bearmouth Dredge Piles

Bring On The Bucket Brigade!

Visualize and endless chain of buckets dipping into Bear Creek waters, each bucket emerged with enough gravel to fill a car trunk. Next, the buckets dumped their loads through a series of devices aimed at concentrating the gold. The entire systems floated on pontoons in a pond. The Yuba Manufacturing Company built the connected bucket dredge used here - the most expensive, complicated and efficient kind of gold dredge available.

Gold Mining Leaves Its Mark

"The history of the different gold camps in Montana follows the classic pattern--discovery of placers, stampedes and frantic skimming of the richer deposits, discovery of the lodes, and finally, the more leisurely and economical working of both lode and placer, the latter usually by dredging."
--Francis A. Thomson, Director, Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, 1948

Some mining has a way of turning the land topsy turvy, especially when a powerful dredge digs below a creek to unearth gold washed downstream from a mother lode. From 1939 to 1942, the Star Pointer Exploration Company unearthed 13,996 ounces of gold. The dredge could dig 43 feet below water and remove 6200 to 6300 cubic yards of gravel per day. That much gravel would fill up three, 2,100-square-foot-homes. Yet, at its peak, a day's digging produced only $630 worth of gold at 10 cents per cubic yard.

Gold Mining: From Tunnels to Dredges
As the dredge workers lowered buckets as far as 43 feet below the water, they occasionally struck old mine tunnels dating from the late 1800s, when miners chiseled far into the rock to flow the high grade gold deposits that led like arteries to the heart of the Garnet Range.