Historic dredge tailings can be found throughout California, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, and most other western states in places where there was enough water to operate them.
Most dredges worked areas for many miles, so these places are not hard to spot.
Their tailings are easily recognizable by the large, uniform piles of gravel and rock that they left behind. The gravels were processed using standard gravity based methods, and the waste material was discarded out of the back of the dredge into tailing piles.įinding areas that have been dredged is not hard to do. To get an idea of scale, most dredges employed an entire crew of men, who worked inside of the huge dredges. They worked by shoveling gravel up in bathtub-sized buckets, where it was processed within the dredge. There aren’t any dredges like this being used today, but the remnants of their work is clearly visible throughout many of the richest gold districts. Here in the U.S., they were used from the late 1800’s through the mid 1900’s. Many of these huge dredges could process over 1000 yards of material per day, and they found a whole lot of gold in the process. These dredges were nothing like the modern suction dredge that we use today bucket-line dredges were massive floating pieces of mining equipment that churned up the valley floors in many gold rich areas and processed the gravels. The evidence of past bucket-line dredging operations can be found in mining districts all throughout the west.
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