A sign above Montana History teacher Kris Schreiner’s classroom alerts Kalispell Middle School eighth graders that they are entering Alder Gulch to mine for gold and garnets.
Alder Gulch, was the site of the “richest placer gold strike in the Rocky Mountains with an estimated total value of 100 million dollars throughout the 18th and 19th century,” according to virginiacitymt.com. A man by the name of William Fairweather discovered the site in May 1863.
“Fairweather dug the dirt, filled a pan and told Edgar to wash the pan in the hope of getting enough gold to buy tobacco. When the first pan turned up $2.40, they knew the gulch had great potential.”
Miners flooded in as word spread. The population surge led to the establishment of Virginia City and Nevada City, locations the students learned about as part of a mining unit in addition to Alder Gulch. Other notable sites Schreiner had marked on a map of Montana were Bannack, Fort Ellis (Bozeman), Butte City, Lost Chance Gulch (Helena), Hell Gate (Missoula), Fort Shaw, Sun River, Fort Benton and Fort Carroll.
“We covered the mining era of Montana all the way to the present day,” Schreiner said, from traditional placer mining to hardrock and open pit mining methods that are used today.
On this day in the classroom, large batches of the alluvial gravel Schreiner collected from a friend’s ranch over the summer are washed in two sluices with battery-operated pump circulation systems, mimicking the flow of a stream. The sluices were purchased through Kalispell Education Foundation grants.
“We’ve done the gold panning before but we haven’t had a pump circulation sluice system. We’ve had some sluices, but kids had to pour buckets of water and you don’t get the right action,” Schreiner said. “Basically, it concentrates all the heavy material in our mine dirt, so they’re not having to do as much cleaning in the gold pan.”
The students were doing what is called placer mining, which involves separating minerals like gold from sand, gravel and clay in streambeds.
“Most miners in the late 1800s built their own sluices along creeks just out of wooden flume,” he said.
“Essentially all they would do is just set it up along the river and they would shovel their dirt in and it would wash all the material they didn’t want at the end. And that’s a lot of the environmental impact in any area that was placer mined because they washed so much of the river systems. They would build their own and then they would abandon them as gold ran out.” This would remove nutrient-rich topsoil.
“If you go to major placer areas like down by Virginia, Nevada City, you can still see the remnants of all that environmental degradation that took place from the topsoil of people placer mining and even hydraulic mining the river systems,” Schreiner said.
STUDENTS LINED up at a desk designated at the “assayers office” to collect the pay dirt they earned by completing assignments. The more work they finished the more dirt they received.
Gathering in groups around water-filled totes, students dropped dirt and water in pans, which they moved in a circular motion.
“So keep that swirling motion and you’re going to keep washing away the top layers until you get down to the heavy stuff in the corner, which should be garnets and gold,” Schreiner said while demonstrating. “You can just kind of tap on the side and that’s gonna bring up those lighter rocks.”
He said the process stratifies the material.
“Stratifying just means allowing it to separate into layers — letting the heavier material go to the bottom and the lighter material go to the top, so quartz and a number of other rocks that we have in this mix,” he said.
“You want to wash that off the top and allow anything like gold and garnets, heavier-density materials to work to the bottom. Then, we wash our pan. We go water in, water out,” he said dipping the pan in the tote of water. “So we reduced the top layer, but we don’t want to [let] go too much. We want to stratify again.”
While the students knew they weren’t going to strike it rich, they carefully sorted through the dirt with tweezers, smiling with satisfaction after spotting a glinting flake of gold or the reddish hue of garnet, which they plucked out.
“It’s a lot of patience. A lot of patience,” eighth-grader Elliana Morris said.
“Then, you end up with some of this,” classmate Gage Sneeden said, picking up a capped vial containing a layer of tiny garnets.
“She found the biggest garnet,” Sneeden said, pointing over to classmate Lucy Holloway.
Holloway wasn’t certain if that was a fact, but showed the garnet, which was not…
Read More: Montana mining history — Kalispell eighth-graders pan for gold and garnets