The Miner's Tin-Dish and Cradle

IN many places in the South Island of New Zealand, gold was present, in the form of small specks, in the material washed down by rivers and streams either in recent times or in ages past. Where streams of recent origin flowed through the deposits laid down many thousands of years ago the gold was concentrated, and it was in such places that the sensational finds of the gold-rush days were made.

Most of the methods employed by the early miners were based on the fact that gold is a very heavy substance, which sinks to the bottom of a stream of water carrying gold, silt, and gravel. The prospector’s essential equipment was the shovel and tin-dish. With his shovel he cleared away the coarse gravel till he came to the finer ‘ wash-dirt,’ the possibly gold-bearing layer in the bed of the stream. A shovelful of this was put into the dish and washed in running water. If the miner was fortunate, specks of gold were left in the dish as the clay and sand were washed away.

Having found a good locality for his operations, the miner would probably set to work with a tub and cradle. In the tub the wash-dirt was puddled with a shovel and water to separate the gold from clay, and then fed into a cradle. This was a box on rockers, open at one end and at the other end fitted with a hopper, through which the gold-bearing material was washed with sufficient water to make the sand and clay flow out the open end when the cradle was rocked. Bars on the sloping bottom of the box and a lining of some hairy material caught the heavy gold particles which sank to the bottom. When sufficient wash-dirt had been put through, the gold caught in the lining was collected in a ‘ panning-off’ dish filled with water.