Hydraulic Giant - Greenhorn Park - Yreka, CA
N 41° 42.689 W 122° 39.455
10T E 528485 N 4617799
This former gold mining piece of equipment is preserved along with other gold mining equipment within Greenhorn Park.
Waymark Code: WMV688
Location: California, United States
Date Posted: 03/02/2017
Views: 1
This is the third hydraulic giant I've encountered in my travels. Environmentalists would cringe at knowing how destructive this piece of equipment was to rivers and creeks in the heyday of gold mining during the mid-to-late 1800s.
The following excerpts are from the Jefferson Backroads June 2012 edition which highlighted another hydraulic giant located in front of the Siskiyou County Museum in Yreka and describes the background of the hydraulic giant like the one on display in Greenhorn Park and parts of it read:
Hydraulic mining, a very efficient method of getting gold out of the ground, was a variation on ground sluicing. Hydraulic miners shot water through a nozzle at high pressure onto cliff faces washing away tons of boulders, gravel, dirt, and ounces of gold. Whole hillsides would collapse with all the debris ending up in a series of huge sluice boxes catching the gold.
Edward Mattison is recognized as the innovator for this method of mining. In 1853 he supplied water through a rawhide hose to a nozzle he carved out of wood. Miners later upgraded their hoses to metal; the nozzle component soon became iron. Product names for these iron nozzles included Hoskin’s Dictator and Hoskin’s Little Giant. The name that stuck, the Monitor, was a product name from the Craig Company. It eventually became the colloquial description for water cannon, just like the word Kleenex today has become the generic term used for facial tissue.
With small-scale placer mining mostly exhausted, hydraulic mining reached its height of operation by the early 1860s. Decades of hydraulic mining resulted in catastrophic environmental damage. During high water events, rivers and streams overflowed their banks. Massive deposits of sand and gravel washed downstream onto adjacent farm land destroying the crop producing potential of the land. Vast areas of farm land in the Sacramento Valley were buried by mining sediment. Farmers demanded an end to hydraulic mining. In a most renowned legal fight, farmers against miners, hydraulic mining operators were sued. The landmark 1884 case of Edwards Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Mining and Gravel Company made its way to US court in San Francisco where Judge Lorenzo Sawyer decided in favor of the farmers. He declared hydraulic mining to be “a public and private nuisance.” Revived in 1893 when Congress passed the Camminetti Act, hydraulic mining was allowed if sediment detention structures were constructed.