BASIC FACTS
ABOUT GOLD
AND
GOLD MINING

I wrote this web page in an attempt to help the biggest greenhorn in the world find gold. There's enough information and helpful hint's to allow you to turn your leisure hours into a very profitable adventure. The four major thing's I am trying to provide are what to look for, where to look for it, how to recover it, and what to do with it after you got it. This Web Page is not written to be the final word or the only way to find gold. One thing to remember is that gold will be where you find it and nobody's going to draw you a map to the "Mother Lode". If they knew where there was a fortune in gold they would be recovering it for themselves. However, it might help if you knew a little about where to find it. Searching for gold in the middle of a Texas cow pasture would be a hot and tiring job and you probably would not find much gold either. Although I tried to write this web page in layman's language, there may be words that you do not understand. If you run across terms that you do not understand I have included a complete "GLOSSARY OF TERMS".

The modern prospector has many advantages over the prospectors of the past. We have better transportation, better equipment and recovery methods and not the least of these is that the gold producing areas known. With these things as a plus we can get to the gold quicker, have a higher percentage recovery and we know where to start. But don't assume that because the gold producing areas are known, that all the gold is already gone. While it is true that miners have overworked the most famous and publicized places, they are a very small percentage of the prospecting areas available to the recreational prospector. Even in the heavily worked areas, gold is still recovered today due to the fact recovery equipment looses fine gold, floods replenishing the gold and gold that other prospectors missed. As you prospect for gold you will notice how little the areas you visit show signs of previous prospecting in the past. Geologists estimate that only early miners recovered about ten percent of the worlds gold. That means that there is a lot of gold waiting for you and I to locate.

GOLD CHARACTERISTICS

Gold is a mineral and is recognized in the same way you want to identify all rocks or minerals. Identification should be made with the following physical properties of rocks and minerals: color, luster, crystals, hardness, cleavage, specific gravity (weight), and fracture. If you do not understand these terms I have included them in the glossary link.

The color of gold is normally yellow but may be silver-white to orange-red, depending upon the impurities present. Gold is almost always found with some impurities, usually silver, copper and iron. It is a metallic element and has a dull to shiny luster. The chemical symbol for gold is "Au". This symbol comes from the Latin word "aurum" which means "shining dawn". Gold has a hardness of 2.5-3 on the Mho's scale of hardness. Gold is not usually found in crystal form, even though it crystallizes in the isometric system, normally forming octahedral crystals, it usually is seen as irregular plates, scales, and masses rather than as crystals. Gold is a rare native mineral ranking 58th in abundance among the 92 natural elements.

Along with its yellow color, the most distinguishing attribute of gold is its weight. Weight of minerals is the term specific gravity. Specific gravity is the weight of a substance compared to water. The specific gravity of purse gold 19.32 times the weight of an equal volume of water at 63.5 º Fahrenheit. A cubic foot of pure gold weighs 1,464.17 Troy pounds. The only minerals that are heavier than gold are iridium, osmium and platinum. It is at least six times as heavy as any of the rocks usually found with it. The weight of gold allows prospectors to remove it from other closely related materials. Most of the equipment used to separate gold from the materials that are associated with it was based on this difference in weight. The atomic weight of gold is 197.2 and its atomic number is 79.

Malleability is another identifying characteristic of gold. Malleability is the ability of a mineral shaped into different forms or shapes. Pure gold is one of the most malleable of all metals. You can flatten it into very thin sheets, or drawn into very fine wire without breaking. It is also one of the most ductile or stretchable minerals. One Troy ounce of gold will stretch into a wire over 60 miles long.

Gold is one of the most stable elements on earth. It forms very few compounds. Seawater, for example, can destroy or decay most other metals except for Gold. The melting point of gold is 1945.4º Fahrenheit (1063º Centigrade). It will not dissolve in most acids except aqua regia (a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids), cyanides and a few more. It is for these reasons that gold is known as a noble metal.

FOOL'S GOLD

What exactly is fool's gold? It is any mineral that can be improperly or wrongly identified as gold. The minerals most often mistaken for gold are pyrite, chalcopyrite, pyrrhotite, marcasite and biotite. Pyrite is the mineral most often called fools gold. Pyrite is iron disulfide and is often found with substantial amounts of nickel and cobalt. It has a similar appearance to gold, but it is much lighter. It has a specific gravity of 4.9 to 5.2 and it is very brittle. Pyrite is identified by its lower specific gravity, or weight, and the fact it will fracture due to how brittle it is. Chalcopyrite and phryhotite are not as common as pyrite. Both have a dark streak and are lighter in weight and harder than gold. Neither of these minerals commonly occurs in crystalline form and most often found as irregularly shaped masses. They both tarnish easily, going from bronze or brassy yellow to yellowish or grayish brown. Biotite is basic potassium, magnesium, iron, and aluminum silicate (mica group). These are usually the very light minerals that shine in your gold pan. Biotite has a specific gravity of 2.8 to 3.4. These flakes, because of their lightweight and flat shapes, are often concentrated in quiet eddies and along sandbanks. Flakes of biotite are the most common forms of fool's gold.

OCCURRENCE

Gold is widely dispersed throughout all igneous rocks. It also occurs in the seawater in small amounts. Gold can be found in at least forty of the fifty states, but it is only found in commercial quantities in twenty-two of the states. It may be possible to find gold in a new area, but it is probably best to look for gold where it is known to exist. The gold bearing areas extend from North Carolina where gold was first discovered in 1540, Georgia in 1828, Alabama in 1830, to Western states and Canada where gold was discovered soon after 1848. I believe that the first discovery made in the United States was made by Hernando De Soto in 1540 in the Valley River in Cherokee County, North Carolina.

There is plenty of gold in the southern Appalachian states to keep us all busy. If you are a greenhorn, you may as well do your prospecting, as close to where you live as possible, so look for areas where excessive travel is not required, this is to keep expenses down to the hobby level.

PRODUCTION

Total world production of gold was estimated at 3 billion ounces, you would be able to put that amount of gold in a room that is 55'wide x 55' long x 55' high.

Thomas Jefferson's in of wrote about gold in Virginia in 1782. The total gold production of the United States has been roughly 310 million troy ounces. Placer gold was the primary objective of the old timer. The first verified lode mine in the United States was the Barringer Mine in Stanley County, North Carolina in 1825. The first verified gold mine in the United States was the Reed Gold mine in Cabarrus County, North Carolina in 1799. It started as simple placer mining and eventually the lode was found.

The largest gold producer in the United States is the Homestake Mining Company open pit mine at Lead, South Dakota. Kennecott Copper Corporation's open pit copper mine at Bingham, Utah, is also a large domestic producer of gold. These are very large operations that have tremendous amount of financial backing. Most of us are not interested in the large producers. The small placer operations are what most of us are interested in. I must inform you that roughly 12 percent of the gold produced came from placer deposits, so we can not even compare to the big mining companies.

USES

The demand for gold is increasing every year, and it was one of the firsts metals used by man. It's mainly used by governments as a standard to base their financial system. Gold coins were minted, but now gold is kept in reserve in bars in Fort Knox, Kentucky, as support for economic conditions by the United States government. Gold is also the standard of exchange in international trade. Nearly half of all gold ever mined is stashed by governments and stored in government vaults. But in recent years the governments are selling the gold off.

The jewelry industry uses over one third of the total gold produced. Most of that gold is alloyed, usually with copper. Most of the gold used in jewelry is used for rings and necklaces.

The largest industrial consumption of gold is in electrical components in the form of integrated circuits, connectors, and printed circuits boards. Dentistry use accounts for about 5 percent of the annual gold consumption. The art industry uses a portion of the total amount.

Gold was legalized in 1975, for private ownership. Private citizens for financial investment can now purchase gold. There are even coins minted for this purpose. No alloys have ever been developed that has all the desirable qualities of gold. Platinum family metals are used from time to time, but they lack the beauty of gold. Silver is occasionally substituted, but it is not as resistant to corrosion than gold.

TROY SYSTEM

Gold is weighed according to the troy system which is based on 1 troy oz. = 480 grains = 20 pennyweight = 1.097 avoirdupois oz. And 12 troy oz. = 1 troy pound = 1.3164 avoirdupois pound. You can find more information on weights and measures on my "Weight Conversion Table" page.

FINENESS

Gold normally contains some silver and often copper and iron. When silver is present in amounts greater than 20 percent, the alloy is known as electrum. Gold is commonly referred to according to its fineness or purity, which is expressed on parts per thousand. Most native gold contains 5-20 percent other metals and thus has a fineness of 800-950 fine.

KARAT SYSTEM

The term "karat", also refers to fineness or purity but is expressed on 24ths, 24 karat = 1000 fine = pure gold.

TYPES OF GOLD MINING

It is important to determine where you want to do your prospecting. But first you must understand the difference between hard rock gold mining (lode gold) and alluvial gold mining (placer gold). Lode gold mining is the place where gold is first deposited in veins or in ores. Placer gold is described as the gold that was eroded from veins or ore deposits and dispersed in rivers, streams, creeks, bench gravels, and any other place where it is not located on vein or ore deposits.

Mother Nature is constantly at work, daily there are major changes to the earth, which can create new lodes and placers. Just think about it almost any thing can create new places where gold is located. Here is a list of things that I am aware could influence where gold is found: floods, storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, freezing and thawing, faulting, tilting and folding, erosion, landslides and glacier action.

LODE MINES

There are two types of lode deposits; these are ore and vein. Vein deposits are usually quartz veins in solid rock, which contain gold in stringers and veins. There are some lode deposits that have gold finely disseminated throughout the surface mantle, this is what I call ore. These lode deposits are not mined by underground tunnels, but by the open pit method. This method, though, is more commonly used to mine glacial drifts or bench placers. In open pit mining of lodes, the overburden is first stripped off, and then the ore is removed from the pit by trucks or railroad cars. In open pit mining of placers the overburden is first stripped off and then the gold bearing gravel is ran through a variety of separation equipment, such as trommels, long toms, etc..

Lode mining for gold is neither a weekend entertainment nor a hobby to be undertaken upon retirement. It is a serious business requiring considerable metallurgical experience and finances to determine whether the gold bearing rock is worth the great expense it takes to process.

Lode mining is expensive. It takes professional evaluation, such as a mining engineer, or other experienced personnel to get the project of the ground. Some people consider bench (deposits high above stream), desert (dry areas with no water), and glacial drifts (gravel moved by ancient glaciers) to be lode mines, but I do not share this opinion. A lode mine in this web page is a mine that followed a vein of gold in tunnels underneath the ground or the excavation of ores that are gold tellurides. Since I am primarily a placer miner, this web page is more helpful to recreational prospectors such as myself. I list the lode mines on this web page because some of my best finds are in the streams below the lode mines. The lodes are usually associated with the placers, because that is how the old timers discovered the lodes. The old timers would trace color up a stream until they found the vein.

PLACER GOLD

There are many different types of placer gold deposits that the weekend recreational miner would be interested in. The first type of placer deposit we'll discuss is the river or creek placer. This type placer is the most common in the south. It usually consists of the gravel bars and gravel paystreaks on a gold bearing river. Usually the best gold in this type deposit is found in the cracks and crevices of the base rock (bedrock). Bedrock is a term that will be used throughout this web page.

The second type of placer deposit to be outlined is the bench placer. A bench placer is a placer that was left high and dry above the present streams. Bench placers are very common in the southeast because of the water worn terrain and age of the mountains.

Placer gold is what most every prospector who reads this web page is in search of. The thrill of seeing "color" glittering in the black sand at the bottom of your pan is one of the greatest thrills I can describe. The search for gold provides its own reward, it is a very active hobby and gives you plenty of good exercise, plus it gives you the opportunity to get rich without gambling in the stock market or worrying about bad investments. Finding gold is the object of the gold prospector. If you are serious and hope to find enough gold to make a profit, then you should have as much information as you can find. Research, knowledge and the correct equipment is the key to successful prospecting. Prospecting for placer gold is not expensive. It is possible to locate a deposit and work it with very little money. You can get by with a shovel, pick, gold pan or a sluice box.

Placer gold had to come from a lode gold source. The lode gold occurs in veins, stringers, or unusual shapes in quartz. Quartz is a white to black in color, although rose, purple (amethyst), yellow (citrine) or brown (smoky) quartz is common. Gold after it was eroded from quartz veins made its way to the rivers, creeks and streams, was ground by the moving water. The nuggets found in streams near their origin will be larger and the lower quantity of small gold.

One thing to remember when prospecting for placer gold is that gold is very heavy and usually concentrates itself down to bedrock. Bedrock is the base rock lying beneath the soil layers. This soil layer is called overburden.

Most of the placer gold is located in the cracks and crevices in bedrock. Not all gold is on bedrock, but that is the place to find large nuggets. The inside bend of the stream where the water slows is a good place to find gold. Gold is most often found in areas where the water slows or has restrictions such as rocks, boulders, trees etc. The successful gold prospector has learned how to evaluate creeks, streams, and rivers for good gold areas. I am not going to tell you every detail of placer geology in this web page, because many other fine books have been written on this subject. But by studying this and other handbooks you can learn about what effect eddies and other natural obstructions to the flow of the water and decide where the gold may be.

The river you are prospecting could have had a different path a few thousand years ago. This change in course could be of interest to you because these old riverbeds contain placer gold. Always look for these old beds some of them are very rich.

The best place to find an old riverbed is above the present river valley. These are known as terrace placers. Terrace placers could be several thousand feet away from the current river. Several places on my gold locations page I mention Terraces.

I am going to end this by saying that I did not go into great detail, I just touched on the surface, due to the fact that there are many other books that teach this subject with a lot more knowledge than I have. All I have done in this web page is outline the basics in which others have gone into great detail.