Silver and Gold - Miners and Sluice Boxes

Miners and Sluice Boxes

Isaac Wallace Baker (1810-c.1862), Miners and Sluice Boxes, Quarter plate daguerreotype. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, gift of anonymous donor

In their unrelenting quest for gold, the forty-niners decimated the natural environment around them, damming and diverting rivers, logging forests, and wasting hillsides. This exploitation is evident in this daguerreotype, which also shows the telltale signs of a cooperative mining venture -- multiple miners working with a network of ditches and sluice boxes.