Gold clean-up, 1920s

October is American Archives Month, and the Alaska Film Archives at University of Alaska Fairbanks is celebrating by highlighting some earlier but lesser known films in its collection. This home movie clip features scenes of men and women "cleaning-up" gold at a mining operation in Interior Alaska in the mid-1920s. The scenes in this film are slightly out of order, but the process is basically this: A large bucket is used to haul gold-bearing gravel out of a mine shaft. Miners run gravel and water through a sluice box, then sweep up the gold particles that collect in the bottom of the sluice. They heat the gold particles over a stove in order to dry them. Impurities are separated from the gold by using a magnet to remove magnetic non-gold particles, and by flipping the gold in a pan to allow lighter non-gold particles to surface or be swept away in the breeze. Finally, the gold is measured and weighed (B&W/Silent/16mm film).
This sequence is an excerpt from AAF-62 from the Cann & Cathey collection held by the Alaska Film Archives, a unit of the Alaska and Polar Regions Collections & Archives Department in the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks. For more information please contact the Alaska Film Archives.
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