Gold Rush Terminology
When researching the past you must understand the language from the past and as humans cannot leave things without change the language can be complicated.
- ADIT – An adit is a more or less horizontal drive (walk-in mine) into a hill that is usually driven for the purpose of intersecting or mining an ore body. An adit may also be driven into a hill to intersect or connect a shaft for the purpose of dewatering. Adits were commonly driven on a slight incline to enable loaded mine trucks to have the advantage of a downhill run out, while the empty (lighter) truck was pushed uphill back into the hill. An adit only becomes a tunnel if it comes out again on the hill somewhere, like a train tunnel.
- AIR SHAFT – This term is one of the over used ones. There is a lot of effort in digging a mine. You don’t do it if you don’t have to. The air shaft is usually an abandoned shaft which has been intersected during the normal course of following the common denominator (usually a quartz vein) or driven a small distance to or along a vein to a known abandoned or disused shaft. An intersection provides ventilation. Two entrances to the surface provide a natural airflow, hence the term air shaft.
- ALLOY – Mixture of two or more metals.
- ALLUVIAL – Earth material moved and washed or transported by water. Alluvial gold (touched by water).
- AMALGAM – Mixture of gold and mercury.
- ANTICLINE – The arch of a fold within strata. Bent rock, the curved over hump.
- AURIFEROUS – Containing gold.
- BAD TURN – Got sick unexpectedly.
- BANJO – An alluvial gold washing trough, a shovel, musical instrument, a carrying case for Chinese gold scales.
- BILLY – A can used to boil water mostly for a cup of tea on a campfire. Also refers to a male goat.
- BLUEY – A blanket commonly used by traveling diggers in which they rolled up their belongings.
- BORING – Drilling holes into hard rock.
- BULLOCKY – Person in charge or driver of bullock team.
- BULLOCK – Male gender of cattle after castration. Bull becomes a bullock. Usually the larger and older variety preferred for work in fields and haulage. Also called a steer, which refers to any age.
- BULLWHEEL – A belt driven drive wheel, located on the side of a machine such as on a stamper battery.
- BUMBLE FOOTED – Usually refers to a horse that doesn’t pick its feet up properly when walking and half trips all the time.
- CALIFORNIAN HAT – Or Windsail. Like a sail this calico or canvas funnel, faced into the wind at the top of a shaft and directed the airflow down the shaft.
- CANT HOOK – Device used to turn (move) logs and timber poles.
- CHINAMANS HORSE – Refers to a horse that stops to go to the toilet while you are riding it.
- CLEANING UP – After the stamper battery has stopped cleaning up refers to getting the gold and or separating the gold and mercury from the copper plates.
- COLLAR – Entry to a shaft. Usually supported by pig stying timber for 10 or 15 feet to support the upper loose ground.
- COUNTRY ROCK – Normal rock in an area. The rock that surrounds a quartz vein or seam.
- COUSIN JACK – Cornish miners.
- GULLY RAKER – Large rain causing gullies to flow with a lot of movement.
- CRADLE – Alluvial gold washing box with slides and riffles to catch gold.
- CRIBBING – Cribbing time meant playing the card game cribbage, usually in the lunchroom when you should have been working. The lunch box became known as a crib box and lunch was refereed to as having your crib. The term also applied to the close setting of timbers usually in porous ground to stop leaching.
- CRUCIBLE – Used to melt gold.
- DEEP LEED – A run of alluvial gravel’s or a gold bearing alluvial seam that uses underground methods to extract it.
- DETONATOR – Something that will set off or initiate an explosive.
- DISHING – Gold Panning.
- DOLLY POT – Small hand operated (motor and pestle) rock crusher used to sample for ore and to sample ore for gold. Most were made from mercury bottles.
- DONKEY – A stationary steam engine.
- DREDGING – Using a machine to dig up and sought through alluvial gravel’s in a watercourse.
- DRIVE – An underground excavation within the mine.
- EXPLOSIVE – Any substance that will when detonated violently and quicker than the speed of sound (hence the sonic boom or loud bang) increase in size.
- FACE – The dead end of any section of an underground working. That’s what you will hit if you walk in without a light.
- FALL OF EARTH – Cave in.
- FIRING – The term fire in the hole denotes a firing in progress. Refers to the setting off of explosives.
- FLOATER – Rocks or ground that appears to be solid that is not attached to the bedrock or country rock.
- FOWL AIR – A possible problem underground. No taste, smell, colours, unfortunately no OXYGEN! Affected by fowl air underground your heart rate increases, you become short of breath and faint before you expire if you do not beat a hasty retreat.
- FOSSICKER – Alluvial surface gold digger. Hence the term fossicking license.
- GADD – A small rock wedge or chisel also known as a moil.
- GIN POLE – Long portable stick with a pulley on top for use as a crane usually to lift shed poles into position.
- GOLD – A naturally occurring, homogenous, inorganic substance of definite or fairly definite chemical composition with characteristics physical properties, formed by the chain reaction of nuclear reactions involved in a super nova and that specific atomic structure is classified as GOLD. From the Drinkwater Doctrine of metallurgic sciences in geophysics and associated science!
- GOOLEY OR GOOK – A rock.
- GRADE – The quantity of minerals present in an ore, e.g. 100 ozs to the ton is high-grade ore.
- GRASS CUTTER – Someone who drives well over on the edge of a dirt road.
- GRASS HOPPER – A Kangaroo.
- GRAIN – A weight reference to gold.
- JACK –
- A male donkey.
- A lifting device, e.g. Wallaby Jack used to change wheels on Bullock wagons or lift mine trucks back onto lines after derailment.
- A shortened version of the name John.
- A common name for any male person who you did not really know. Today people use the expression “man”.
- A prefix to suggest something about that person as follows.
- JACK THE JOURNEY MAN – Any traveler.
- JACK OF ALL TRADES – A person who is familiar with the trades of many different jobs.
- JOHNNY – A Chinese person on the goldfields.
- JOURNEY MAN – A Blacksmith who has completed his trade and is traveling to work for master blacksmiths in order to gain experience.
- HAMMER AND TAP – The process of drilling holes in hard rock by manually hitting and turning (rotating) a drill steel.
- LAGGING – Secondary timber placed behind main timber in a shaft, drive, tunnel or adit to support loose rock.
- MAN KILLER – A hand held tool like an axe or pick that is really too big for the job.
- MINER – On the goldfields a miner looked for reef gold.
- MULLOCK – Waste rock thrown outside a shaft or other underground working around the entrance forming a heap. Mullock heap.
- NUGGET – Larger than normal piece of alluvial gold. A small pieces a colour, then a speck then a Nugget. The first gold commissioner on the Ophir Goldfield, R.J. Hardy observed a nugget was half an ounce or more and held special attraction to fossickers.
- ORE – A rock that holds a metal you want. If quartz has gold in it then that quartz is classed as ore.
- PANNING – The first Australian gold pans were frying pans with the handles removed. Therefore the frying pan was no good for frying but good for gold so it became gold panning with a gold pan.
- POMMY – A New Chum to the Colony. New chums especially from England unaccustomed to the Australian climate would get sunburn especially on the facial checks. Until they tanned and acclimatized they were named after the colour of the fruit pomegranate, which is red.
- POVERTY POT – Small container into which you placed the results of each dish until the end of the day, when you washed up.
- PUDDLE – Soaking alluvial wash to make it easier to recover the gold. Gold panning was sometimes referred to as puddling a dish. A puddling machine that was whim operated used a horse to walk around a circular trough to rake over water soaked paydirt.
- QUARTZ – Olivine rich. Olivine is the most common mineral on earth. Silica based it is an igneous rock that transported impurities towards the surface of the earth.. Weighs 165 lbs. per cubic foot.
- RED COATS – Police in 1800s named after the British red uniform.
- REEF AND REEF GOLD – The reef is the seam of rock the gold comes from and reef gold depicts it as being located or recovered from the reef.
- RETORT – Used to separate or vaporize off mercury from gold.
- ROUND – A pattern of drill holes bored for a firing.
- RUSH – Refers to uncontrolled movement of animals, in America it’s called a stampede. Most commonly used to describe spooked cattle, however for a period in time applied to the movement of gold diggers towards goldfields.
- SHAFT – A vertical or semi vertical excavation into the earth. Underlay shaft is on an angle.
- SHANKSES PONY – An imaginary horse to go from one place to another. You really are walking, you haven’t got a horse.
- SINKING – The process of downward excavation.
- SLUICE – A long inclined (one in twelve drop) trough through which water flows with gravel and dirt. If all works well gold is trapped by obstructions called riffles.
- SPECIMEN – Larger than normal piece of reef gold.
- SPIDER MINERS – Fashioned piece of metal used to hold a candle underground. Usually with a hook and point.
- STICK MAN – A pensioner. Not in the work force, unable to work.
- TAILINGS – The already treated gold bearing material. E.g. tailings dam or heap.
- TAILING – The art of holding onto a horses tail while the horse walks uphill and tows you along behind.
- TAMPING – Or stemming. The act of packing a substance in behind an explosive to make it air tight and therefore work more efficiently.
- TIP SPIDER – (bitten by) rocks falling out of mine truck or bucket. Been bitten by a tip spider if you get you finger caught between rocks.
- WASHING UP – Recovering the gold at the end of the day from an alluvial gold machine.
- WHINZE – A shaft within an underground working.
- WHITE KANGAROO – A roadside guide post.
- WHIP SHY – Doesn’t like loud noise like the crack of a stock whip.