I live in and detect mostly in El Dorado County, California in search of early Gold Rush camps and settlements. The other day I was detecting a new area down on a creek and it was clear that no other detectorists had ever been there before me, great success!! Period 1850s targets began coming out of the ground and then I got a MONSTROUS overload signal on my CTX...I figured it was a cast iron stove door or something similar. I dug down and about 8” down I began unearthing a sluice rake, and next to it was an upside-down gold pan! Those who detect in the mother lode know how hard it is to find an intact gold pan as they are extremely brittle and disintegrate in the ground. I got these out of the hole and underneath the gold pan was ANOTHER gold pan! Two intact gold pans in one hole doesn’t happen...it just doesn’t...but there was still more. Underneath the gold pans were three intact pick heads, a sledge hammer, and two axe heads. In the same hole next to the gold pans was two intact period shovels, and underneath those was what I thought was another gold pan, but it turned out to be an upside-down long handled skillet. Underneath the skillet was two intact 3 prong forks and two spreader knives....and yet there was still more! Beneath the silverware was a small cooking pot with lid, a coffee pot with lid (sadly destroyed during the trip home), a broken pewter or Britannia metal spoon, 2 metal dinner plates, a fully intact JW Hunnewell condiment bottle, and the extremely brittle remains of what I can only assume was a rubberized tarp or tent material all folded up at the bottom of the hole. It took several hours to dig it all and 2 trips (2.4 miles each way) to carry it all out. It is literally a gold miner’s starter kit all in one hole! Truly one of the most epic finds of my life and I will never forget what it was like unearthing all of this at once!
Total contents of the cache:
1 sluice rake
2 gold pans
3 picks
2 shovels
2 axes
1 sledge hammer
2 forks
2 spreaders
1 spoon
1 skillet
1 small cooking pot with lid
1 coffee pot with lid (Destroyed)
2 metal plates
1 JW Hunnewell condiment bottle
1 folded up tarp/tent (destroyed)
That’s cool! You could write a story around that cache. Who knows, the miner might have hit a gold streak and buried everything till he could return with more equipment....endless possibilities.
I was wondering the exact same thing. This stuff was deliberately stacked this way and buried, it wasn’t accidentally or haphazardly just tossed in a pile. It was also buried deep, about a foot and a half or so maybe deeper; whereas most of the relics I recover from gold rush sites are usually less than 4 inches deep. I think that it was cached there with intent to return when the weather got more favorable or maybe they took ill and buried their gear and went to the nearest town to recover and didn’t...I don’t believe it’s an “I quit” pile or anything like that, if you quit or give up you’re not going to take the time to bury your costly equipment you’re going to sell it to try and recover some of your expenses, or you’ll just throw it on the ground and leave. It’s definitely a head scratcher lol
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