| Motherlode |
Articles about Mother Lode |
Website Links For Mother |
Information AboutMotherlode |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT MOTHER LODE | |
| gold mining | |
| metaphors | |
| california gold rush | |
|
In the United States, ''Mother Lode'' is most famously the name given to the long alignment of hard rock gold deposits stretching northwest to southeast in the Sierra Nevada of California . The California Mother Lode is a zone from one to four miles wide and 120 miles long, which stretches from Georgetown in El Dorado County on the north, through Amador, Calaveras, and Tuolomne counties, south to Mormon Bar in Mariposa county. It was discovered in the early 1850s, during the California Gold Rush . The zone contains hundreds of mines and prospects, including some of the best-known historic mines of the gold-rush era. Individual gold deposits within the Mother Lode are gold-bearing quartz veins up to 50 feet thick and a few thousand feet long. The California Mother Lode was one of the most productive gold-producing districts in the United States, but is now given over to tourism.A.H. Koschman and M.H. Bergendahl (1968) ''Principal Gold-Producing Districts of the United States''. US Geological Survey, Professional Paper 610, p.55 The California Gold Rush , as with most Gold Rush es, started with the discovery of Placer gold in sands and gravels of streambeds, where the gold had eroded out of the hard rock vein deposits. Placer miners followed the gold-bearing sands upstream to discover the source in the Bedrock . This source was the "mother" of the gold in the river and so was dubbed the "mother Lode ". A popular misconception is that small veins of gold or silver ore in a mining district are necessarily branches of a single rich and massive ''mother lode'' deep in the ground. This idea is contrary to modern theories of ore deposits. The term is also used Metaphor ically to refer to the origin of something valuable or in great abundance. REFERENCES See also |
|
|