The pan is used to find alluvial gold- small flakes or nuggets found in ponds or streams. It is really just a frying pan without its handle. To find gold, miners shift the pan gently in the water so that the gold would sink to the bottom of the pan and the dirt would be separated from it.
Cradle
The cradle is a large, heavy wooden box-like object. It is used to separate dirt, clay and gravel from gold. Miners rock the cradle and as they do so, water washes away the dirt, leaving the gold to become stuck in the riffles (small dents) of the cradle.
Shaft Mining
Soon gold became hard to find just below the soil. Miners had to dig deeper to fetch gold, so they dug holes, or shafts into the ground. These shafts were normally one metre squared and 50 metres deep. Miners attached a bucket to a windlass using a long piece of rope, and one miner would be at the bottom of the shaft shoveling soil into the lowered bucket. Then a miner would use the windlass to bring the bucket up again, and two other miners would wash the soil into a cradle.
Pick and Shovel
The pick and shovel are simple, useful tools. On the gold fields, the pick was used to hack away rock and clay to reveal the gold beneath, while the shovel was mainly used for scooping soil and rocks into cradles or pans.
The pick and shovel are simple, useful tools. On the gold fields, the pick was used to hack away rock and clay to reveal the gold beneath, while the shovel was mainly used for scooping soil and rocks into cradles or pans.