I suspect they just didn't have the capital to overcome that sinking." To do that, large dredge boats would be assembled on site, floating in man-made ponds that moved with the dredge as it dug up the earth in front of it.Įven though it seems like there was a lot of gold being brought out of the dredges, they had huge expenses - manpower, maintaining the dredges, paying for the power, everything else. It couldn't be mined with traditional mining techniques, it had to be dug up. That gold lay on average around 30 feet below the ground. This dredge operated from 1909 to 1922, removing around $7 million in gold. Because of the nature of gold being very heavy, the gold over eons ended up down at the bedrock level with layers of silt over the top of it." The Reiling Dredge as it appeared when in opperation along French Gulch, east of Breckenridge. "The dredges were going after gold that had been eroded through time by the forces of nature and had been brought down into the valley floor. Larry Crispell of the Breckenridge Heritage Alliance explains. Getting to that gold required a new form of mining -the dredge. Then the shaft mines, but there was money to be made on the valley floor. "That is a very rich history, a very rich story for Breckenridge."įirst came the placer mines along the streambanks. "Breckenridge was founded on the discovery of gold," says Wendy Wolfe, who sits on the Breckenridge town council. These are the tailings piles from the numerous gold dredges that operated in the area up in the early half of the 20th century. (CBS4) - They're scars left over from a bygone era - huge piles of torn-up earth that lie in the valleys surrounding Breckenridge.
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