Most modern placer miners dig through the overburden with heavy equipment such as front-end loaders or excavators to get at the mining materials and pump water up from a nearby river or stream. The early miners had no mechanical way of pumping water up hill so had to use the forces of gravity to divert water from up high in the mountains to use to wash the gravel and eventually expose the gold.
These photos from one of the upper benches show clearly how the old timers mined in rows - they'd 'row' the rocks off as they mined the material, first under the rows of rocks, then in between. What they left looks almost like a man-made maze of boulders - with some rows being three or four feet high.
Each of these rocks was moved and deliberately placed by hand some 130 years ago. These mazes of rocks can be found all over the Holloway Bar property and most of the ground that could be reached with the old water trenches was mined at some point.
