Scattered throughout the property are more signs of the early miners. This doesn't look like much, but it's actually an old sluicebox hand-cut from local wood and held together with old square nails from a blacksmith. Since this wasn't exactly the big city, they would have had to pack in both the saw to cut the wood and any materials needed to build the sluicebox. The only things that were already here were water, trees, rocks, hopefully lots of gold, and many wild animals and insects. Everything else had to be brought in, likely up the Stikine River to Telegraph Creek, then over land to Dease Lake, which is in the Arctic watershed. They could then float down the Dease River and eventually walk up McDame Creek, which flows into the Dease River. The waterways were the highways of the day and were well used by the gold seekers.
One of the old Chinese miners was still here in the 1930's working the property. We figure that this was his sluicebox and one of the last places that he mined.
This box is a little more complete so likely isn't as old. It used slightly more modern round nails rather than the old square nails of the early box builders. He still mined like the earlier miners from some 50 years before he was here, but on a smaller scale.
The second bench above McDame Creek is probably 100 feet or so above the creek so he still had to bring his water from up high in the old water channels. He'd place the old box right where the water was running so that it would flow through the box allowing him to mine.
He dug everything out by hand, close to his sluicebox. Cleanup would have been done entirely by hand-panning. He mined only the shallow ground, strip mining one place and then jumping to another place. Scott's test holes near the old sluicebox proved to have some nice gold - some that the last of the old-timers missed - and they didn't miss much of the easy-to-get-to gold.
