Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/64

42 muddy stream ran down a series of wooden flumes or sluices, in the bottoms of which were pockets and transverse ledges to catch the heavier particles of gold and the black sand with which the gold was mixed. After it had passed through these flumes, the stream was again raised, by means of an Archimedean screw, to a height of twenty or thirty feet, and turned into another series of sluices, where it finally parted with its last and lightest flakes of precious metal. From 460 to 560 tons of earth were churned and washed in this manner every day, with a product ranging in value from $235 to $285, the average yield of the auriferous earth being about 51 cents a ton. Mr. Nesterófski said that he expected to get three puds, or about 131 pounds (troy) of gold out of the Andréyefski priisk before the end of the working season. This would represent a value of about $30,000. The average number of men and women employed in the placer was 150. They worked from 5 to 5, with from one to two hours' rest at noon, and their wages ranged from 17 cents a day for girls and women to 50 cents a day for men that furnished their own horses and carts. Out of these wages they had to pay $2 a hundredweight for coarse wheaten flour, 5 cents a pound for second quality meat, and about 75 cents a hundredweight for oats. Nothing, of course, but the direst necessity will force a woman to toil strenuously in a gold placer eleven hours a day for a dollar and two cents a week; and yet I saw many women, and a number of young girls, engaged in such work and receiving such wages, in the Andréyefski priisk. The life of men in the Siberian gold placers is a life of terrible hardship, privation, and suffering; but for the women it must be worse than penal servitude.

We did not leave the priisk until late in the afternoon, when the last sluice had been "cleaned up" for the night, the last flake of gold separated with a magnet from the heavy "iron sand," and a little more than a pound of gold dust locked up in an iron flask as the proceeds of 500 tons of