An area adapted to surface-mining. Spanish.
1846. At present the old and the new Placer, near Santa Fe, have attracted most attention, and not only gold washes, but some gold mines too, are worked there.—A. Wislizenus (1848), ‘Tour of New Mexico,’ p. 24 (Stanford Dict.).
1849. The other party were direct from the gold mines, or placers, and were returning to San Francisco with the proceeds of their washings and diggings on the Yuba River.—Theodore T. Johnson, ‘Sights in the Gold Region,’ pp. 124–5 (N.Y.). (Italics in the original.)
1849. Will they all stop at the first placer, as a turkey-hen and her young ones would stop at the first ant-hill?—Mr. Benton of Missouri, U.S. Senate, Jan. 15: Cong. Globe, p. 258.
1850. If rich placers or gold mines should be discovered [in New Mexico], slavery would inevitably go there.—Mr. Bell of Tenn., the same, July 5: id., p. 1095, App.
1850. Thirty feet square is to be the size of a lot to be worked by manual labor in a placer.—Mr. Fremont of California, the same, Sept. 25: id., p. 1370, App.
1909. Perhaps no single fact is more responsible for the change that has taken place in the character of Western mining camps than the cessation of placer or gulch mining. A placer mine was the ideal poor man’s mine, from which, with the simple contrivance of a sluice box, he washed out precious nuggets of gold from the gravelly soil of the mountain gulches, with only the labor of shovelling the gravel into his “flume.” The placer mining days were the one’s that produced the Jack Hamlins and Tennessee’s Pardners.—N.Y. Evening Post, Feb. 22.
