What did forty-niners use r mining?

Question

what did the forty-niners ( gold rush people) use for mining? thanks.

Answer 1

pick axe

dynamite

water

manual labor to get the product out.

Answer 2

Because the gold in the California gravel beds was so richly concentrated, the early forty-niners simply panned for gold in California's rivers and streams, a form of placer mining

However, panning cannot be done on a large scale, and industrious miners and groups of miners graduated to placer mining "cradles" and "rockers" or "long-toms" to process larger volumes of gravel. In the most complex placer mining, groups of prospectors would divert the water from an entire river into a sluice alongside the river, and then dig for gold in the newly-exposed river bottom.