The Young America mine was located in the Sardine Lakes area, just a few miles north of Sierra City, California. The operation's stamp mill was situated in a particularly spectacular location on the shore of Lower Sardine Lake, as the photos in this collection reveal.

The stamp mill was the big gold machine of its day. By 1850 in California all of the rivers and streams had been picked clean of placer gold. It didn't take long for miners to follow the gold deep into the Sierra's steep valleys to snow white quartz outcroppings.

During the California Gold Rush, Hendy Iron Works built mining and stamp mill machinery exclusively. They supplied mining operations around the world with 5-stamp mills that could operate as a single unit or as multiple units of up to 100 stamps, with 20 – 40 stamps as the most common installation.

 — Bodie's gold mining was at its peak around 1880. During that year over $3 million in gold bullion was shipped out of the town. There were over 30 mines operating in the area and nine stamp mills crushing the ore and using the mercury process.

 — Soon after miners discovered gold in underground quartz veins, mills were brought in to process ore. Dating back to at least the 1500's, the mills used heavy iron pounders called stamps to crush the rock. (A historical marker located in Coloma in El Dorado County, California.)

There are many different techniques to process the vast variety of ores that came out of western mines, and many mines often employed their own milling methods. This article will focus on the most common type of ore processing facility – the stamp mill.

The stamp mill is a complex machine that crushes ore to extract valuable metals. Its main components include: Stamps: These are the heavy iron or steel tools that crush the ore. Each stamp consists of a shaft (stem) with a heavy metal shoe attached to the bottom.

The Joshua Hendy Stamp Mill, is enclosed in a stamp mill building and provides a full explanation of the gold extraction process from the ore. The mill, on its original site, is easily viewed from various points in the building.

The following image shows a battery of stamps that were used to crush the ore into fine dust. The photo contains the caption: "Clean Up day at the Deadwood Terra Gold Stamp Mill; one of the Homestake mills, Terraville, Dakota."

 — Cave Creek Museum is home to a fully operational stamp mill that was used to extract gold more than a century ago. The Arizona Gold Mining Experience offers a glimpse into what it was like to be an Arizona miner in 1910.