Gold Miners usually looked for gold in the water. They would use pans or slides to look through the water. The gold would sparkle and the miners needed to look through all of the dirt to find just a little bit of gold. Later on, the miners could dig deep holes in the mountains to find more gold, but this was hard and expensive. The miners wanted to "GET RICH" but most of them didn't earn a lot of money and the gold was hard to find.