Although I am running the risk of repeating something someone else has pointed out in this long thread (I haven't read it all) I may be able to add a bit to the discussion of the meaning of the verse kat quoted in the thread-starting post.

"I've wandered all over this country,
Prospecting and digging for gold.
I've tunneled, hydraulicked, and cradled,
And I have been frequently sold."

The verse is certainly about gold, mentioning five activities in the one verse that are related to gold. "Prospecting" is self-explanatory, finding gold. The next four verbs are ways of getting gold.

Digging is the most obvious.

Tunneling is hard-rock mining, getting gold from the rock where it is embedded in tiny particles. It means the rock has to be blasted out, crushed by powerful hammers, and then the gold separated from the broken rock.

Hydraulics is the washing down of hillsides of overburden to get to the gold strata below. Huge hoses called Monitors were set up in the Gold Country of California and the powerful water blast literally ripped away trees, plants, and soil and washed them all into the streams and rivers. The debris made its way to San Francisco Bay where it silted up the bottom. In Dana's book, Two Years Before the Mast, he describes sailing into Yerba Buena (Pre-Gold Rush San Francisco) and mentions that the bottom of the bay was light-colored and visible from the deck. Today, that is very hard to believe. There are now swamps and marshes in places where there used to be river runs, all due to mining excesses of what is getting to be one and a half centuries ago. The waste created by hydraulicking set off an early form of the conservation movement.

Hydraulics were used in other gold districts but it happens that I am most familiar with Northern California where it is still possible to see the canyons of bare rock where the water cannons did their work long ago.

Cradling is another way of separating gold from not-gold. It is kind of an automated panning process. A cradle can be a homemade device operated by one man or a larger machine operated by a crew. They are still used today.

To sum it all up, when this song was current, listeners would have known that the singer was an experienced, if not successful, gold-seeker.

I hope this adds to your enjoyment of the song.

Sourdough