The scales looked like they were made of gold, but I'm not sure. Scales were used for weighing gold. The gold was weighed an ounce at a time. I think the forty-niners, miners, and the store- keepers or the restaurant keepers used them to weigh the gold. Wells Fargo weighed out $55 million dollars worth of gold. The miners claimed they could show the weight of a pencil mark on a piece of paper because the scales were so precise.