545 hard-rock & placer mines, Placer County, Calif, RARE old 1st ed, locations !

Description

Rare 1936 1st ed. lists over 545
gold mines in Placer County, California
Lists more than 245 gold (quartz) mines and 300 placer mines;
pinpoints most with exact range-and-township coordinates!
T
his 83-year-old rare first-edition report lists
every known gold mine
— over 545 of them — in 1936 Placer County, California.
The head frame at the Auburn-Chicago mine, near Penryn.
If you pay 7 for this report, that means you're getting 545 deposits for about 30 cents each. Talk about a bargain!!
Or would you rather spend days of your valuable time exploring played-out mines from some hokey amateur rockhound book?
Let's face it: The best-known gold mines in Placer County have been picked clean for years. BUT this report lists the well-known locales
+AND+
the unknown locales — every single gold deposit in the county: big and little, famous and forgotten.
No fences
and no guards
Much of this area is accessible and completely deserted. You can go anywhere you want at these sites and pretty much do whatever you want, when you want, as long as it's legal.
There are no guards, fences, barking dogs or no trespassing signs. Much of this area is miles away from any town of any size and is on federal Bureau of Land Management or National Forest Service lands and is open to prospecting and mineral collecting.
First edition in nice shape
This is not a reprint, but a first edition, one of earliest reports on gold mining in Placer County to ever appear in the
California Journal of Mines and Geology
(for complete report condition, see "The Report")
.
This quarterly periodical is considered primary source material. And the book itself is in nice condition, one of the best copies that I have seen of this rare fragile title. So buy it now or forever hold your peace. Once it's gone, it's gone.
We're not talking descriptions of a few dinky little prospect pits here. "The variety, extent and richness of the gold placer mines (in Placer County) have been remarkable," according to this report. Especially rich are the deposits in the American River, Forest Hill Divide, Dutch Flat, Gold Run and Iowa Hill district. The Ophir mines alone produced "several million dollars."
Lists quartz mines and placers in two ways
One of the real values of this report is that it lists mines in two ways:
Open-pit mining of gold-bearing gossan ore at Dairy Farm mine, 1935.
First, it alphabetically summarizes the more important or interesting gold mines and prospects in the county. These descriptions can run from a few lines to several pages, depending on the importance of the mine.
Second, it also alphabetically lists in table form
every known
gold mine and prospect in the county. Each entry in this huge table — which runs for 18 pages in two sections —
includes the owner's name and address. But more importantly, the exact location of almost every prospect is given in
infallible range-and-township coordinates
! Just plug them into your GPS or look them up on the appropriate topo, and you're there.
Gold mines described
Here are just a few of the gold mines described in the text:
Dairy Farm mine
, eight miles northeast of Sheridan — produced considerable gold from 1913 to 1918.
Gravel bank at Paragon mine, Placer County, at the site of slide which buried monitors and pipe and killed one man in May 1935.
Ferrier Diggings (Johnny Rafael mines)
, in Lady Canyon, middle fork of the American River — Andrew Ferrier, the discoverer, "is reported to have taken out a small fortune." Ore was gold-bearing clay.
Gold Dike mine
, in the Canada Hill district, 10 miles from Westvile — Ore taken out in 1933 yielded a maximum of a ton. Two men were working in August, 1935.
Herman mine
, five miles south of Westville — has yielded 0,000 to date. In August, 21 men were employed; a cook house and club house were being built. "It was planned to use steam to generate electric power, and a generator was being installed."
Rawhide mine
, on Texas Ridge, between the branches of North Fork of the American River — has four adits (tunnels) totaling 6,189 feet (over a mile)! Thirty men were employed in May 1935. Total recorded production has been "a little over
0,000." The principal vein is "a stringer lead in a dike lying between a hanging wall of slate and a footwall of igneous rock."
Valley View
(also called Harpending or Whiskey Hill), six miles north of Lincoln — had a 40-stamp mill crushing ore in the 1860s. "For many years the water flowing from an old adit has been used locally and has been bottled and sold under the name of Kilaga Water, for the treatment of certain skin diseases and poison oak."
Bob Lewis drift mine
, in the Michigan Bluff district — gravel was blue and cemented. "A 10-stamp mill crushed 25 tons a day, which was mined by a crew of five breasters and one carman."
Burns mine
, one half mile from Michigan Bluff — reopening of this old drift mine was started in March 1934 by D. Young, J. Simpson and A. M. Dunlop. "The present owners cleaned out and retimbered the longer adit and drove a new tunnel about 600 feet long, where gravel was reported in 1934."
Paragon mine
, two miles from Forest Hill at the former site of Bath — on May 29, 1935, at the end of the piping season, a serious bank slide occurred killing one man.
And many more mines, large and small, active and abandoned, famous and forgotten
.
Treasure trove of information
How can you look for "color" in Placer County mine dumps or streams if you don't know where the best dumps or streams are? Why waste weekends randomly digging through tailing piles for specimens? This book will lead you to the most likely areas to hit pay dirt!
It's also a treasure trove of information for history buffs, bottle collectors, photographers, geologists, hikers, offroaders, rockhounds, metal detectorists — just about anyone interested in learning about, exploring or prospecting old mine sites in historic Placer County.
This is not some gift-shop rockhound book; it was prepared by the California Division of Mines — written about miners for miners by miners.
When I say that this report is rare, I don't use that term lightly. I have seen a handful of these in 22 years of looking for California mining items. No collection of Placer County or California mining memorabilia is complete without this hard-to-find report — packed with geologic information, ore value, mine-production stats, history, even claim holders' names and addresses.
Also a valuable tool for stock certificate collectors
Because this report lists mine owners and different names for the same mine, it is also a valuable tool for collectors of stock certificates.
Some mine descriptions contain brief histories of the mines in question (including dates of actual production) and previous owners.
The report also has an article on Borax Lake in Lake County, California.
Where is it?
Placer County — in Northern California — extends from the eastern side of Sacramento Valley to the Nevada state line, including a large part of Lake Tahoe. Adjacent counties are Nevada, Yuba, Sutter, Sacramento and El Dorado.
The Book:
The Placer County gold mines article is part of a larger book,
California Journal of Mines and Geology,
(cover, below right), Vol.
32, No. 1, January 1936, State Division of Mines, San Francisco, size: six by nine inches, stiff paper covers, about 124 pages total, about 90 pages in the Placer County gold article: "Gold Mines of Placer County," by C. A. Logan, mining engineer
.
Overall in good shape. Writing on cover. Binding is holding, spine is slightly damaged. Bumped corners, some dogeared pages. Some toning on some pages and cover, but nothing that interferes readability. All of this sounds much worse than it is; most pages are barely yellowed; printing is black with very little fading. All in all, one of the best copies that I have seen of this rare report.
As always, I am
extremely
conservative about rating book condition and very detailed in listing any potential flaw, no matter how slight. You get what you pay for. If you want a trashed book, filled with ripped pages, that the seller just "somehow forgot" to tell you about in his ad, then look elsewhere on ebay.
Payment methods and domestic shipping
Paypal only. FREE shipping. WOW!!! Hoo hah! I pride myself on bulletproof packaging and ship in sturdy cardboard boxes or reinforced padded envelopes.
The fine print:
Feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions about the item or terms of sale.
I post feedback once a week. Not responsible for typographical errors.
Good luck and thanks for looking!
Surface plant at Dairy Farm mine, near Sheridan, 1935.
Nearby counties
Nearby counties include Alpine, Mono, Inyo, Amador, Calaveras, San Joaquin, Contra Costa, Solano, Yolo, Colusa, Glenn, Butte, Plumas, Sierra, Tehama and Lassen. Cities and towns in Placer include Alpine Meadows, Alta, Applegate, Auburn, Blue Canyon, Bowman, Carnelian Bay, Colfax, Dutch Flat, Emigrant Gap, Foresthill, Gold Run, Granite Bay, Homewood, Iowa Hill, Kings Beach, Lincoln, Loomis, Magra, Meadow Vista, Newcastle, Olympic Valley, Ophir, Penryn, Rocklin, Roseville, Sheridan, Tahoe City, Tahoe Vista and Weimar.
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