Location
This district is in southeastern Butte County about 10 miles southeast of Oroville. It is an extensive area of placer deposits that occur in the vicinity of the old towns of Bangor and Wyandotte. The Honcut dredging district is just to the southwest.
History
The district was originally mined during the gold rush. Extensive drift and hydraulic mining was done from the middle 1850s through the 1890s. Bangor, founded in 1855 by the Lumbert brothers and named for their home town in Maine, was an important mining and staging center. Numerous Chinese were in the district from the 1870s through the 1890s. This and the adjoining Honcut district were dredged in the early 1900s and again in the 1930s.
Geology
Tertiary gravels covering a broad 3- by 8-mile area are believed to represent an ancient delta of the Tertiary Yuba River. The channel flowed northwest through Bangor and then west. Farther west are shore gravels of Pleistocene age.
The channel gravels were mined by drifting, the shore gravels by hydraulicking, and the Recent gravels by dredging. The channel gravels are as much as 150 feet thick, well rounded, well cemented, and consist of intrusive and metamorphic rock fragments with 10 to 20 percent quartz. The gold was flaky and often rusty. A number of coarse nuggets were found, one of which was reported to have weighed 14 pounds. Bedrock consists mainly of greenstone and amphibolite.
Drift Mines
Bangor, Blue Lead, Catskill, Gray Lead, Turner.
Bibliography
Crawford, J. J., 1894, Bangor mine: California Min. Bur., Rept. 12, pp. 80-81.
Lindgren, Waldemar, 1895, Smartsville folio, California: U. S. Geol. Survey Geol. Atlas of the U. S., folio 18, 6 pp.
Lindgren, Waldemar, 1911, U. S. Geol. Survey Prof. Paper 73, pp. 122-123.
Logan, C. A., 1930, Butte County, Blue lead Mining Company: Cali. fornia Div. Min. Rept. 26, p. 387.
