Location and History
This district is in west-central Nevada County about seven miles due east of Nevada City. It includes the Tertiary placer "diggings" at Scotts Flat, Quaker Hill, Hunts Hill, Buckeye Hill, and Burrington Hill. The You Bet-Red Dog district lies immediately to the south and the Nevada City district to the west. The various mines were extensively hydraulicked from the 1850s through the 1880s, and later the tailings were reworked by Chinese miners. Also there was drift mining in the district. The area was prospected during the 1930s.
Geology
These deposits are in the north-northwest trending Tertiary gravel channel that extends from You Bet-Red Dog to North Columbia. A southwest-trending tributary comes into the area from Burrington Hill and joins this channel at Hunts Hill. At Hunts Hill and Quaker Hill the main channel is nearly 600 feet deep with bench gravels up to 300 feet in depth. The deep gravels are well-cemented and quartz-rich and, in places, were very rich in gold. The upper gravels usually are fine and contain abundant sand. The deep channel is believed to be continuous all the way from Hunts Hill to the Blue Tent district, a distance of seven miles. Bedrock in the east portion is slate and in the west, phyllite and greenstone. On the major ridges the gravels are capped by Tertiary andesite and rhyolite.
In 1911 Lindgren estimated that 12 million cubic yards of gravel had been removed from Scotts Flat and 35 million from Quaker Hill. He also estimated that a vast amount (140 million cubic yards) remained at Quaker Hill. The U. S. Army Engineers (jarman, 1927) estimated 50 million to 90 million cubic yards remained at Quaker Hill. They also estimated that 6.75 million cubic yards had been removed, and 4 million to 5 million remained at Hunts Hill.
Bibliography
Jarman, Arthur, 1927, Hunts Hill, Quaker Hill, and Buckeye Hill: California Min. Bur. Rept. 23, pp. 100-101.
Lindgren, Waldemar, 1911, Tertiary gravels of the Sierra Nevada: U.S. Geol. Survey Prof. Paper 73, pp. 143-144.
Lindgren, Waldemar, 1900, Colfax folio: U. S. Gear. Survey Gear. Atlas of the U.S., folio 66, 10 pp.
