Location and History
This district is in the south-west corner of Sierra County at the site of the old town of Pike or Pike City. Some of the early-day miners came from Pike, Missouri. The district, 12 miles northeast of North San Juan and 26 miles northeast of Nevada City, includes the Tippicanoe, Negro Tent, Snowden Hill, and Grizzly Gulch areas. The area was originally mined during the gold rush, and the Alaska mine was worked on a large scale from 1863 to 1916. The Pleasant View hydraulic mine was active in 1962 and 1963.
Geology and Ore Deposits
The district is underlain by meta diabase, serpentine, and irregular bodies of amphibolite. Fine-grained phyllite and quartzite of the Delhi Formation (Carboniferous) lie on the east side.
Lenticular quartz veins with calcite occur chiefly in the metadiabase. The ore bodies contain free gold and often abundant sulfides, including galena. There are some extensive ore shoots and some high-grade pockets. The gold often is coarse. Several patches of Tertiary quartz-rich gravel are a few acres in extent, some of the gravel capped by andesite.
Mines
Lode: Alaska $1 million+, American Flat, Beame, Blue Grouse, Bowman, General Grant. Placer:
Grizzly Gulch, Mt. Alta, Orient, Pleasant View, Tippicanoe, True Grit.
Bibliography
Averill, C. V., 1942, Sierra County, Alaska mine: California Div. Mines Rept. 38, pp. 17-18.
Lindgren, Waldemar, 1900, Colfax folio, California: U.S. Geol.
Survey Geol. Atlas of the U.S., folio 66, 10 pp.
Lindgren, Waldemar, 1911, Tertiary gravels of the Sierra Nevada: U.S. Geal. Survey Prof. Paper 73, p. 138.
MacBoyle, Errol, 1920, Sierra County, Pike mining district: California Min. Bur. Rept. 16, pp. 14-15.
