Lawrence County South Dakota Gold Production |
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SQUAW CREEK DISTRICT
The Squaw Creek district, which includes the Ragged Top, Elk Mountain, and Carbonate areas, is in western Lawrence County west of the Bald Mountain and Garden districts. The recorded gold production of the district through 1959 was about 76,000 ounces, of which about 75,800 ounces came from the Ragged Top Mountain area.
Lead and silver ores were discovered in the Carbonate area in the early 1880's and peak production was from 1885 to 1891. Only small amounts of gold were recovered as a byproduct from this ore (Allsman, 1940, p. 53). In 1896 considerable excitement was caused by the discovery of boulders of silicified limestone containing gold in the Ragged Top Mountain area. Shortly thereafter gold lodes were found west and south of Ragged Top Mountain and in the Squaw Creek and Annie Creek areas. The deposits north of Ragged Top Mountain yielded about $316,000 in gold (15,285 ounces) from 1896 to 1899. The mines west of Ragged Top Mountain were most active from 1899 to 1906 (Allsman, 1940, p. 53). After 1914 the district declined, and only a few ounces of gold from scattered placer activities was reported from 1915 through 1959.
The Squaw Creek district is a plateau is 2.5 miles wide and 5 miles long on the northwest side of the Black Hills dome. The Mississippian Pahasapa Limestone, which forms the caprock on the plateau, is underlain by the Cambrian sedimentary rocks which are exposed along streams that have cut through the limestone. The sedimentary rocks are intruded by Tertiary porphyry bodies, and in the Ragged Top Mountain area a laccolith of phonolite is intruded at the base of the Carboniferous beds (Irving and others, 1904, p. 172). The ore bodies occur in the flat-lying Pahasapa Limestone adjoining the phonolite mass.
The ore deposits occur in silicified vertical fractures and in irregular masses of silicified limestone in the Pahasapa. The most productive ore bodies, west of Ragged Top Mountain, are flat shoots near the surface, which apparently are lateral extensions from the tops of vertical fissure veins. A thin, relatively impervious capping, which seems to cover most of the deposits, apparently caused the rising mineralizing solutions to spread below the cap, thus forming the flat ore bodies (Allsman, 1940, p. 52). The ore body consists of light-buff silicified limestone and purple fluorite containing gold, silver, and tellurium. The presence of tellurium indicates that the precious metals probably occur as tellurides in the unaltered ore. In general the veins are shallow and are said to become narrow at depth; in places ore bodies pinch out at depths of 60 feet. The veins have not been explored generally to any great depth (Irving and others, 1904, p. 173-177).
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