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Historic Valley Gold #3
20 Acre Placer Claim - Pikes Peak District - Powell County, Montana
Presenting the Historic Valley Gold 3 Placer Mining Claim for sale, a 20 Acre Unpatented Placer Mining Claim. The claim is located just outside of Gold Creek, Montana. MCC 240307
This is a remote Montana gold mine. The Valley Gold 3 Placer Gold Claim offers impressive mining opportunities. An extensive amount of gravel bars as well as the natural streambed support productive gold recovery. The claim is suited for most types of gold mining activities from panning, sluicing and high-banking to metal detecting, dowsing and more. Pike's Peak Creek which runs through the middle of the claim provides plenty of year round water for all your mining needs. During surveying gold was easily found in the material by panning. The valley bottom is old river bed material. The higher benches also hold old river bed material. The claim boasts excellent access and does get visitors driving through on the road. The claim was originally surveyed and sampled for rich, free gold deposits in the gravels. There are plenty of areas to camp near this claim. This is a unique claim that is in a valley of old glacial till.
The creek bed is over 600 feet on this claim and there is water year round. It is likely there is some native silver, sapphires, and possibly some relics to be found on the claim but the primary commodity will be gold. This is not a claim to pass up!
Pike's Peak Creek offers a wealth of gravel bars and hard-packed streambed; ideal spots to high-bank, sluice, metal detect, or pan. It is likely there has been some work done after 1900 based on the remnants and items seen in the area. It is estimated by the surveyors that the claim has been worked intermittently in the early 1900's. No effort to mine for many decades is evident. The gold that you will find on this claim has been washing down from the mines, hills and gulches above and depositing and replenishing the gold on this claim. The ground in the Pikes Peak area is known to average 1 ozt/20 yrds. This ground is glacial till that was deposited by 2 or 3 glaciers. These glaciers scaped the top off the mountains above the creeks in the area and deposited the gold bearing material in the valley where this claim is located. All of the 20 acres holds gold at an average of 1 oz/20 yrds.
There is direct road access to this claim and room for staging, parking and other operations. This is an unpatented mining claim for sale. Mineral rights only for recreational mining. The land is public land. This is not a homestead or land for sale.
The best gold is on bedrock but at times there is a clay layer that is a false bedrock and the gold will be on top of this layer. If you want a challenge the clay layer can also hold some nice gold as well. Pike's Peak Creek is one of the creeks in the district that was mined by hand in the late 1800's. There is still good gold in the creek, benches and on bedrock on this claim.
Prior to the advent of dredge operations in 1934, nearly half of the gold recovered in the district came from the Pikes Peak placers. The Batterton Bar in the district produced $140,000 (6,461 ozt) in a single season. Gold was found in small particles with some nuggets up to $10 (.5oz) in value. The gold assayed at $17.75 an ounce at a time when pure gold ran $21.67. Some gold from the Larrabee Bank ran as high as $18.60 per ounce.
Part of the pay streak was mined by drifting, but this area was covered by waste rock from mines higher on the hill. Below Treadwater Bar, a 3,000 foot segment of recovered pay streak was worked by a dragline shovel and a dry-land washer (Pardee 1951).
The Bureau of Mines has estimated that demonstrated U.S. reserves of gold are 85 million ounces. Approximately one-half of the total resources are estimated to be by-product gold, while 40% of the remaining one-half (56 million ounces) could be mined for gold alone … Most U.S. gold resources are in the nation’s western states. About 80% of the U.S. gold resources are estimated to be in Alaska, California, Idaho, Montana and Washington. (Earthsearch, Inc. 1983)
Overview of the Mines
The Valley Gold 3 Mine is in an area with rich gold mining history. Estimates by Lyden (1948, p. 98-103) suggest that placer production before 1904 may have exceeded 120,000 ounces. As with all old mines and mining districts in the Western U.S., the old timers NEVER got it all!
Gold Creek and it's tributaries, lying south of the Gold Creek Station on the Northern Pacific Railroad, hold the distinction of being the site of the first discovery of gold in Montana... Pikes Peak Creek - These placer deposits have been worked intermittently since 1862 when a party of prospectors from Colorado, including J.M. Bozeman after whom the city of Bozeman was named, arrived and tried thier luck in the virgin gravel bars. The creek was named after that part of the territory from which this group of prospectors hailed (Stuart, 1896, p. 122)
By 1870 it is said that $20,000,000 in placer gold had been taken from the gulches (Wolle, 1963, p. 220)
An engineer, reporting on the possibilities of this district... has estimated that in 500 acres of ground along Pikes Peak Creek there are 20,000,000 yd3 of gravel that contain 22 cents/yd3, recoverable gold (M26, MBMG, 1948)
While it is sometimes said old mines have been ‘worked out’ as the saying means there is no gold left, the truth is “it is better to say they are worked over; it is also true that the primitive methods used and the wasteful haste to get rich indulged in, left much of the gold in the ground, so that improved methods … will give even better results than those first obtained.” (MBMG Open Report 466)
Details about the Mine:
Access to the Mine | You can drive a full size truck/RV to the mine. |
Total Workings | Over 600 feet of creek bed estimated. This assessment is based on what surveyors observed while on site. Loose gravels in the creek bed of small pebbles to larger boulders. Boulders are great places for the gold to hide. Benches on both sides of the creek are virgin ground. |
Minerals in the Mine | Free milling gold, gold nuggets and or gems. Historically mined for gold. Minerals of sapphire, silver, black sands with rare earth minerals are known in to be in the ground. |
Foot traffic at the mine | Some |
Last Worked | Unknown |
Number of Mines | 1 Placer |
Nearest city with amenities | Deerlodge, approximately 18 miles |
Access to the Claim | A very good dirt road breaks off from the Interstate and runs all the way onto the claim. |
Parking and Staging on the Claim | Claim is situated so it allows for parking of vehicles if desired. |
Structures on claim | None |
Resources | Year round water, grasses, sage and trees |
Elevation | Aprox. 5700 feet |
Montana is ranked 7th by the USGS for total gold production in the US and has 31 mining districts. Gold production for the 1800’s to 1968 is 17.8 million ounces and large amounts of gold have been mined from 1968 to present. Geologists have predicted that based on the past and the geology of Montana that several large gold and silver deposits will be found and developed in the future (Bergendahl and Koshmann, 1968).
Climate / Weather

USGS Information
Economic information about the deposit and operations |
|
Operation Type | Placer |
---|---|
Development Status | Past Producer |
Commodity type | Metallic |
Commodities |
Gold- Primary Silver - Tertiary |
Nearby Scientific Data | Glacial Drift |
References | USGS Database - 10022669, 10270508, 10124553 |
Mining District Information
Pikes Peak | |
On May 8 1862, Granville Stuart set up the first effective sluices in Montana. When he found gold, the news was not lost on the prospectors passing through the area. A party of prospectors arrived on May 14 and found diggings that paid 20 cents per pan. On May 20 another party arrived and prospected along a branch of Gold Creek which they named Pikes Peak Creek. On June 1, yet another group of prospectors arrived on the scene and found gravel that paid about $10 to the man by working the stream with sluices (Pardee 1951). | |
Early placer mining in the Gold Creek area, later to become known as the Pioneer district, was hindered by a lack of sufficient water to mine placer deposits topograph-ically higher than the active streams and by the abundance of large boulders in gold-bearing stream channels. During much of the 1860's, prospectors were more attracted to richer and more easily worked placers such as the Bannack and Alder Gulch districts, approximately 150 mi south of the Pioneer district. The construction of the Rock Creek ditch in 1868-69 rejuvenated mining activity in the Pioneer district and led to discovery and mining of many rich placer deposits in succeeding years (Pardee, 1951 ). The Pioneer district eventually produced approximately $6 million (value at time of production) in gold from placers. | |
In 1868 or 1869 Conrad Kohrs and others, formed the Rock Creek Ditch Company, to build a 16 mile canal to deliver water from Rock Creek to the Pioneer, Pike's Peak Creek, and Pikes Peak districts. The system initially delivered water to the Gold Hill terraces; the first terrace to be worked was the slope descending down to Pikes Peak Creek. These terraces contained rich gold deposits. Several hundred men worked the placers and a reported $140,000 was recovered in a single season from a pit on Batterton Bar. By 1870, it was estimated that $20,000,000 in placer gold had been taken from the gulches (Pardee 1951; Wolle 1963). | |
As these placers grew, the town of Yam Hill became deserted and a new town of Pioneer City began to grow. It has been estimated that over a million dollars of gold dust (at $20.67 per ounce) was removed from the Pioneer Bar in the late 1870s and early 1880s (Pardee 1951; Wolle 1963). | |
Production figures for the creeks of the district have generally been combined reports, so a fair and accurate estimate of the production of each creek cannot be made. The total production of the placer mines in the district, up to 1949, was estimated to be $28,526,000. | |
Gold Creek and Pikes Peak Creek flow into an area of complexly folded and faulted Mesozoic and Paleozoic sediments which have been intruded by an elongated batholith of quartz monzonite. The lode deposits occur in veins and replacement deposits in highly altered granite or quartz monzonite. None of the lode deposits have been particularly important as points of production, but erosion of these gold-bearing deposits have resulted in extensive placer deposits in ... Pikes Peak Creek. The placer gold occurs in recent stream gravels and also in bench gravels. The deposits have been mined by sluicing, hydraulicking, and dredging (Sahinen 1935). | |
Prior to ... 1934, nearly half of the gold recovered in the district came from the Pikes Peak placers. The Batterton Bar in the district produced $140,000 in a single season. Gold was found in small particles with some nuggets up to $10 in value. The gold assayed at $17.75 an ounce at a time when pure gold ran $21.67. Some gold from the Larrabee Bank ran as high as $18.60 per ounce. | |
GOLD IS CONTAINED IN AND RECONCENTRATED FROM PLEISTOCENE GLACIAL DEBRIS. |



































