CBS 13 in Sacramento reports that Sutter Gold Mining Inc. will reopen the historic Lincoln Mine near the town of Sutter Creek. The company believes there is twenty tons of gold worth over a billion dollars still left in the company’s 3.6-mile parcel of land, an area that includes a long list of famous gold rush mines. Sutter Gold has spent twenty years researching and sampling the mine and has acquired all the necessary permits. An Australian bank financed the venture to the tune of twenty million dollars. The company expects that by the summer of 2012 they will be producing gold.
Amador County is the heart of the mother lode, and the mine Sutter Gold will work is the same mine that once made Leland Stanford a fortune. He went on to become instrumental in the transcontinental railroad and also started Stanford University. Most California mines closed at the onset of World War II and never reopened, but with the price of gold hovering around sixteen hundred dollars an ounce, gold mining has become profitable again.
But the Lincoln isn’t the first mine to reopen in California. In 2008 the Mesquite Mine in Imperial County started operations and a year later the Briggs Mine, near Death Valley National Park, began work. Both are open pit mines but plans are underway to reopen another famous gold rush mine in Grass Valley, a gold rush mining district as famous for its hard rock quartz mines as was the mother lode.
The Idaho-Maryland mine, closed since 1956, was once the second largest gold producing mine in California and one portion of the old mine was one of the richest gold producers in the world, with one million ounces of gold from one million tons of ore, an average of one ounce per ton. Now the Emgold Mining Corporation is working to prepare environmental impact reports and obtain the needed permits to begin pumping out water that has flooded the seventy-two miles of shafts. Emgold anticipates that the mine could contain three to five million ounces of gold.
Many estimates say that only ten to twenty percent of California’s gold has been mined. Gold prices when mining ended around the middle of the 20th century were only thirty-five dollars an ounce. How many other old mines in the gold country have the potential to be reopened? Is California on the edge of a second gold rush? The first California gold rush made America a wealthy nation. Would a second gold rush have the same result?
John Putnam is the author of Hangtown Creek, a thrilling saga of the early California gold rush.
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