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Cache Creek, Colorado, has to
be one of the least told about and the least written about major
placers in Colorado. Researching this area takes quite a
bit of time, and my friend Steven Veatch has done a bang up job
of doing just that. He has a book coming out soon about
the area, and I'll be one of the first to own it, but in the
mean time I can tell you what I know about the area.
Steven has certainly gone a long way to educate anyone willing
to listen about Cache Creek, and much of the credit of my
knowledge about the area must go to him.
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What we all know about Cache
Creek is that it was run for some 50 years at a profit and
largely by outside English concerns. Cache Creek placer
was the only profitable commercial placer that ran
almost continuously from1884 until it was shut down in
1911, and is known to have produced over 49,000 ounces
of gold, or over $1,000,000 dollars at the price of
$20.67 per ounce. So much material was run through
their sluices, they silted the Arkansas
River for 17 years in the early 1900's, until they were stopped
when water issues as far as Pueblo were voiced and acted upon.
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Much of the material was run
into sluice boxes, or ground sluiced using hydraulic methods to
deliver the gravels to be worked, and much of the small gold was
lost downstream into the Arkansas River. Water was flumed
into the Cache Creek area from Flume Creek, Lake Creek, and
Clear Creek. The ditch from Lake Creek was 16 miles long,
and water from Clear Creek was piped over the mountain to the
south.
There are still layers in the
Arkansas River that are rich in the small gold run off from the
Cache Creek placers. It lies in a butterscotch colored
clay that is sometimes easy to work and a dredger can, also,
easily run this material too fast and lose much of what is
there. The gold in this layer tends to be course and rolly,
making it a challenge to keep in a dredge sluice.
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In 1859 (Parker, 1992), a
year after Green Russell found gold at approximately where
Confluence Park in Denver is now, the original discovery at
Cache Creek was made, and was worked by small miners until
around 1883. The deposit is believed to be an outwash terrace of
the lower Bull Lake age, but there is evidence that there was
more than one overlay in this valley floor during that age, with
more than one source for the gold. We have found at least three
different colors of gold with different mother rock attached,
which seems to bear this out. |
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If you have dreams of
reaching bedrock in this area, you would be richly rewarded!
However, be aware that the gravels are some 61 + feet deep, and
you would have a tough time reaching bedrock with a #2 shovel.
There is still an active, working placer operation below the BLM
open public prospecting area that has equipment working all
summer, and they are reported to be very happy with their finds
at the bottom of the gravels. For you, the weekend placer
miner, there is plenty of fun to be had in the upper 15 feet.
See you in the day use parking lot! |
