Indian Creek Mining District, Idaho, USAi

Regional Level Types
Indian Creek Mining District	Mining District
Idaho	State
USA	Country

In general terms, the Indian Creek District includes the area drained by Indian Creek and Squaw Creek. The district borders the state of Montana on the north, joins the Mineral Hill District on the west, and extends a short distance south of the Salmon River.

The first claims were located in the district during 1895, but little mining was done until the Kitty Burton Gold Mining Company acquired the Kitty Burton and Ulysses properties. Ore was processed in several amalgamation mills, the last being a 15-stamp mill with amalgamation plates and a Wilfley table. Between January, 1903 and July, 1907, 68,194 tons were milled. Total production for the district is a little less than $600,000; about three fourths is attributed to the Ulysses mine and most of the rest to the Kittie Burton mine (Umpleby, 1913, p. 134-135).

Mineralization at the Ulysses and Kittie Burton consists of shear and thrust hosted gold-bearing veins along wide zones in metamorphosed quartzite (Formation Capital, November 1, 1988, p. 6). The veins, up to 12 feet thick, contained coarsely crystalline quartz with pyrite, braunite, chalcopyrite, pyrrhotite, malachite, and azurite (Umpleby, 1913, p. 136).

Just northeast of the Ulysses and Kittie Burton is a northwest trending zone containing anomalous amounts of cobalt, copper, bismuth, nickel, gold, and silver. The chemical signature of this zone is very similar to the chemical signature of the Blackbird Cu-Co zone. The zone extends from the head of Sage Creek on the southeast to the McConn Creek iron deposit on the northwest. Mineralization appears to be associated with quartz veins, veinlets, and zones of silicification, often along bedding and bedding plane faults in quartzite, phyllite and schist. Resources at the McConn Creek iron deposit are estimated to be millions of tons grading about 40 percent iron (Young, 1961).

In the southwest part of the Indian Creek District, numerous small deposits containing phosphates, rare-earth oxides, and thorium occur in a northwest trending zone. Monazite, the primary ore mineral, occurs in Precambrian marble beds and to a much lesser extent in pegmatite dikes. Monazite is a rare-earth phosphate with appreciable substitution of thorium for rare earths.