Hill City District – Pennington County, South Dakota
The main road to this mine has been gated. If you gained access through the gate you could drive to within 100 feet of the shaft entrance.
This claim is located about 8 miles outside of Hill City, South Dakota on easy 2WD roads. The last few miles are dirt but a car could get to the claim.
Contact us for exact coordinates

This is an epic historic mine located in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The claim was worked for gold and has an extensive history of production. The ore bin and tipple have been restored and saved from destruction. As part of the building restoration, there are interpretive signs around the claim that discuss the mining methods and men of the day. Some of the information is accurate, some is far from accurate and told with a very anti-mining spin. As with any mining claim, the real history is underground and has not been plastered on any signs. The main portal has been grated and drops roughly 40' to a drift level that is not documented. This claim is easy to get to and very close to Historic Hill City. The claim will most likely not be accessible in winter, once the snow falls. In fact most of the town of Hill City shuts down in the winter months. The town and area is hopping in the summer months. Visitors to Sturgis and Mount Rushmore pack the streets and hotels.

The Hill City quadrangle is in the central part of the Precambrian core of the Black Hills uplift. The Precambrian rocks within the quadrangle are chiefly pelitic phyllites and schists, and metagraywackes, which are intruded by part of a small batholithic mass of pegmatitic granite, the Harney Peak Granite. The Hill City quadrangle is on the northwest flank of the Harney Peak dome, which was formed by the intrusion of this batholith, and contains about 2 square miles of Harney Peak Granite in its southeast corner. Additional sheets of pegmatitic granite, including some zoned pegmatites, form satellitic intrusive bodies throughout the south half of the quadrangle, but become less abundant away from the main granite body. The age of the Harney Peak Granite, as indicated by isotopic ages of its associated pegmatites, is about 1,600 m.y. (million years).[2]

From a 1940s report,

The Gold Hill group, formerly known as the Gold Lode, is being explored and developed by the Gold Mountain Mining Co. under the direction of A. Jackson Birdsell of Spearfish, S. Dak. The property comprises of 10 unpatented claims about 4 miles north of Hill City. It is held under lease with an option to buy. In the summer of 1938 the mine was being developed from a vertical shaft and the ore treated in a 25-ton mill operating one shift a day.[1]

The mine was operated about ten years, from 1929 to its forced closure in 1941. The gold was found in fissure veins, it was free-milling, or native, and found in bodies as wide as 5'. The mine was taken over in 1945 and worked by small mining groups on and off until 1960. A larger mining company bought out the miners in 1960 and held the property until early 1990 when the company went bankrupt. The mine is thought to have not been worked since 1960. There are no existing maps or documentation of the workings underground.

The Black Hills National Forest Service sought to reclaim the mine in 2007 and destroy the building as the usual MO. Instead the Black Hills Historical Preservation Trust fought for it to be first left alone, and then restored. From 2009-2012, the Black Hills Historical Preservation Trust raised over $40k and donated thousands of hours to the restoration. The Forest Service supervised the restoration under guidance of Archeologist, Michael Salisbury. The Forest Service did make sure they got paid during the restoration process, removing 15 to 20 tons of unprocessed gold bearing ore from the mill.[2]

The shaft appears to go down about 40 feet and then splits into drifts in both a north and south direction. Based on geological surveys, the ore body was found in a large fissure that produced native gold in concentrations as high as 40 ounces per ton. Silver and fine gold were extracted through a crusher process. Gold separated by hand, and silver sent off site for processing, the gold was found as free milling in wide fissures.