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Above: inside the adit of the Niagra mine at French Gulch. This mine is on private property and this photograph taken with permission. This photograph was taken by Jeremy Tuggle on January 14, 2023.
This quartz mine (or hard rock mine) is currently part of the Washington mine holdings at French Gulch in the French Gulch Mining District of Shasta County, just off of present-day French Gulch Road. It is located on private property. Although, this mine is not as old as the Washington mine, which was located by John Souter and John Syme in 1852, the Niagra mine was located nearby that historic mining property in 1857 while prospectors were chasing a vein of quartz which immediately excited the prospectors into digging out this adit and creating a main haulage tunnel for the mine at that time. Twenty-seven years later, in 1884, the mine was owned and operated by William T. Coleman, of San Francisco, who kept his men busy at blasting out new drifts of this mine, and his miners extracting the ore it produced. Then in 1891, this mine contained five drifts inside it which had been established over the years.
Inside, the walls of this mine contained granitic porphyry and slate in which they found an abundance of minerals which included gold, pyrite, and silver among others. These five drifts of the Niagra mine varied in length and were recorded between 300-feet to 1,380-feet. At that time, the price of blasting out these drifts cost Coleman between $3.50 to $13.50 per foot. Coleman planned future extensions of these drifts as well. The Niagra miners put in raises and winzes (winzes were also known as vertical shafts) inside this mine. The deepest shaft at the Niagra mine was recorded at 480-feet deep. An ore chute which was measured at 400-feet long existed for an easier process of loading the ore into the ore cars situated on an ore car track below it so the ore can be dumped into these ore cars and taken to the surface of the earth to be milled and processed.
The Niagra mine had an impressive stamp mill on this mining property which included 18-stamps to crush the ore of the mine to obtain the gold they sought after. While the loose gold was salvaged at the stamp mill its gold were amalgamated and alloyed into bricks while using mercury in the battery on the plates at the stamp mill. This process is more commonly known as a pan-amalgamation. Ten of these impressive stamps weighed 850 pounds each while the additional stamps weighed 600 pounds each.
Work was steady at the Niagra mine from 1891 to about 1920, and the Niagra mine continued its production of gold after that, however, work came to screeching halt once the Great Depression occurred which made a major impact in the region. Various people came in and purchased this mine after that, but production notes were not kept for this mine as a single producer due to most of the production notes merging into one account for the entire Washington mine holdings. So, it's not known exactly how much this single mine produced but it was lucrative.
The Niagra mine is located five miles north-west from the townsite of French Gulch. Niagra Road in the townsite of French Gulch was named after this mine. In 2004, the French Gulch Nevada Gold Mining Corporation purchased this celebrated mining property as part of the Washington mine holdings; a subsidiary company owned by the Bullion River Gold Corporation of Reno, Nevada. Since that time, this mining property has been bought once more and its now an active clean-up site.
RESOURCES:
The Trinity Journal newspaper of Weaverville, June 7, 1884
The Mines Handbook An Enlargement of the Copper Handbook - founded by Horace J. Stevens, 1900 - A Manual of the Mining Industry of the World by Walter Harvey Weed, New York City ©1920
Albers, John P., 1961, Economic geology of the French Gulch, Shasta and Trinity counties: California Division of Mines and Geology Special Report
Mines and Mineral Resources of Shasta County, California – County Report 6 – by Philip A. Lydon and J.C. O’ Brien ©1974 by California Division of Mines and Geology
