American Creek
American Gulch
This placer deposit is on American Creek at an elevation of about 800 feet, in the northeast quarter of section 8, T. 5 N., R. 26 W., of the Fairbanks Meridian. The location is accurate within a quarter of a mile. The site corresponds to location 14 of Cobb (1972), and roughly to the site for American-Lynx Creek, U.S. Bureau of Land Management MAS number 0020480096.
Bedrock in the American Creek area includes Precambrian or lower Paleozoic marine metasedimentary rocks and intermediate to mafic meta-igneous rocks; middle Paleozoic greenschist, carbonate, and chert; and Mesozoic greenstone and metasedimentary rocks (Chapman and others, 1982; WGM, Inc., 1998). The right-lateral Kaltag fault bounds these rocks to the south.
Little is published about the placer deposit, and only a little work was done there in the early 1900s. Eakin (1913) reported that the gravels are 10 to 12 feet thick and are thawed placer material at the head of American Creek proved to be as rich as $1 in gold per square foot of bedrock (at $20.67 per ounce). The stream gradient is about 200 feet per mile.
Prospect shafts were reported on American Creek, and surface mining may also have been employed. There was small-scale mining and prospecting on American Creek in 1911 and 1912 (Eakin, 1912, 1913). No work was reported again until 1917, when some open cuts were made (Martin, 1919). The creek then appears to have been abandoned for a long time. Delima Placers and Holovics Placers operated bulldozers on American Creek in 1975 (Carnes, 1976).
Some exploration for lode gold was done by Central Alaska Gold Company for Doyon, Ltd., in the American-Lynx creeks area (WGM, Inc., 1998). The lode occurrences in that area are described in ARDF record TN016.
There is no public record of the amount of gold mined from American Creek. However, some of the placer ground reportedly contained as much as $1 in gold per square foot of bedrock (at $20.67 per ounce).
This site is on land selected by or conveyed to Doyon, Ltd. For further information, contact Doyon, Ltd., at 1 Doyon Place, Suite 300, Fairbanks, Alaska, 99701-2941.
Carnes, D.R., 1976, Active Alaskan placer operations, 1975: U.S. Bureau of Mines Open-File Report 98-76, 90 p., 40 plates, scale 1:250,000.
Cobb, E.H., 1977, Summary of references to mineral occurrences (other than mineral fuels and construction materials) in the Tanana quadrangle, Alaska: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 77-432, 98 p.
Eakin, H M., 1912, The Rampart and Hot Springs region: U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 520-I, p. 271-286.
Eakin, H.M., 1913, A geologic reconnaissance of a part of the Rampart quadrangle, Alaska: U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 535, 38 p.
Martin, G.C., 1919, Alaska Mining Industry in 1917: U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 692-A, p. 11-42.
WGM Inc., 1998, Doyon, Ltd., Report 98-28: Unpublished report held by Doyon, Ltd., Fairbanks, Alaska.