Mining
Hatcher Pass is in the Willow Creek mining district. Over 500,000 ounces (14,000,000 g) of gold has been produced from the district. The first mining claims were staked in the Hatcher Pass area in 1906. Underground hard-rock mining of gold from quartz veins accounts for most of the mineral wealth extracted from the Hatcher Pass area, although the first mining efforts were placer mining of stream gravels, and placer mining in the area has continued sporadically to this day. The first mill in the area started operating in 1908. Underground mining continued at a variety of locations around the pass until 1951. In the 1980s, one of the area's hard-rock mines was briefly re-opened. At least one mining company is actively exploring for gold in the area now.
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Famous quotes containing the word mining:
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It’s a mining town in lotus land.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)