Gavilan Mining District

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Gavilan Mining District is a gold mining district 6 miles west of Perris, California and Gavilan Hills and east of Gavilan Peak on the Gavilan Plateau in Riverside County, California. It includes only 2 mines: the Ida Leona Mine and the Gavilan Mine located within yards of each other. [1]

Perris, California City in California, United States

Perris is a city in Riverside County, California, United States, located 71 miles (114 km) east-southeast of Los Angeles, California, and 80.9 miles (130.2 km) north of San Diego, California. It is known for Lake Perris, which houses many flora and fauna. The city is most widely recognized for having many choices involving aerial activities, such as skydiving and hot-air ballooning. Perris is within the Inland Empire metropolitan area of Southern California.

Gavilan Hills, sometimes called the Gavilan Mountains, are a range of the Temescal Mountains, in Riverside County, California. The name given them came from local New Mexican and Californio miners of the mountains and Gavilan Plateau. In Spanish Gavilan, means "sparrow hawk".

Gavilan Plateau is a plateau in Riverside County, California. It lies at an elevation of 2083 feet on the north slope of the Temescal Mountains overlooking the Cajalco Valley south of Riverside, California.

History

It is unknown how much gold these mines produced but they were worked from at least 1855 and perhaps earlier by Californio and New Mexican miners from Agua Mansa. [2] :97 The mines were on the property of the Rancho El Sobrante de San Jacinto which by 1893 had come into the hands of an English syndicate, the San Jacinto Estate Limited of London.

Rancho El Sobrante was a 20,565-acre (83.22 km2) Mexican land grant in present-day Contra Costa County, California given in 1841 by Governor Juan Alvarado to Juan Jose Castro and Victor Castro. The name means "left over " in Spanish—the grant's boundaries were determined by the boundaries of the surrounding grants: San Antonio, San Pablo, El Pinole, La Boca de la Cañada del Pinole, Acalanes, and La Laguna de los Palos Colorados. This grant included the area between present day El Sobrante and Orinda.

The California Journal of Mines and Geology, Volume 11, 1893 reports these Gavilan Mines:

"... years ago produced from quartz veins considerable gold, the rock being first crushed in numerous arrastras, the beds of which, to the number of fifty or more, are still scattered all about the neighborhood of the mines."
"The veins of the Gavilan Mines are not large, but of good grade, occurring in a granitoid rock. ... The Mexicans worked a large shoot down to the water-line, and judging from the size and number of the dumps these old workings must have been of great extent."
"In later years, under American management, the quartz was hauled to a stamp mill in the Pinacate District."
"At the time the rancho became the property of the English people nothing had been done in these mines for many years." [3]

M. C. Westbrook and Associates, leased most of the mining area from the English syndicate in 1891, planning a town site at the mines called Westbrook.

"During the past two years the old workings have been investigated and a local company organized at Riverside to operate them under lease." [3]

However, when the report writer visited the mines in 1893:

"At the time of my visit some workmen were industriously engaged in taking down the gallows frame of the hoist and making preparations to vacate the premises, and this in the face of the report that had gone abroad that a good-sized vein of pay rock had been uncovered at the bottom of the mine at the depth of 180 feet. I did not see the alleged ore shoot and could get no satisfaction from the men at work other than vague hints that there was dissension among the Board of Directors." [3]

Shortly afterward Westbrook and Associates sold the lease to the mines to the Gavilan Mining and Milling Company for a period of ten years.

The old Gavilan mine ceased to be mined in the 1890s. The Ida Leona mine continued to be worked and was most active in the 1930s and finally closed in 1942, having produced $50,000. [4] :A-41,A-43

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References

  1. ↑ The Ida Leona Mine from www.riversideca.gov/library Riverside Public Library website, accessed 6/1/2015
  2. ↑ Lech, Steve, Pioneers of Riverside County: The Spanish, Mexican and Early American Periods, The History Press, Charleston, SC, 2012
  3. 1 2 3 California Journal of Mines and Geology, Volume 11, 1893, pp.366-367
  4. ↑ Russell V. Miller, Dinah O. Shumway, and Robert L. Hill, with Geophysical Contributions by R.H. Chapman and L.G. Youngs, MINERAL LAND CLASSIFICATION OF THE TEMESCAL VALLEY AREA, RIVERSIDE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA, 1991, SPECIAL REPORT 165, CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF CONSERVATION, Division of Mines and Geology, Sacramento, 1991 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from University of California, Davis Libraries

Coordinates: 33°48′03″N117°20′08″W / 33.80083°N 117.33556°W / 33.80083; -117.33556

Geographic coordinate system Coordinate system

A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are often chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position and two or three of the numbers represent a horizontal position; alternatively, a geographic position may be expressed in a combined three-dimensional Cartesian vector. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation. To specify a location on a plane requires a map projection.

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