Little
San Domingo Click to See full
map extent
FootPrint
Details.
The Little San Domingo Footprint covers
over 35 square miles of productive placer ground.
High Resolution Aerial Imagery at 9" resolution
covers the entire region. This quality imagery lets
you clearly identify old roads, mines, diggings and
tailing piles. Color changes on the surface clearly
indicate various types of bedrock in certain areas.
All FootPrints standard layers are available showing,
the topography, hydrography, ownership and much more.
Close to Phoenix with plenty of flat
ground for camping right on the map, this is a great
choice for all prospectors.
San
Domingo Placers
This information is taken directly from Arizona
Bureau of Mines, Bulletin 168, 1961
The San Domingo gold placers were discovered many
years ago. The greatest activity in the area is reported
to have been between 1870 and 1880, when the towns
of Old San Domingo and New San Domingo were maintained
by the placer miners. About 1875, Old Woman Gulch,
a southern tributary of San Domingo Wash, was a large
producer.
Several projects have been planned for hydraulicking
portions of this area. Dams have been proposed to
catch the torrential run-off of the rainy seasons
or to divert the subsurface water of Hassayampa Creek.
In 1910, a Mr. Sanger built a dam across San Domingo
Wash and started sluicing, but the reservoir filled
up with sand and gravel before operations had proceeded
for one season. Dry-washing and rocking have been
carried on in the area every year since its discovery
and have supplied a large proportion of the placer
production of Maricopa County.
The recorded production of gold from the San Domingo
placers during 1934-49 was valued at $16,379.
The principal rocks of the San Domingo area are
pre-Cambrian, granite, gneiss, and schist, Tertiary
basalt, andesite, rhyolite, agglomerate, and sandstone,
and various dikes. Quartz veins probably of both pre-Cambrian
and post-Cambrian age, have furnished the gold that
erosion has concentrated in placers.
The placers occupy a belt 6 or 7 miles long by an
irregular width along the drainage system o of San
Domingo Wash. They are not confined to stream beds
alone but are found also on some of the gravelly mesas
that separate gulches.
The gold is angular, fairly coarse, and of .925
to .965 fineness. Several prospectors of the region
state that, although much of the gold found was in
pieces worth about $1, nuggets valued at $30 were
common in the early days, and several worth $10 to
$15 were found in 1925. The gold is reported to lie
mostly near bedrock in the upper reaches of the gulches
but is somewhat distributed through the gravels in
the lower country. |