Little San Domingo
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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.