Harry Auxer, for whom the project is named, and other parties staked the first in approximately 1903. The Auxer Gold Mining Company was organized in 1920, formed to consolidate and develop the property and by 1936 controlled all the claims, after which they amended them into a contiguous claim block.
The first development work on the property was a 350-foot tunnel that was driven to develop the Minneapolis vein by Harry Auxer. The exact date of this work is unknown, but sometime between 1905 and 1915. Reports indicate that there were promising results near the portal, but not enough grade on the vein to justify continued development.
After this an inclined shaft approximately 60 feet deep was sunk on the Boston vein, completed before 1915. This was the first discovery of significant gold mineralization on the property. The incline shaft has two drifts on the south side at approximately 30 and 60 feet, respectively. The shaft was deepened to approximately 80 feet by 1923. The primary shaft itself and both drifts encountered high grade gold mineralization, up to 100 grams per ton (g/t) gold, as well as thick intervals of continuous gold mineralization up to 9.2 g/t across 14 feet. This shaft was sunk on a quartz carbonate ore shoot, the primary development target, and the gold mineralization, hosted in the quartz carbonate pyrite, continued vertically to the bottom at 80 feet. This shaft was chronically flooded, limiting accessibility to a short window of about two weeks at the end of each summer.
Sometime between 1915 and 1936 a crosscut tunnel was developed to access the Boston and Chicago veins from 200 ft below. This tunnel originates in a valley to the east of the main mineralized areas and runs for over 1000 ft crossing both the Chicago and Boston veins.
By the time the Auxer Mining Company was able to consolidate the claims and settle the disputes between the various owners, the US government had begun enacting a series of laws that were detrimental to the gold mining industry. Beginning in 1933 with Executive Order 6102 the private ownership of gold was banned. This caused problems as gold miners had a limited time window from the time of production until the sale to the federal government before they would be outside the law. In 1942 the federal government banned all non-strategic metal mining due to the war effort. These two changes marked the end of any significant effort at the Auxer and was the death knell for most gold mining in the American west. Koch (1959) summarizes this devastating affect when he writes “Since World War II, gold mining has been unable to recover from the 1942 closure brought on by Government order. Oregon’s mines are not alone in this respect, and only a few gold mines in the United States have been able to reopen and continue operations.”
The 1950’s brought a continued effort by the Auxer Gold Mining Company to establish the Auxer into a mine. By 1958 the Wellington Creek Road, now the primary vehicle access to the property, had been built. It was reported that the company had shipped hand-sorted ore from the dump at the top of the shaft which had a head grade of 19.8 g/t Au to an unknown smelter.
The project sat idle through the 1960’s and early 1970’s until Idora Silver Company leased it and began to do work in the mid-1970’s. They calculated and reported to their shareholders a “potential resource” of 14,000 ounces of gold (Laczay, 1974). Idora leased the property to Wellington Resources in 1976.
Between 1976 and 1982 Wellington Resources successfully mined ore and shipped concentrate (Table 1). The lease was terminated first in 1983, then re-signed in 1984. Ultimately, the lease was terminated again in 1986 due to failure to pay the agreed upon royalty by secretly sending ore shipments to a second smelter (Trail BC), in addition to the agreed upon smelter at the Bunker Hill Mine (Appendix B). This cancellation of the lease along with a depressed gold price in the 1980’s marked the end of historic production at the Auxer.
The property sat idle until the sometime prior to 1999 when all of the original claims were finally dropped, nearly 100 years after they had been staked. In 1999 Ashington Mining Company staked two claims over the historic area and sold them to Shoshone Silver Mining Company in 2003 for $22,500. These two claims were allowed to drop in 2015.
In October of 2018 six new claims centered over the inclined shaft and covering most of the known mineralization were staked by the author. In May 2019 he staked an additional 16 claims, covering the entire known extents of the vein system. In December of 2019 Lighting Creek Resources Corporation was formed to develop the Auxer and has since acquired the original 20 claims and staked an additional 126, bringing the current land package to over 2,900 acres covered by 146 federal mining claims.
