Blackjack Gold Mine

Campbell prospected throughout the district, and by 1892, when rich gold ore in the Keystone mine attracted attention, he and his associates, A. E: Thomas, John Kirby, and W. Smith, had located the Rose, U.S. (one of the Alice group), Empire, Golden Chariot, May, Commercial, South Side, and Hoosier claims. Somewhere in south-western Alberta, in the Crowsnest Pass, close by Coleman (according to some), in The Lost Lemmon Mine, it is said, is a gold vein worth millions. All you have to do is find it, and get past the curse! If you see a dead man with an axe in his head, you may be close! Blackrock Gold Corp. Is a discovery driven junior exploration company focused on uncovering the next big economic gold deposit. Anchored by a seasoned Board, the Company is focused on blue-sky opportunities, with an aim to acquiring large-scale, packages of land that are in prolific gold belts within stable jurisdictions.

In the late winter of 1870, a group of American prospectors ventured northeast from the Tobacco Plains in northern Montana in search of gold along the North Saskatchewan River. Finding nothing, two men – Frank Lemon and his co-explorer, known as Blackjack – decided to head off-course to test their luck on new terrain.

They headed south and followed an old Indian trail along Highwood River and up into the mountains. It is said that somewhere near Crowsnest Pass in southwest Alberta, the pair began panning in a river that connected with three mountain streams. Finding likely showings, they followed one stream’s flow as it trickled down from the headwaters. The area proved to be rich with gold diggings.

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After spending some time panning in the stream, the prospectors went to fetch their horses, which were tethered nearby. Looking up, they noticed a large, towering ledge with thick streaks of solid gold. Yet rather than celebrate, Lemon and Blackjack got into a heated argument. Would they set up camp and mine it immediately, or come back later with more supplies when the weather was fair?

When Blackjack retired for the evening, Lemon let his rage get the better of him. He crawled from his tent and chopped his sleeping partner’s skull with an axe.

Lemon became unhinged when he realized what he had done. Building a raging bonfire, he grabbed his pistol and paced back and forth next to Blackjack’s lifeless body until dawn.

Meanwhile, a hunting party of Stoney Indians were heading south into the Livingstone Range. Many accounts claim that two had seen Lemon and Blackjack from afar right before the prospectors found the golden ridge and decided to track them. After witnessing Lemon murder Blackjack, the Indians reported the murder – as well as the gold – to their chief. Upon hearing of the riches contained within the ledge, the chief swore the men to secrecy.

When Lemon returned to Montana, he blamed renegade Blackfoot Indians, known at the time for killing prospectors, for Blackjack’s death. Yet when he visited the local priest, Lemon confessed to Blackjack’s murder, revealing also the rough location of his prized gold discovery. The priest kept Lemon’s secret safe and quickly sent a man named John McDougall to the site of the crime to give Blackjack a proper burial.

It is said that McDougall found the ledge, located the body and laid it to rest. Upon his return home, a wealthy prospector named Lafayette French – the man who had funded the initial expedition that led to Lemon and Blackjack’s discovery – commissioned him to lead a group of prospectors out to exploit Lemon’s golden ridge. Unfortunately, McDougall took the mine’s location to his grave as he died of alcohol poisoning the night before he was to meet with the prospecting party in Crowsnest Lake.

Some versions of the story claim that the Stoney Indian chief who had sworn his men to secrecy had also laid a curse upon the site to guarantee it would never be found again. And oddly, similarly sinister twists of fate seemed to befall anyone who tried to unearth Lemon’s elusive gold strike.

Encouraged by the priest and fellow prospectors who had heard the tale, Lemon attempted to lead a handful of expeditions to the site. Unfortunately, his mental health had deteriorated after the murder, so that he was never able to find the site again. Worse, he appeared to become increasingly deranged and aggressive the closer he would get to the mine. Thus Lemon’s golden discovery became known as the Lost Lemon Mine.

The priest, determined to claim the mine, organized another expedition more than a decade later, in 1883. But a forest fire that had blazed through the region rendered the route impassable.

Later, French joined an ongoing expedition led by an acquaintance of Lemon, which had so far proven futile, but fell gravely ill shortly thereafter, forcing him to return home. Undeterred, he spent the next 30 years of his life searching for it.

A friend received a letter from French years later, claiming that he found the spot. Shortly after mailing the letter, however, French died in a mysterious fire that burned his cabin to the ground.

In the 145 years since the legend was first told, there have been numerous tales of many lives spent searching for the Lost Lemon Mine.

The legend even spurred two false gold rushes, in 1931 and 1988, where prospectors found gold so poorly concentrated it was not worth extracting.

Some say it is along the Saskatchewan-Montana border, others swear it is hidden along the Livingstone Range, and even more believe it is trapped inside the Crowsnest Volcanics in southwest Alberta. Geologists have proposed theories based on science, journalists have written first-hand accounts and witnesses have drawn crude maps. But to this day, the Lost Lemon Mine has never been rediscovered.

Citigold Corporation has access to a modern gold extraction plant that is located away from the populated areas of Charters Towers about 10 kilometres south west of the city centre along the Gregory Highway on the historically rich Black Jack mine site.

The plant is a conventional CIL (Carbon In Leach) plant with a capacity to process about 340,000 tonnes per year of Charters Towers gold bearing ore. There is also a substantial gravity gold recovery circuit planned to be installed within the overall plant design to recover the coarse gold particles.

The plant outputs gold 'dore' bars (containing about 60% gold and 30% silver) which are then shipped by secure transport to a gold bullion refiner where the gold and silver are refined and the mine paid for these valuable metals.

Blackjack Gold Miners

Overall Plant Insfrastructure

The CIL plant is fully equipped with crushing and grinding circuits, small gravity circuit for coarse gold, gold absorption and desorption leach circuits, electrowinning and gold pouring facilities. The plant has operated efficiently, recovering around 97% of the gold from the ore.

The plant is electric powered from the 66,000 volt Queensland State electricity grid and benefits from extensive Charters Towers city infrastructure including local industry, housing, skilled labour, sealed roads and community services.

The team at Charters Towers ensures the processing plant machinery is in satisfactory operational condition for the processing and extraction of gold from the ore. All equipment involved in the extraction process, including crushers, tanks and pumps is regularly examined for its durability and performance ability.

Gold Extraction Process

Blackjack Gold Miner

The mechanical and chemical gold extraction process used at Charters Towers has evolved to become a highly sophisticated, technical process. Today, modern processing plants commonly practice a chemical extraction method, whereby carbon is used to recover gold. As a direct result of large-scale advancements in technology, processing plants today have revolutionized the way gold was commonly extracted. Such plants have the capability to process ore at significantly higher efficiency levels than traditional methods, and while these have marked a new era of the recovery of gold, the process continues to undergo development.

The recovery of gold from Charters Towers type ore requires a relatively simple metallurgical process using well-established methods and equipment.

Citigold’s main gold recovery tool, the Black Jack gold plant, is an industry standard carbon-in-leach (CIL) plant. The stockpiled ore, comprising the large blasted rock from underground, is crushed to under 12 millimetres, and transported by conveyer to the grinding mill where water and lime are added prior to the ore being reduced in size by grinding to fine sand particles with a width of 0.1 millimetres. The slurry is then pumped through a series of six large tanks where additional chemical substances are added to further dissolve the gold. Carbon is added to the tanks to absorb and concentrate the gold, and later the gold is extracted from the carbon by a final chemical and electroplating process before it is smelted into gold ‘ dore ’ bars. The ‘ dore ’, which on average may consist of approximately 60 percent gold and 30 percent silver, is shipped by security transport to a specialist gold refinery, where it is made into pure gold bars that are readily sold on the international market.

Blackjack Gold Mine Charters Towers

Designed for Expansion

Blackjack Gold Mine Menzies

The plant layout was designed with provision for a second ball mill, expanded gravity circuit and additional leach tanks to cater for increased gold output in the future. There are plans to in future crush and use autosorters underground in the mines to remove the waste rock that dilutes the ore. This has the potential to lift ore grades to 20g/t and therefore the process plant upgrade will be through expanding the gravity gold recovery part. There may be no requirement to expand the mill or leach circuit.

Production in the future will derive from several reef structures at Charters Towers, namely Sunburst, Brilliant and Day Dawn and several associated reefs, feeding this centrally-located processing plant. The existing major decline that access the underground Central mine will supply the plant with ore to achieve our initial major target of 220,000 ounces of gold per annum.

After the valuable metals are extracted the tailings residue, comprising principally granite rock ground into fine sand size particles, is deposited into a licensed storage facility on site. The stored tailings, after completion of mining operations, naturally neutralize themselves and will be capped with rock and soil for revegation.

Historical Production

The history of the Charters Towers goldffields production of 6,600,000 ounces means the goldfield averaged 145,000 ounces of gold per annum for 45 consecutive years to 1918, with a peak production performance of 320,000 ounces in 1899. With a modernised facility, latest equipment and highly specialised experts, Citigold Corporation may one day exceed this performance.