Extract from MINFILE Occurrence: 092INW035
Development status: Prospect
Names: FERGUSON CREEK, FERG, WK CHROME, WK, TIK, CHROME HAWK, BEAR, JOE HENRY, HENRY JOE
The Ferguson Creek chromite occurrences are located near its headwaters, about 15.5 kilometres north of Cache Creek and 3 kilometres east of Highway 97. The showings are in and near a prominent bluff on the northwest side of the creek. These showings are about 5 kilometres south of the Scottie Creek showings (092INW001).
The hostrock for the Ferguson Creek chromite prospect is an upper Paleozoic serpentinite wedge in the eastern facies of the Carboniferous to Jurassic Cache Creek Complex. This consists of a Late Triassic accretionary prism/subduction complex associated with the Nicola volcanic arc. The melange contains Pennsylvanian and Early Permian limestones, chert, basalt and ultramafic rocks in a matrix of Permo-Jurassic chert and argillite.
Chromite occurs as parallel layers of grains in the dunitic rock. Two showings in opencuts are lenticular pods consisting of closely-packed grains and stringers of chromitite. These pods measure 4.5 by 1.2 by 0.3 metres and 7.6 by 0.6 metres. A chip sample by Stevenson (1941) yielded 17.9 per cent Cr2O3 across 0.3 metre. A selected sample of cleaned chromite from this assay site yielded 28.2 per cent Cr2O3. A third exposure, in the exploration adit in the bluff, is 30 by 0.6 by 0.1 metres of stringer type chromite. These are the only reported showings at the site.
Showings on Scottie Creek, 5 kilometres to the north, were discovered in 1901 (see Scottie Creek, 092INW001), however, there is no report of activity on Ferguson Creek until the 1920s. In 1927, The Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada, Limited optioned two claims (Bear group?) on Ferguson Creek and one on Scottie Creek, and staked extra ground. Exploration work, confined to the northeast showing, included trenching and 51 metres of crosscut and drift in one adit. Operatio
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