United States Geological Survey Report Bulletin 931-C

Abstract

Abstract: The tin and copper deposits at Majuba Hill, Pershing County, Nevada are in a partly brecciated plug of Tertiary rhyolite porphyry, which is altered nearly everywhere to quartz and sericite and in some places is intensely tourmalinized. The tin mineral, cassiterite, appears to be associated with the alteration, for the single concentration of it was formed by replacement of altered breccia. Brecciated and altered rock is, however, only a general guide to potentially tin-bearing ground, and not a specific guide to ore shoots, for most of such rock appears to contain only small amounts of cassiterite, widely and unevenly distributed. The known deposit, which is exposed only underground, is at most 20 by 20 by 10 feet in size, and may contain about 12,000 pounds of metallic tin. The deposit is cut off by a normal fault, which apparently is of small displacement, and the footwall segment has not been found. The copper deposit is in the same normal fault, about 300 feet south of the earlier-formed tin deposit. From it about 4,000 tons of 12 percent copper ore was mined in 1915-18, but none has been mined since and no copper ore is now in sight