The Hudson Bay mine, or H.B., as it is generally called , is one of the mines of the Sheep Creek camp, in the Nelson Mining Division , Province of British Columbia. It was placer gold in Sheep Creek, below the site of this mine, that attracted prospectors to the Salmo area of southern BC. Two prospectors, P.F. Horton and H.M. Billings, discovered and staked the HB in 1910 and immediately bonded it to the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company in nearby Trail. Production began in 1912 with 742 tons of ore being shipped to the Trail smelter that year. The ore was basically lead-zinc-silver containing about 4% zinc, 1% lead and several grams per ton of silver.
The HB property is located on Aspen Creek, a tributary of Sheep Creek, 8 kilometres southeast of Salmo. The north end of the No. 1 orebody outcropped at an elevation of 1219 metres, west of Aspen Creek and almost a 1.6 kilometres north of Sheep Creek.
The HB mine was initially staked in 1907 and put into production in a limited manner in 1912. In 1927 the property was acquired by the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company (“Cominco”). Exploration by Cominco in 1949-1950 lead to the discovery of three parallel, steeply dipping, ore zones extending for 900 metres in a north-south direction across the claims. In 1955 the HB Mine was put into production at 1,000 t/day. Ten years later in 1965 the adjacent Garnet Lead-Zinc Mine was put into production as part of Cominco’s HB mining operation.
Between 1912 and 1978 the HB and Garnet mines produced a total of 6,656,101 tonnes of ore at an average grade of 4.1% Zinc, 0.8% Lead and 4.8 g/tonne Silver. Seventy percent of this production is estimated to have been mined from the HB Mine deposits.
The HB and Garnet mines closed in August 1978. As of December 31, 1978, the remaining measured and indicated reserves for the HB Mine were reported by Canadian Pacific Limited as approximately 36,287 tonnes grading 0.1 per cent lead and 4.1 per cent zinc.
The HB mine produced a total of 6,656,101 tonnes of ore in 29 years between 1912 and 1978. Recovered from this ore were 29,425,521 grams of silver, 49,511,536 kilograms of lead, 260,431,646 kilograms of zinc, 2,019,586 kilograms of cadmium, 105,412 kilograms of copper and 6,159 grams of gold.