The Champion property began as the New Years claim, located in 1851 when the Gold Rush was transforming California. The Providence, located in 1858, proved easier to work at first. By 1888, the Champion's inclined shaft had reached only 300 feet, while the Providence was already descending past 1,100 feet with eleven drifts driven on the Merrifield vein. The problem was the concentrates. The Providence struggled to process its sulfide-rich ore until around 1870, when the chlorination process finally made the operation profitable. That breakthrough changed everything. Both mines now had reason to dig deeper, and deeper meant inevitable collision.

The Merrifield vein could be traced for 11,000 feet, from a point 3,000 feet south of the Providence shaft all the way to the Mount Auburn mine. But where did one company's rights end and another's begin? Under American mining law, whoever owned the apex, the highest point where a vein reached the surface, could follow that vein downward even under a neighbor's property. The lawsuits that followed consumed a decade, suspending operations at intervals and diverting money from development to attorneys. When the Champion finally absorbed the Providence in 1902, the consolidated operation faced another lawsuit, this time with the Home mine to the west. That fight ended in 1907 with another purchase.

The mines operated with water power harnessed through Pelton wheels, one running the plunger pump, another the hoist, a third powering the stamp mill. Miners earned $3 per day, the standard wage for underground work in the 1890s. The ore was free milling but heavily mineralized, sometimes running $150 to $200 per ton in high-grade shoots. Sulphurets, the concentrated sulfide minerals, yielded about $80 per ton after processing through the chlorination works. Fifty-six men and boys worked underground while five more tended the roasting furnaces where chlorine gas stripped gold from sulfide ore. The veins dipped at 35 to 40 degrees, heavy ground that required constant timbering with supports that lasted barely a year and a half.

By 1919, the Champion Group had swallowed claims with names that read like a roll call of Sierra Nevada ambition: Bavaria, Bayard Taylor, Climax, Mary Ann, New Years, Wyoming, and dozens more. The operation stretched along the Ural and Merrifield veins under the management of Arthur De Wint Foote, the same engineer who had built the North Star powerhouse. His son, Arthur Burling Foote, served as superintendent. Total production estimates ranged wildly, from $8 million to $20 million, though authenticated records showed the Champion Company alone produced $2,864,528 from over 500,000 tons of ore between 1893 and 1913.

In 1911, the North Star Mines Company, hungry for expansion, bonded the Champion Group and began extensive exploration work. They unwatered the Champion shaft to its bottom at 2,400 feet and drove new drifts north along the Ural vein, connecting the old workings to fresh ore bodies. The consolidation created one of the two most productive mining groups in the Nevada City Mining District. But the Champion-Providence Mine closed in 1920, a casualty of declining ore grades and rising costs. The mill and cyanide plant fell silent. Today, the site along Deer Creek preserves the memory of California's hardrock mining era, when men followed veins of milky white quartz deep into the earth, hoping the next blast would reveal a bonanza.