The Salt Spring Hills are a low mountain range in the Mojave Desert, in northern San Bernardino County, California.

Some of the party discovered gold in the creek and traced it to a quartz vein in the nearby hills near Amargosa Spring.

This discovery which became known once the party reached the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, set off the first gold rush in the Mojave Desert.

[3] Mrs. Rousseau and her doctor husband traveled the Mohave Desert in the final months of 1864 with a wagon train from Utah bound for San Bernardino.

That train passed the Salt Spring Hills, where Mrs. Rousseau mentioned in her diary, dated December 4, that there were four houses and a quartz mill there, and that three men who had been serving as caretakers for a mine located there had been killed by Indians eight weeks earlier.