Dease Creek flows southwesterly into Dease Lake and enters the lake about 30 kilometres north of the community of Dease Creek. Gold in Dease Creek was discovered in the summer of 1873, and Captain W. Moore was among the first to begin work there. The settlement of Laketon (abandoned) was built at the mouth of the creek.

Bedrock outcrops in the bed of the creek at many places and, for 13 kilometres upstream, there is comparatively little drift or alluvial filling in the bottom of the valley, with the exception of the bottom of the canyon near the mouth of the creek, where the depth to bedrock is reported to be 5.4 to 7.6 metres. Parts of the old pre-glacial channel, in the form of drift covered rock benches, occur at intervals along the creek for 13 kilometres. The benches occur as small remnants on one side or the other. The longest stretch, about 518 metres, is about 2.4 kilometres up the creek from its mouth. Drifting and opencut work reportedly has shown that the benches contain fairly high gold values. It may be however, that most of the gold is in the basal gravels which were mostly drifted out. The old channel, for the most part, has been destroyed by the stream erosion that produced the present valley (Geological Survey of Canada Summary Report 1925 Part A, pages 56A-61A).

As indicated on Geological Survey of Canada Open File 2779, the creek is underlain by various units of the Carboniferous-Jurassic Cache Creek Complex. These include basalt, tuff, agglomerate, minor chert and argillite of the Permian French Range Formation and chert, cherty argillite, argillite, siltstone, volcanic sandstone, limestone and metamorphosed equivalents, of the Mississippian-Triassic Kedahda Formation. Quartz sweats are locally evident. In 1991, mapping in the vicinity of Lyons Gulch uncovered a carbonate altered, fuchsite-bearing listwanite along a road.

Mining on Dease Creek began in 1874 and continued for many years. The standard method was by diverting the creek by means of wing-dams, and sluicing the materials down to bedrock and thoroughly cleaning the bedrock. Drifting and opencuts were also carried out on the benches. The gold-rich spots were where the old channel had been cut away by the present channel; the barren places were opposite the stretches where the old channel is intact. Bedrock in the rich parts of the creek bottom, for 9 to 13 kilometres upstream, is said to have been cleaned at least a dozen times since 1874.

The most notable work was on the McCrimmon ground where nearly the whole 518 metre length of the bench was drifted. Considerable drifting and opencut work was done on the Brian-McKay ground 1.6 kilometres farther upstream, and at California bar about 13 kilometres upstream from the mouth. The chief interest in later years was in a 274 metre section of ground "from just above the canyon to where the stream issues into the flats". This ground was drilled in 1913, 1924 and 1930-31 with the idea of hydraulicking the benches, and mining the ground in the bed of the creek at and near the mouth. Several attempts were made at mining this section but none proved successful. The main activity on the creek ended in about 1932 although some production was reported into the 1940s.

Total recorded production from 1874 to 1945 totalled 3,923,576 grams of gold (Bulletin 28, page 58).