12/22/03

I become superintendent of the Ajo Mines in Arizona. Become connected with the New York syndicate. The water problem. Mexican at the water hole.

Among my wife’s Eastern friends was Colonel C. C. Bean, the first delegate to Congress from Arizona. Bean was a mining enthusiast of the first rank, and his experiences and exploits in the great copper state are written indelibly on its records. He was one of the discovers of the United Verde, which he worked for silver, totally oblivious to the fabulous wealth in copper that lay underneath his working and which was destined to bring fame and fortune to W. A. Clark. Bean sold the United Verde for $2500 to other men who continued to work it for silver, and then meandered over to Copper Basin, where he made a stake of $100,000.

In 1898, Colonel Bean secured an option on the old Ajos group of claims forty miles south of Gila Bend, Arizona, a watering station on the Southern Pacific Railroad. The Ajo property was a group of six patented claims set down in an ancient crater, dotted with shafts and honeycomb workings that are characteristic of Mexican mining. Colonel Bean, who was also a promoter, organized a syndicate in New York in order to work the property. It was composed of Willard B. Ward, a retired mining engineer, a member of the executive Union Club of New York and Commodore of the New York Yacht Club; Isaac Untermeyer, brother of Sam Untermeyer, a prominent lawyer; Anton Eilers, the builder and owner of the great Eilers Smelter in Leadville, which was consolidated with the American Smelting & Refining Company; Henry R. Wolcott, retried capitalist; and R. P. Lounsbury, a New York broker and son-in-law of J. B. Higgins, one of the owners of the Homestake gold mine.

Through my wife, Colonel Bean was given to understand that my accomplishments as an expert mining man were legion and that without my assistance the Ajos would not amount to a hill of prairie dogs, and so impressed was the genial colonel with my capabilities that he sent me a wire asking if I would take the job of superintendent of the Ajos. This I accepted promptly, and in a few days, accompanied by my wife, I arrived at the Ajo camp to start operations.

My crew at Ajo consisted of an assortment of I.W.W.’s Yaki Indians, renegade Mexicans, and tow Americans. Communication with Gila Bend, some forty miles away, was maintained by two mules and a buckboard, driven by a local character known as the “Arkansas Traveler,” a title acquired by virtue of his naïve curiosity and stupendous gall. He would carry no letters without first tearing off the corners, and his inquisitiveness sometimes extended to reading the contents. Tom Childs, who had a cattle ranch adjoining the Ajos, told him to inquire for his mail on one occasion, as he had sent in a mountain lion’s pelt to the state treasurer and expected a check for the bounty. On the return of the buckboard, Tom asked Arkansas if he had a letter for him. Arkansas said: “Yes, I have a letter for you, Tom,” and felt in his pockets for the missive. “I guess I must have lost it; but anyhow, it was all about a lion’s skin.” Except for these little foibles he was a faithful fellow, but when I caught him reading a private communication from the company, I had to find another driver.

The supply of water in that arid desert was always a matter of concern to me at the Ajo camp. There was an incline tunnel in a wash, which was filled by rain when we had it, but it was usually dry and used as a cellar to store our food supplies. My sailor instincts detecting the indications of a coming storm one day, I advised my Irish cook to get the goods of the tunnel before the flood came. This he neglected to accomplish in time, and the tunnel began to fill with water. I ordered him to get busy, but he sashayed with the reply, “Do you take me fur a submarine diver?” and I was minus a cook.

We had a hoisting plant on one of the shafts, and the water from this was sufficient for boiler purposes, but it was so strongly impregnated with copper that the tubes had to be replaced every six months. By condensing the steam from the boiler we were able to supply the boarding house with water. At the southern end of the claims was an excavation in the wash, twenty feet deep and about the same in diameter, which furnished water for the saloon camp that had inevitably been established outside our sidelines. This “well” water was greatly relished by the denizens of the neighborhood, who assured me of its wholesomeness, adding, “There’s some body to that water!” In order to avert an epidemic I had the whole cleaned out, and among the curiosities hoisted was a variety of Mexican saddles, skeletons of coyotes, snakes, and the decomposed carcass of a burro.

While we are on the subject, I might mention a trip taken during my sojourn at Ajo with a visiting engineer who wished to inspect the Harqua Halar Mines, located about sixty miles from Ajo. We traveled in a light spring buckboard, and carried only a small tank of water, as I planned to reach the mine on the second day from Ajo. All went well until we sprang a leak in the water tank, and my companion suggested that we branch off to the south, where there was water in the Aqua Dosia Mountains. There was no choice in the matter, so we pointed the mules to the well, which was twenty miles off our route. When nearing the well we met a prospector with his burros, and asked if there was water in the Aqua Dosia well. He replied that there was plenty of it, and that all we had to do was to “shove that Mexican who was floating in it to one side, and get all we wanted.” And that is what we found, the body of a man floating in the well face downward; also a coyote, which in its desire for a drink had leaned too far over the rim of the hole and tumbled in. The water was not particularly appetizing, but quenched our thirst and that of the mules, after which we put a plug in the tank to stop the leak and filled it to the brim. We did not salvage the Mexican or the coyote!

The climate of the Ajos is warm and dry, and the nights, cooled by the breeze from the Gulf of California, are delightful. In the summer the days are intensely hot, and several times I crossed the desert with the thermometer at 128º in the shade, while the water in the tank behind almost reached the boiling point. The great desert, which, while it possesses neither a Sphinx nor a pyramid, nor a Muslim, Arab, or camel, is rich in varied fascinations, which one could never imagine to exist upon such an arid waste.

The moment the sun is up - and he is no laggard there – intense heat prevails. The air pulsates with it. The sun, accompanied by the hot winds, scorches one’s bones, blisters the flesh, creates boiling water in his canteen, cooks eggs, and does all manner of extraordinary stunts. The sagebrush, mesquite ironwood, and cacti are all as dry as the sandy arroyas. Then the dazzling and glaring day passes, and the sun like molten gold disappears. A marvelous transition comes over the desert. A cooling freshness permeates the air. The refulgent light is merged into an almost supernatural beauty. The Western horizon blazes with glory, and the wonderful rainbow sky of Arizona entrances us. All around the edge of the heavens, encompassing the entire horizon from where the sun had gone down and back again, there is a gorgeous rainbow of every prismatic shade.

Twilight is of brief duration in a tropical climate, and suddenly the sky turns and quivers with the marvelous constellations. They look as if one could reach up and grasp all the planets like so many jewels and bring them down to earth. But between sundown and the blossoming of the stars a most incredible transition takes place, which is to that part of the world what the Aurora Borealis is to the North. Often we would take seats out of doors, as if in a theatre and the same intent – to watch the transition scenes enacted by the peculiar tropical atmosphere, which, strange to say, I have never heard described. George Elbert Purr, in his exquisite etchings of Arizona, has caught the spirit of the desert. You have all beheld transformation scenes upon the stage, where the magnificent filmy curtains, fine as gossamer, ascend and descend, and each revelation exceeds the other in splendor.

For months in this part of Arizona the sky is cloudless, but when there is a storm, Nature works miracles. Upon one occasion, my wife and I were returning to our camp from Gila Bend, forty miles away. It was early morning, and the atmosphere was enchantingly and marvelously blue, of the liquid radiance and brilliance of a zircon. There was a felling of unreality, as if we were in Fairyland. We had traveled thirty-five miles when the sky suddenly became overcast. Deep indigo clouds of surpassing beauty began to gather. The sun fled; the wind became a hurricane. The air grew cold, and the lightening blazed across the sky with dazzling forks of electricity, plunging into the ground on every side of us. Then came the cloudburst, and we were overwhelmed with water that came in endless sheets until it reached the horses’ knees. Part of the top and sides of the carriage, together with our canteens and other articles, flew with the winds. We were wet to the bone; our teeth chattered, and we would not speak. Momentarily we expected death in one from or another – from the lightning or the wind, or, if we escaped that, from being drowned when we reached the arroyas we had to cross before reaching Ajo.

Night came with intense darkness, save when Illuminated by lightning, and we had raging rivers to ford, for the arroyas that had looked so guileless ordinarily now were tremendous, turbid, roaring, dangerous torrents, and the water cold as ice. Our horses partly swam and then touched the ground, while the water overflowed the floor of the carriage. On the sand dunes we could almost fancy hearing the rattlesnakes shaking their rattles in the bushes as we crossed. When at last we saw the lights of the little settlement and knew that we were safe, our emotions were mixed with relief over our escape from danger and a felling of awe and exultation over having witnessed nature in the grandeur of her angry mood.