12/22/03

Copper in Arizona. A deal with Barney Barnatto, the South African diamond king. Karl Eilers and I locate shafts which yield porphyry copper. My crew on strike. Blowing up the assay office. A bundle of dynamite and lighted fuse under our house. My men propose to hang me. The arrival of payroll in the nick of time. The rope "fence" to keep out snakes on the desert. Colonel Bean tames a rattlesnake.

From the days of 1859 the Ajo mines have been producers of copper. Hi Golly, a Greek who did odd jobs about the camp, told me that he had come to Arizona with a herd of camels and packed copper to California for many years. The veins were small but rich, and no tow openings had the same form of mineral. None of the shafts were more than seventy feet deep. The deepest had a streak of calcite studded with native copper the size of a pea; another shaft had copper glance or chalcocite; still another had red oxide; but the best showing was in the shaft were I put the hoist. There, after the hole had been deepened below the old workings, I found a streak of bornite and glance that produced several carloads of ore yielding 63% of the red metal. This was hauled over the desert in wagons to Deming and sold to the sampler there. A drip of water, blue in color, from the back of one of the drifts, was productive of almost pure copper when it fell upon the iron scrap. The formation on the surface was a soft porphyry, well saturated with the copper solutions, but that was only the secondary excretion of the vast bodies of sulphides that underlay the whole mass.

Barney Barnatto, the South African diamond king, was approached as likely to finance the project on a large scale, and he sent Charles Roelker, the chief engineer for the Chartered Company of South Africa, to make an examination, but the grade of ore was just below his limit and he turned the proposition down. That was before the day of “porphyry copper’” and no process had yet been invented for the successful reduction of low-grade ores. It was owing to the sagacity of Karl Eilers and his sterling qualities as a geologist and mining engineer that the values of the great Ajo copper deposit was demonstrated to the world. Mr. Eilers, who was an official of the American Smelting & Refining Company, came to the Ajos to study the geological conditions prevailing around that ancient volcanic crater out in the middle of the desert and decide whether there was a real mine there. Together we selected sites for four shafts, which were sunk to a depth of one hundred feet each, and these four pits have since proved the existence of a mineral deposit that has produced hundreds of millions of dollars in copper. Since then has come the transformation of that barren spot, on which was nothing but cactus and greasewood, into a thriving young city, modern to the Nth degree, including business houses, hospitals, churches, schools, hotels, theaters, parks, and fine residences, a water system that is the envy of every town in Southern Arizona, and a railroad connected with the Southern Pacific at Gila Bend, forty miles away.

The job of managing an outfit of misfits, renegades, and bandits forty miles from nowhere and getting a reasonable day’s work from them was not altogether a sinecure. The Mexicans would demand high wages, and by working town days would make enough to keep a family of ten children for two weeks, so they would quit work and spend most of their time lolling around their adobe huts. The Yaki Indians were by far the best workers, as every payday they had me send their wages to their people in Sonora to buy arms with which to fight the Mexican government, and for this reason they were always broke and anxious to hold their jobs. This set an example to the others, which engendered a fierce antagonism. However, should a grievance arise, they all banded together against the common enemy – the management.

Colonel Bean, the manager, was seldom at the camp, as it was necessary for him to give his time to the financing of the work and other activities of the syndicate. Mr. Ward, the chairman of the group, was very prompt in forwarding the pay roll to Bean, but in those days of uncertain transportation the money did not always arrive on time at the camp. This would cause a hullabaloo and give the radical element an opportunity to stir up trouble. On one occasion when the pay roll was behind time, a stick of dynamite with a lighted fuse attached was thrown into the assay office, but no one was present and the damage was confined to the destruction of the assay furnace and chemicals.

My wife and I had a house separate from the rest of the camp. The building rested on posts as a protection from snakes, Gila monsters, and other reptiles. A delayed pay roll had aroused the anger of the I. W. W.’s, and one morning as I emerge from the house I observed a thin line of smoke coming from the spot under the house above which our bed was located. I walked over to it and saw that it was a lighted fuse, which I jerked out from a bundle of six sticks of powder wrapped in burlap. In another minute the house would have been blown to atoms with my wife in it. I was never able to locate the dastard who had intended to murder us in our bed.

The most trying time at the Ajos was when the whole force went on strike for more pay and shorter hours. The pay roll was also behind, which added to the dissatisfaction. The men were in an ugly mood, drinking heavily at the saloon tent, and word was sent to me of the dire threats they were making. Fortunately there were no firearms in the camp, or an attack would have been made that night.

The following morning, as my wife and I were walking over to the cookhouse for breakfast, the crew came around the corner of the house and blocked the way. I told them stand aside. The spokesman, one of the most rabid of the I. W. W.’s, said: “Where is our money?”

I answered: “Why worry about your money? The mail will soon be here and then you will be paid off!”

“We don’t propose to wait any longer! Come on, boys!” they all shouted in unison, and closed in on me. One f the Mexicans produced a lariat and flung the loop over my head. Another tried to tie my hands, but I frustrated him. Pushing and dragging me toward the head frame of the mineshaft, they fastened the lariat to the sheave wheel above and evidently intended to drop me into the hole.

My wife rushed in among them and pleaded for my life, explaining to them that I was only an agent and should not be held responsible for their troubles. This had not occurred to them, and the argument seemed to have some weight. The gang began to argue among themselves, and I saw that my wife’s pleading had erected a split, the outcome of which was in doubt when the crunching of wheels was heard coming up the canyon. With the coming of the buckboard I was released, and I lost no time in going through the mail sack. Fortunately the money for the pay roll was there, and I fired each one as he reached for his money.

While waiting for a new crew of men, I did some prospecting on the desert and found that the mineralization was not confined to the Ajo crater. The formation looked good to me and I made one location on what appeared to be an exceptionally rich piece of ground. I did not proceed with its development, however, but a company several years later opened up a producing mine at that spot.

On one of these prospecting trips I went out into the desert with another engineer, traveling in a light spring buggy drawn by tow horses. At nightfall we made our camp, and tried out a recipe we had heard of to keep the snakes by tying our hair lariats together and running it around our camp. The theory was that the snakes would not cross the scratchy rope. Then we spread our blankets on the ground and rolled up together. Our sleep was undisturbed until the wee sma’ hours, when I felt a heavy lump of something between us which was slowly moving. I was awake in an instant and threw back the blankets, yelling “Hey! There is a rattler in the bed.” My companion leaped out, and we looked around for a club, but before we found one the snake had uncoiled and wriggled off into the brush. We spent the rest of the night in the spring buckboard.

The flies at the Ajo boarding house were legion. Everything was covered with wire screens, yet they would get into the food while we were in the act of eating it. The scorpions and tarantulas would crawl along the rafters and drop down on one’s plate; then scamper off with a mouthful, much to the disgust of the diner and the despair of the cook. Armies of ants, both red and black, were always on the march in front of my house. Trapdoor spiders seemed to be their meat, for they were usually transporting to their barracks, in sections, a spider, which had probably been disabled by a scorpion. On one occasion they had captured a small tarantula, and if a moving picture could have been taken of that battle, showing the neat and scientific was in which they overwhelmed the big insect, then jauntily dissected the monster, and ended in a victory parade conducted in precise military order, it would have been the prize feature of the year.

A few Gila monsters made their habitat in the district, and sidewinders, king, and rattlesnakes were plentiful. The king snakes would art between one’s feet with lightning swiftness, but they are harmless and we encouraged them because they are death to the rattlers.

Colonel Bean was a connoisseur in rattlesnakes, and one day as we were riding together on muleback to Gila bend, I saw a large rattler coiled on a bank beside the road, and called his attention to it. I always had an aversion for snakes, no matter what the breed, and was for keeping on our way.

“Hold on!” cried the colonel. “I want that snake. I promised a friend in Phoenix I would bring him one!”

Dismounting so as not to disturb the reptile, the old gentleman cut a forked stick, and moving closer began to manipulate the switch over the snake until it uncoiled, when he got the forked end over its neck, pinning it to the ground. Then he reached down, and running his hand along its back, grasped the rattler behind the fork. Straightening up, with the snake writing and thrashing about, and winding about his wrist, he came over to where I was standing and shoved its head close to my face. As I sprang back he shouted: “Isn’t he a beauty?”

I was too disgusted to express any admiration for the reptile, but nevertheless unstrapped a pair of overalls from my saddle, tied up the bottom of a leg with a shoelace, and the old fellow dropped it in. This impromptu sack was tied on behind the colonel, and we pursued our way. We nearly lost the rattler though, for on looking behind I saw that the string had loosened and about a foot of the snake’s tail was hanging out and flopping against the mule’s belly with the movement of the animal. Bean dismounted and shook the snake back where it belonged, tying it up more securely. Later he presented it to his admiring friend without any further mishap.

Later on in the year the option on the Ajo came due, but the syndicate declined to exercise it, and we closed down. The land lay idle for several years. The came the discovery of a method of treating low grade copper ores; the old Ajos became the New Cornelia; and the dream of my old manager that the property would one day become the greatest copper mine in Arizona has been fully realized, although the old colonel did not live long enough to see it.