I know William Williams was anxious as he approached the cabin after midnight on Thursday, 26 July, 1860. He could see the adobe and the outbuildings in the dim
quarter moon light, but the silence worried him. No smoke issued from the chimney where 15 men had cooked their meals and
smelted their ore for the last year. There was not a sound from the corral where the burros and horses should have been responding to the pack animals he was leading. Motioning the boys, Billy and Charley Ake, to hold back their laden burros, Williams approached the cabin alone, calling out his
cousin's name. "James? James?" Something unseen in the
pitch blackness made him stop short. William struck a match. And in
a ragged breath he saw that the cabin's front door was ajar, and
then, stretched on the ground he saw James, face down, with his
head split wide open and small clumps of gray-white brain trailing
away into the dark.
This
story begins after North America had been sailing westward at 2
inches a year for about a hundred million years. Then about 25
million years ago the continent's northwestern edge slammed head on
into the Juan de Fuca plate. And like 2 cars colliding head on left headlamp
to right headlamp, the collision sent 250 sextillion tons of
continental rock buckling and twisting. The wrenching spun Baja
California loose from Mexico and, about 17 million years ago,
switched on the San Andreas fault.
Telling
the boys to stay back, William edged past his cousin's corpse, and
pushed the door wider. The small room was was pitch black. Holding
the match high, William took two steps inside and stumbled over the
heavy body of John Moss. William stumbled out of the cabin, yelling
at the Ake boys to gather the mules, and get the hell out of here.
As
the west coast twisted, the crust behind was pulled out, stretching a
hundred miles and more, until it was so thin it cracked into 400 blocks
roughly 25 miles across, each dropping down at a 60 degree angle on the west end with
eastern escarpments tilting up to 10,000 feet into the sky.
They formed a rhythmic
series of north-south mountain islands, appearing on maps like "an
army of caterpillars marching toward Mexico". With every 1,000 feet in elevation up in each range, the temperature dropped down 4 degrees, and rainfall increased by 4 inches. Thus each mountain range became a sky island, biologically isolated by the 120 degree desert seas between them .And in this 500
by 1,500 mile Basin and Range Province lay most of North America's
accessible rare metal wealth.
The 3 hurried 35 miles south along the San Pedro River to Sonoita
Creek, then west up it's canyon to Fort Buchanan. The outpost's
commander, Captain Richard
S. Ewell, recognized William as the panicked man rode up, not long after dawn.
The
two had crossed paths just the day before, and, as Ewell wrote
his sister back in Virginia, he immediately realized, "..something
bad had happened." The story spilled from William like a desert
gully-washer. "He
said he had arrived at the mine about midnight, and no one answering,
struck a light and saw his cousin lifeless with his head split open.
They did not wait to see more...." Ewell dispatched as many of
his malaria ridden dragoons as he could spare to accompany William back to the cabin. The Captain's assumption was that the Apache must be responsible. But Ewell kept the Ake boys at the fort to question them, as to what they had seen and heard.
As
the crustal blocks tilted they lifted ancient hydrothermal vents, where super heated brine had split the bedrock. As the vents cooled
they left behind precipitate, veins of quartz, tinted occasionally
with gold, but more often with lead - galena - or sulfur - agentite - or even chlorine - horn silver (above).
And by the middle of the 19th
century, some humans had learned to read such rocks, the way a hunter
reads a trail. A bit of fur caught on a bramble, a leaf nervously
nibbled but left on the branch, tells of a furtive buck hiding
nearby. Quartz stained with chalcopyrite tells of veins of copper
sulphide hiding below. Gelena hints at lead sulphide (above). Should you
find both, if you were educated, diligent and lucky, you might find
silver as well.
The
soldiers found the mechanic James Williams, "ravaged by
animals", on the ground between the 3 room adobe cabin (above) and the
empty supply shed. All the horses and mules kept in the corral and
their tack were gone. Inside the adobe was the body of chemist John
C. Moss. He lay on the front room floor, stabbed multiple times. The
contents of the cabin had been ransacked, and some of the assaying
equipment was missing. But there was no sign of the cook, David
Brontrager, nor of the 11
miners recruited from Sonora Mexico, nor the tents they had occupied, nor their boss, the head of the St. Louis
Mining Company, Frederick Brunckow.
Silver
is an odd metal. You never pan for silver in a stream, or dig it out
with your bare hands. Silver is found only in veins running through
hard rock, where it forms thin flakes or plates and occasionally crystal clusters (above). But it takes an educated eye to
recognize silver ore. In 1858 an educated mining engineer tracked a
quartz trail across the hot deserts of the Sonoran desert, until
he found a 6 foot wide vein of silver chloride, a mile east of the
north flowing San Pedro River. He filed a claim and named his mine
"The Bronco". His name was Frederick Brunckow.
Frederick
had been born in Saxony in 1830, of a Russian father and a German
mother. He was trained as a mining engineer at the University of
Westphalia. He was fluent in German, English, French and Spanish. At
20 years of age he emigrated to the United States, where he worked his way down
the Mississippi as a steamboat deckhand, all the way to Texas. There, in 1854, his mining degree earned him an
$1,800 a year salary with the Sonora Exploration and Mining Company.
And after 2 seasons tracking minerals in the New Mexico basin and
range providence, Frederick decided to strike out on his own.
They
found Frederick Brunckow not far inside the mine shaft (above). Like the
others he had been dead for several days. But his death had been more
violent, in part probably because he was Jewish.
His corpse had a 10
inch long hardened steel hand-held drill bit driven into this
abdomen. Because of the violence of all the attacks, and because the
bodies had lain in the Arizona heat for 3 days, the dead were buried in hastily dug and poorly marked graves. The next morning the nervous soldiers returned to
Fort Buchanan.
Frederick had found financial backing in the immigrant community of St. Louis,
Missouri. He found his first four employees there, as well.
Pharmacist John Moss invested in the Bronco and would serve as
chemist. Machinist James Williams agreed to keep the mine's
equipment running and his cousin William offered to serve as the
Bronco's supervisor. Another German American, David
Brontrager, signed on as the mine's cook. The plan was to gather equipment in St. Louis, sail down the Mississippi to New Orleans, then across the Gulf of Mexico to Texas, and make their way overland to Arizona and Sonora, where Frederick would hire peons to do the heavy work because they were cheaper than Americans.
The
soldiers returned to Fort Buchanan on Sunday, 29 July, 1860. Their
opinion, as Captain Ewell told his sister, was "the Mexican
employees had risen, murdered the Americans and robbed the place and
run off for Sonora" Having negotiated with the Apache, Ewell
agreed. "This is much worse than would have been done by the
Indians," he wrote, "who don't betray confidence in this
manner." A few days later, this version was seemingly confirmed
when the cook, David Brontrager, reappeared 15 miles closer to the
Mexican border, at Camp Jecker, on the San Pedro River.
The
first task in hard rock mining is simple back-breaking labor under
very dangerous conditions. In "single-jacking" an
individual miner used a 5 pound hammer to drive a 4 foot long drill 3
feet into the rock, rotating the drill a quarter turn after every
strike.
When there was enough space 2 or 3 men would "Double Jack",
one holding the drill and the others wielding 10 pound hammers, The
completed holes were then filled with black powder, which was set off
to crack the rock into pieces. The debris was then "mucked out"
and carried to the surface in buckets or carts.
If
Broterager's story was to be believed, just hours after William and
the Ake brothers had left the adobe on Monday, 23 July, to buy flour
at Fort Buchanan, the Sonoran peons had rebelled. They murdered
Brunckow because he was the boss and because he was Jewish, James Williams and John Moss because
they were witnesses, and the peons kidnapped and released
Broterager at the Mexican border because, as they told him, he was "a good
Catholic".
The peons primary motive was theft. What they stole
speaks to their poverty in feudal Sonora. They took firearms, boots, shoes, underwear,
and several dozen pairs of pants, and a small amount of silver ore
which had been refined through the use of an arrastra.
The
method had been brought to the new world by the Spanish 300 years
earlier. An axle was vertically driven into the center of a pit,
lined with stones (above). Large flat bottom rocks were then tied to the
axle so that as the axle turned, the stones would be dragged
(arrastra) across the ore, slowly grinding it into pebbles. This "Chilli Mill" meant more
back breaking labor, this time under the killing Arizona sun. But
without abundant water, it was the only way to "refine" the
ore.
In the America of 1860, Catholics were still suspect, and Ewell could not
prove Broterager's innocence. So the German American remained in the fort's brig while
the Arizona mining community panicked. Meetings were held,
committees formed, outraged expressed, and a list of the "murdering
greasers" was compiled. Captain Ewell forwarded these
expressions of outrage to Governor Ignacio Pesqueira of Sonora, Mexico (above). The murderers were never arrested, but some of
the mining equipment was returned, along with enough validation of
Broterager's story, that he was released.
And then the outbreak of the Civil War gave the Americans something else to worry about.
Captain Ewell would rise to Lieutenant General of the Confederate States of America, and command 1/3rd of the Army of Northern Virginia. And the German immigrant community of St. Louis would
enlist in large numbers to help defeat the Confederacy.
But
the violence which had butchered 3 men in a lonely cabin in 1860, would eventually lead to the 30 most iconic seconds of violence in the
history of the American frontier, just 8 miles from that dark and
bloody adobe, in a town called Tombstone.
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