The Vulture Henry Wickenburg's Mine

WHAT CHANGES Henry Wickenburg would find if he could return today from that spirit world which so interested him during the hard years of his life. He would learn that the Vulture mines have yielded over $8,000,000 in gold since that day in 1863 when he stumbled on the region, forgetting Civil War and Apaches in the thrill of having made a strike. But there was an ill omen hanging over Henry Wickenburg that day. Misunderstood, good, old Henry Wickenburg could today watch the steam shovels and trucks which mine gold at the Vulture taking the place of picks, shovels and man's sweat, see the sand-leaching and cyanide plants which are substitutes for horse driven arrastras, dry-washing and panning, and feel the heat on his ruddy face of electric melting pots that spew molten gold into brick molds.

That tall, broad-faced, bearded German would be most surprised and pleased at one thing, if he could return, though he was never a vain or covetous man. It is the monument to his memory which the city of Wickenburg dedicated last November 23. It marks the 78 years since he crossed the Hassayampa river to go into the bare, nameless ridges that were to be called the Vulture Mountains. He would be grateful for that monument. It might make up for having been neglected, duped, and allowed to die, mysteriously and alone, in the brush near the town his name bears.

Continuing the supposition that Old Henry might return, he would wonder why the Dons of Phoenix took visitors and residents to Wickenburg and the Vulture mine in January. He would wonder why and discount the stories of his courage in holding his claims against Apaches, raiders and claim jumpers and shrug aside the incident of a Texas renegade who almost took his life.

A new importance has been given many things in Henry Wickenburg's life since he died that May night of 1905. There is a new glamour about his past and that of the minesmillions from the lodes and placers, thirteen men strung up in the Hangman's Tree, a ceiling trap-door in his home where he hid his money, and strange seances to call back for him spirits from the after world.

Gruff but gentle, rough but generous, Henry Wickenburg did many things out of desire or necessity that now seem brave and wise. For instance, sleeping on that bluff behind his home. He knew he was safer from Apaches or gunmen there, but more, he had lived too long in the open to care for the smothering closeness of a bedroom.

What wouldn't one give to know all of his story, particularly those years between his birth in 1830 in Austria and the day he discovered the Vulture mine. When did he come to the United States, how and where meet that great trapper and frontiersman, Pauline Weaver?

Weaver was 30 years Henry Wickenburg's senior, but they were friends. Perhaps the woodsman told young Henry of his days with the Hudson Bay company, of his entering Arizona in 1830, and of guiding the Mormon Battalion along the Gila river. But mountain men speak few words.

They were together in Arizona when the Civil War brought strife to Arizona. Troops were withdrawn and Indians pillaged ranches and towns unpunished. Weaver guided troops from Fort Whipple in 1865 as they tried to stem the red tide of destruction.

For all this strife, everyone was looking for gold and silver. Whether trapper, rancher, army deserter, renegade, gambler or traitor, all hoped to make a rich strike. Weaver and Wickenburg were no exceptions. The latter had wandered from Yuma, La Paz, Tucson, Peeples Valley and into the Harquahala country before his strike in 1863. With his prospector's tools, food and mules, defying Apaches he traveled slowly through the unmapped, dangerous miles between the state's two safe spots, Tucson and Prescott. He camped besides streams and springs or made dry camps. Lady luck attended him in 1865 when he wandered up the Hassayampa Modern miners have returned to the Vulture. Modern mining methods are making the old mine pay again. and over into the nameless mountains to camp the night. There are two legends about his discovery of the Vulture mine. One has it that he shot a buzzard and saw the gold as he stopped to pick up the bird. This would explain the name for the mountains and mine, Vulture. The other story is that he was trying to catch his mule and saw gold in the rock he was trying to throw at the contrary critter. In that shattered quartz was free gold, gold that might have made him a very rich man.

Wickenburg worked hard that first year after he found the gold. He mined a ton of it and hauled it close to the Hassayampa's waters. Apaches caused him days of delay. He began an arrastra, but it needed Charles B. Genung, who came by, to help him finish it. The ton of ore paid them $105 for their labor.

As the two men worked they talked and friendship grew. Young Genung knew Wickenburg's friends, the Doctors Smith, of California. The couple, both doctors, had a daughter who interested Charles. Wickenburg told how the Smiths had cured his friend, Pauline Weaver, of a fever. The trapper had given them three leagues of land in San Bernardino county for their kindness. There they built the Whitewater Station in San Gregorio Pass, which travelers knew well. Wickenburg often stopped at the Station. Once, while there to hunt for a few days, he opened his trunk to get shells and left the lid up. Glancing back as he left the house, he called: "Kind of keep an eye on that trunk. Mrs. Smith, there is $10,000 in it."

Genung built several arrastras for Wickenburg, stayed on to watch others copy his fine work. A year after the mine's discovery 200 persons were living in Wickenburg and some eighty men worked for Wickenburg at the Vulture. The shaft was down 100 feet, but it cost $10 a ton to haul the ore from mine to river and water was sold there at 10 cents a gallon.

Every gold or silver strike meant a mushroom town and hundreds of people flocking into the regions. That was true at Wickenburg. With hard-working citizens came saloon keepers and gamblers, and not far behind were the gunmen who knew the best spots at which to hold up a stage. What had been lonely - unpopulated desert became in a year a teeming countryside.

Jonathan Richmond wrote his parents in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1864, that "there are in Walker's Granite Creek, and the Hasiamp Diggings, about four hundred miners, most of whom have located quartz leads (lodes) and are holding on for capitalists to come in with means and machinery. The country is rich, but the scarcity of water ruins many a man's castles."

Lack of water ruined many, but this was no disaster compared with meeting Apaches or having them appear, suddenly, at camp. In another letter, which must have been small comfort to his parents, Jonathan Richmond told of being in the Vulture mining region where "we passed the dead bodies of the five Mexicans who had been killed the day before. They were mutilated in the most horrible manner, heads, ears, feet and legs cut off, etc., etc. Fifteen arrows were in the body of one. The fires around which these Indians had had their war dance were still burning. It was an awful sight."

Despite Indians, the miners worked on. They had to, for the law required them to work their claims every 10 days. The claims were "jumpable" if they did not.

That may have been the reason Henry Wick-enburg worked so hard to mine ore and was willing to sell it at bargain counter price, $15 a ton, provided the buyer sorted his ore and built his own arrastra. But perhaps he needed cash, yet men often earned $25 to $50 a day at their placers and sometimes a lucky person picked up a nugget worth $100. Saloons and gamblers got more of this money than the merchants in their clapboard stores in the growing town of Wickenburg. Careful, honest, temperate Henry Wickenburg watched others fortunes disappear on the turn of a card or after a prolonged drunk during which a claim was jumped.

That Wickenburg ran into financial difficulties is known and three years after his discovery he sold his rights to B. Phelps of New York for $75,000, receiving only a small portion of this due to litigation. The Vulture Company of New York established a large camp, ordered machinery, and built a 40-stamp mill near the town of Wickenburg. Machinery in (Continued on Page Thirty-eight)