Henry Wickenburg, Soldier of Misfortune

You can't go too much on what these old Indian fighters say. "But some day, we will come back, you and I, Major to find that vein of gold," Wickenburg replied. "Perhaps."

In Tucson, Wickenburg found employment driving a freight outfit carrying supplies to southern military posts. He saved his money, spent his evenings dreaming of that campsite on the Hassayampa, making plans to return to the river country and search for King Woolsey's ledge of gold.

In October, 1863, Wickenburg, Van Bibber, Green, Smith, Estill, and Fisher returned to the "punkin patch." They had a splendid outfit with adequate supplies to see them through three months of prospecting. After ten weeks of fruitless search in the Harqua Halas the others gradually lost faith. But Wickenburg's confidence could not be destroyed.

When Green and Van Bibber broached the subject to Wickenburg, Henry refused to give up the prospect. "You can go back if you like. But I am not satisfied."

Van Bibber pointed out that Henry's knowledge of geology should have convinced him they could not expect to find gold in such formations as they had covered in their search. "We'd be better off panning the creeks up by Prescott," he said.

"That may be true," Wickenburg replied in the slow determined fashion, "had we wanted to make only a few dollars. When we find the vein Woolsey spoke of, you will realize how unwise it would have been to content ourselves with what we might find in our pans at the end of a day's work."

"But we haven't found the vein, Henry," Green interrupted."

"I was near a peak yesterday," Wickenburg continued. "There is a peculiar white formation on the side of it. And above were vultures circling. I will go to the peak, if I find nothing there, we will give up for a while."

Henry made camp that night near the base of his peak. When he arose the following morning, he found his burro had wandered off, and he set out to trace the beast.

That afternoon, Green and Van Bibber were startled by Henry's shouts as he raced toward them.

"I have found it. Jenny, my burro, she took me to it. Look at this float! And I have located the vein!"

"Say that again, Henry," Van Bibber demanded.

"Jenny runs off in the night and I follow her. When I catch up, she would not stop. Finally, I lost my temper. Oh, I should not have done so, because she did not know. I picked up some rocks to throw at her, then I looked down, and what I had in my hand was float. I knew then the vein was near. Quickly I searched. It crops out on the flat below the peak where I saw the vultures, a beautiful wide vein. We will call the mine after those birds. Later that afternoon, a notice was posted claiming the Vulture with all spurs, dips, and angles of mineral con-tained therein in the name of Wickenburg and his five companions.

That night, Wickenburg was again a wealthy man, made so by the treasures of the earth..

But things weren't easy at the Vulture. The nearest water was twenty-five miles away. The Indians were hos-tile. Wickenburg and his friends had no money with which to develop the mine. Gradually the others drifted away leav-ing their share of the claim to Henry who refused to quit.

Henry Wickenburg spent that winter taking ore out of the Vulture. Most of the time he worked alone. On the backs of two burros, he packed his ore to the campsite on the river.

The only method of reducing ore then in use in the West was the crude Spanish arrastre, which required water to recover the gold.

In the early summer of 1864, with the aid of Charles Genung, Wickenburg built the first arrastre on the Hassayampa. On the Fourth of July, his forty-fourth birthday, the first ton of ore from the Vulture was crushed, and three hundred fifty dollars in gold recovered by Wickenburg and Genung.

Again, fortune was within Henry's grasp. This time there was no imperial government to rob him. In all the years since leaving home, he had never communicated with his family. But now he could. Now he could make up perhaps for the misfortune his discovery of coal had brought to Frederick and Anna Heintzel. But fortune only toyed with Henry Wickenburg. Unable to operate the mine alone, he hit upon a plan of allowing other miners to work the Vulture, requiring them to pay fifteen dollars a ton for the ore they took out. He and Genung would operate the arrastre. Fifteen dollars was an incredibly low price for the rich Vulture ore. Even so, the contract miners high-graded the richest pockets and stole far more than they paid for. Some authorities believe Jacob Walz high-graded ore from the Vulture, and that he created the story of the Lost Dutchman mine to cover his crime. By 1865, a five-stamp mill had been built on the river, the first of its kind in the country. But contract mining was unsatisfactory, and the mill was closed. That fall, a representative of the Behtehuel-Phelps interests purchased three hundred feet of the Vulture vein from Wickenburg for $85,000. They made a down payment of $20,000 and the company began producing ore at the Vulture. They built a pipeline to bring water from the river, installed expensive machinery, and built barracks out of native rock for their employees. A dispute arose between Wickenburg and the company, the exact cause of which is unknown. Wickenburg spent the $20,000 down payment to finance litigation. And in the end the courts ruled in favor of the company. Behtehuel-Phelps now refused to pay the balance due Henry. We don't know exactly how much gold the Vulture produced, two, ten, or fifty millions: but we do know it was in the millions. The mine changed hands many times. For a time, it was the property of "Silver Dollar" Tabor of Denver. An English company had controlling interest for years. But out of all the Vulture's wealth, Henry Wickenburg was unable to keep a dollar. With the development of the mine, a village sprang up on the river, called Wickenburg in honor of the man who had thrown a piece of float at an irascible burro and recognized the value of his missile. Wickenburg lived on in an adobe cabin near the river. Somehow he managed a living. With the passing of the years, he grew to accept the loss of two fortunes philosophically. To his friend, Henry Cowell, he said, "What use would money be to me now? My father and mother are beyond help. I have all the riches I need in the beauty of the desert, the quiet of the river, the change of the seasons, my home, and my friends.

On July 4, 1905, forty-one years after the first ore from the Vulture was crushed, the body of Henry Wickenburg was found in a grove of mesquite trees behind his house. A bullet hole through his right temple, an old-fashioned Colt revolver at his side. Murder or suicide, it makes little difference now. The body of a man who all his life followed a dream, who, in spite of disaster and misfortune, never lost ability to see the vision, lies buried on the knoll he selected beside his friends, the Cowells.

Henry Wickenburg was always a pioneer. The words of Marie Sandoz might have been written for him. "One can go into a wild country and make it tame, but, like a coat and a cap and mittens that he can never take off, he must always carry the look of the land as it was. He can drive the plow through the nigger-wool, make fields and roads go every way, build a fine house, and wear the stiff collar, and yet he will always look like the grass where the buffalo have eaten, and smell of the new ground his feet have walked on."