Gold in Them Thar Hills

There's Gold in Them Thar Hills!

They say that gold is where you find it, and in Arizona, they found it almost everywhere. The mineral-rich areas shown on the geological face map of the state is a Georgia O'Keeffe abstraction of sinuous curves singing a lyric of promise. And many heard the siren song and fell under its spell.

They searched for the yellow metal here as people have searched the world for tens of thousands of years. No one knows when or where the first "gold rush" occurred. It may have been as simple as a cave man finding a shiny stone in a stream, discarding it, and then on second thought, saving it for adornment because it flashed in the sun. The rest is history and a violent one at that.

In the very early days, men focused their search on Arizona because of tales of lost cities of gold and later, lost mines waiting to be rediscovered. But while some spent their days searching, others staked honest-to-goodness claims that would eventually make Arizona the fourth ranked gold-pro ducing state in the nation.

As early as 1774-when Arizona was still part of Mexico-a Jesuit padre and others were mining rich lodes in southern Arizona. But the legendary period, Arizona's golden age, was the latter part of the 19th century.

It was then the fabulous Vulture lode was discovered and worked near what is now Wickenburg. It was the first important underground mine in the state, named when a prospector threw a rock to shoo off a vulture eating his lunch. The rock turned out to be solid gold, and the rest is history, that Records about $2.5 million coming from that site between 1865 and 1942.

The largest gold producer in Arizona was the United Eastern Mine at Oatman, where geologists ignored the lack of pay ore on the surface. Their guess was that a rich vein was deeper down. In 1913, they sunk a 465-foot shaft and hit paydirt. Between 1917 and 1924, they took about $15 million from the ground.

And there was the Alvarada Mine in central Arizona, which was financed with a $90,000 government loan. Eventually, it produced more than $2 million worth of gold-one of the few mines to ever repay a government loan in full. Almost next door was the Tom Reed Mine, which remained in operation until about 1940; and nearby-between Kingman and Oatman was the Goldroad mine that produced about $7.3 million before it ceased operation in 1930.

In those days, gold was king in Arizona, with mines like the Crown King, in the heart of the Bradshaw Mountains (producing $2 million between 1890 and 1916) and the King of Arizona mine north of Yuma (worth $3.5 million in its 17-year life). The deepest mine was the Congress, which led to the building of a Santa Fe Railroad spur between Ash Fork and Phoenix. Its shaft descended 4000 feet into the earth, and before closing in 1910, it produced some $7.7 million worth of precious metal.

A gold strike in the Bradshaw Mountains gave birth to the town of Prescott in 1864, and at one time, active mines stretched the length and breadth of the state. In fact, gold deposits of economic importance have been found in every Arizona county except Apache, Coconino, and Navajo.

In 1933, gold was valued at $20.67 an ounce, and Arizona was producing about 150,000 ounces yearly. The next year, President Roosevelt raised the price to $35 an ounce, and production jumped to 315,000 ounces. That was the heyday of gold mining in Arizona (as elsewhere). Then, in 1942, the federal government issued an order that made it almost impossible to get supplies (historians refer to it as a "war-inspired folly") and many mines closed for good. But although the rich mines became things of legend here, gold production persisted, since Arizona is the nation's number one copper producer and nearly all copper contains a little of the shiny metal. By the 1960s, Arizona's gold production even outstripped that of California and Colorado.

When anyone thinks of an Arizona prospector, they see a scruffy man, covered with whiskers and dirt, squatting beside a stream with a beaten-up pan in his hand, or swinging a pick into the crevice of a mountain. They see men and mules hightailing it into town with pockets full of nuggets, ready to share their tips (or tall tales) about all the gold in them thar hills. The romance of the gold diggers is a rich folk heritage in Arizona. Nobody talks about the hard and dangerous conditions those miners lived under; nor about all the times those pockets were empty.

Thomas Knox, in his book Underground; or Life Below the Surface, painted a particularly violent picture of the miners in Arizona Territory during the latter half of the 19th century.

It was “ . . . delightful country in every respect, except in climate, soil, production, and inhabitants. The natives have a pleasant way of slaughtering every stranger who attempts to stay there; and sometimes, when they refrain from their amusement for a few months, the strangers fall to killing each other. Until very recently it was said that no white man had ever died in Arizona with his boots off meaning that he had never died in bed. The Indians make traveling very insecure; and the Peons, or native Mexican laborers, in the mines vary the monotony of their employment by an occasional massacre of the superintendent and every other white man about the place.” Prospecting and mining are not what they used to be in Arizona, but interest here has always remained high so high that geology bulletins on the state's golden riches have continued to be run-away best sellers.

The Arizona Bureau of Mines regularly updates and reprints booklets to give a running start to both professional and amateur prospectors. They tell all about placers, or concentrations of gold in gravel and sand, like King Tut placers in north-western Mohave County and the Big Bug placers of south-central Yavapai County and the San Domingo placers of northern Maricopa County.

Because zealots have a tendency to get carried away in their search for gold, the pamphlets usually contain a note of caution, too.

Written mostly in the 1930s, the language is basic, without frills, reflecting the harsh realities of the Great Depression, when countless unemployed men struck out into the wilds to pan, sluice, and dry wash for traces of the bright yellow metal. And sometimes the words come very close to being almost pure poetry.

“A person not in robust health or one who has not sufficient funds to finance his entire trip runs a splendid chance of starving to death if he tackles placer mining in Arizona,” a 1933 bulletin says in warning. “If however, a man in good health is out of work, and has enough money to pay camp expenses for some time, and is willing to work hard, a prospecting trip will doubtless prove preferable to lying around and doing nothing.”