Back Road to the Silver Kings

Back Road to the Silver Kings Ghost Camps of the Patagonias

You could go a very long way trying to leave civilization behind you and not do nearly as well as on this off-yonder loop of road drifting down from Patagonia toward the border, east of Nogales.

It has no number, no name. It meanders southeastward for a spell, after leaving state route 82, climbs into the 4,000-foot-plus Patagonia Mountains, then angles back to the highway in a westerly direction. This is quintessential southern Arizona ranch country, its rich, rolling grasslands sweeping off to every horizon. It's woodsy country. It's wildlife country, alive with deer (both desert mule and whitetail), antelope, coyote, fox, squirrel, and more species of birds than you'd find in a sophisticated aviary.

But it's not people country.

"There aren't more than 30 or 40 people living in the whole area," Surveyor-Engineer Bob Lenon told us as we paused at Patagonia to get our bearings.

Why? It would be a great place to live, wouldn't it cool, high, clear, detached from a frenetic world?

Yes, but you can't lay hands on the land, or leastwise very much of it. Most of it is U.S. forestland, not patentable.

There is, to be sure, some private land, notably down close to the border, around Lochiel and out through the San Rafael Valley. And wouldn't you know?-developers fixed their sights on it some years ago, envisioning "ranch-ettes" on small lots and a nice profit in the process. But the locals put the ki-bosh on that by making sure that the area didn't get rezoned.

Still, there were people here once oh, many, many of them. For this is also silver country. There exist out through those hills the remains of perhaps 75 mines. Some are remarkably intact, the water in their deepest shafts still being pumped, against the day when someone will decide they're worth digging into again.

"I'd say there's as much in those mines now, as has come out of them," said Bob Lenon, a chunky, white-haired man in his early 70's. "Maybe $10 or $20 million. No mine is ever really worked out. But if there's $100,000 in it, it may cost $500,000 to take it out."

Thirty-five or so of those mines are or were located in and around Har-shaw, the first port of call as you roll southward on reasonably good gravel road out of Patagonia. (The Mexicans Called Harshaw Durazno, which means "peach orchard," because the early Spanish Jesuits planted a peach orchard there.) There's not much left of Har-shaw a few old houses, an old (and unused) school, maybe a dozen people. But just a hundred years ago, it was a swinging son of a gun.

The persistent efforts of the military had finally subdued the feisty Apaches, and white prospectors began to cast covetous eyes on the manifest mineral riches of southern Arizona. One of them was David Tecumseh Harshaw, who text continued on page 19

This was silver country, here in the Patagonia Mountains of Santa Cruz County. But one of the most promising mines was said to be the Pride of the West, a copper producer. James Tallon text continued from page 14 first came to Arizona in 1862 as a sergeant in Company K of the 1st California Infantry. Mustered out of the Union Army at Oakland, California, at the end of the Civil War, he returned to Arizona and, after a short stint at ranching, began digging for gold on the eastern slopes of the Santa Ritas near Tucson. After that he moved into the Patagonias and, with several other men, soon found a surface vein that yielded $700 to $1,000 a ton worth of silver. By the time he left, to use his mining proceeds for the buying of a ranch and a stage station at Davidson Springs, east of the Santa Ritas, David Harshaw had given his name to a mine, a brand new mining district, and a brand new boomtown.

Eastern capital poured in via the Hermosa Mining Company of New York City. By mid-1880 the director of the U.S. Mint was able to report that the Hermosa Mill had produced $365,654 worth of silver in a period of four months. In the course of the year, well over $400,000 in silver bullion was taken out of the Harshaw Mine alone, and that was only one of the 35. James Reilly, editor of the Territorial Expositor, traveled southward out of Phoenix in his buckboard to survey the mining activities of southern Arizona and informed his readers that Harshaw was the busiest camp he'd seen outside Tombstone. It would be "preposterous," he said, to try to estimate the wealth of the Harshaw mines.

Population: 800, give or take a few. Lots of Easterners and Mexicans, of course, but also a polyglot lot of seekers after wealth, from places as distant as Ireland, China, England, Canada, and France. Twenty-four saloons. Ten blacksmiths. Four livery stables. A newspaper. Four prostitutes.

And then in early 1881, so suddenly that it quite took people's breath away, the bubble burst. The Harshaw Mine began to play out. So did others. The Hermosa Company shut down its mill and moved to Mexico. A few folks stayed around, thinking the town would boom again, but it never did.

A man named James Finley did come down from Tucson 10 years later, buy the Harshaw Mine, put it back in production, and take some silver out of it. But it was substantially less than a bonanza.

Finley did something else, though. He established in Harshaw, a lineage which survives to this day. That would be the Norman Hale family.

Hale, a ruddy-faced, balding man in his upper middle years, is Jim Finley's grandson. He and his wife, Ruth, and their daughter, Mary, run cattle on 15 sections of Coronado National Forest land. "Ranching here is like so many things these days," he says philosophically. "The price of everything goes up faster than the price of cattle."

It's a quiet life, ranching in Harshaw, except when the lions come. Well, anyway, one lion, and that, of course requires some telling.

It happened not long before we turned off the main road in Harshaw to knock on the front door of the Hales' modest frame ranch house. The Hales had been missing chickens, and there were claw marks on the ground. They conjectured that the claws were those of owls, because cats had been disappearing, too, and the Hales figured the owls had gotten them.

Even so, that didn't explain the strange behavior of their boxer dog. He'd go sniffing around the chicken house, and his hair would stand on end.

Then one evening about 10 o'clock - they were watching the news-Mary heard a noise outside. Her father took down his 12-gauge shotgun, and they went outside. There was a shadowy figure in a big tree near the house. Mary laid a flashlight atop the barrel of her father's gun. They thought that what they were seeing was a skunk. Hale squeezed the trigger and out of the tree toppled a very dead mountain lion which, when they weighed him up, depressed the scales to the tune of 113 pounds.

He'd apparently been in a fight. One ear was chewed off.

There's a saying in the Arizona hill country that where there's one mountain lion, there are frequently two. The Hale's aren't entirely oblivious to that possibility. Now and again they listen to the 10 o'clock news with one ear cocked to the outdoors.

Three miles down the road from Harshaw lies another of the Patagonias' silvery ghosts a place known as Mowry, although it's so long gone that you'll not even find it on the map any more. There's little more than an old cemetery to mark the spot, in which or so you'll hear lie, among others, two men killed by Indians and hung head downward from a tree limb while a slow fire was kindled beneath them.

But Mowry is or deserves to be more famous for the man who gave it its name. For around that name swirl tales of treason or alleged treason and a duel fought with rifles.

He was Lt. Sylvester Mowry of the U.S. Army. Stationed at nearby Fort Crittenden, he heard about a mine called the Patagonia, which purportedly had been discovered by the early-day Jesuits, then was rediscovered in the 1850s by two Mexican prospectors. They sold or traded it to a group of officers at Fort Crittenden, who fell on hard times and sold it in turn to Mowry.

He resigned his commission to give it all his energies. Renamed the Mowry Mine, it repaid him nicely for his efforts, yielding up as much as $4,500 worth of silver per week.

And then Mowry's troubles began. It all started with a fish story.

Sylvester Mowry was, to begin with, a great deal more than an Arizona dirt miner. He traveled widely, lectured, ran for Congress, and wrote books about Arizona. In the course of one of his lectures in an Eastern city, he re-marked, apropos of nothing much at all, that Arizona streams teemed with fish, which, depending on which streams you're talking about, is accu-rate enough on its face.

But the statement provoked a cause cèlébre. In nearby Tubac there lived a newspaperman named Edward E. Cross, who edited The Arizonian and corresponded for the St. Louis Repub-lican. Writing in the Republican, he poked fun at Mowry for his remark San Rafael Ranch, the prototypical ranch house which was the location for the movie McClintock, starring John Wayne, is still very much a working spread, sprawled out on 22,000 acres of grassland in the San Rafael Valley of Southern Arizona. J. Peter Mortimer Left to dream in the warm Southern Arizona sun, a derelict wooden ore hopper slowly returns to the land from which it came. James Tallon about the fish, saying only one kind of fish had been found in the anemic streams of this arid territory. It was, he said, about as long as a man's finger and was known as the Mowry Trout.

Such a remark, in this day and age, would be viewed as a rather unfunny joke, but in the 1800s a man's honor was a fragile thing. Mowry, deeming he'd been called a liar, challenged Cross to a duel. It was fought near Tubac before a large gallery of sporting types, ranchers, and laborers. Both men were lousy marksmen, exchanging three shots without drawing blood. Then Mowry's rifle failed to discharge. That gave him a free shot. Cross waited with folded arms, steeling himself for the fatal shot. It never came. Mowry fired into the air, shook hands with Cross, declared himself to be satisfied, and then, after an exchange of apologies in The Arizonian, became of all things editor and publisher of that selfsame newspaper.

Mowry also went back to mining his silver, but now it was as if his life had become star-crossed. Suddenly, the government arrested him on charges of treason more specifically, furnishing the Confederates with lead from the Mowry Mine for the manufacture of bullets. He was taken to Fort Yuma and confined, and his mine was confiscated. In time he won exoneration and release, but, for reasons not entirely clear, he never got his mine back. He waged a long, costly, and fruitless legal battle and died finally in poverty. It was ironic, for in the salad days of Sylvester Mowry and the Mowry Mine, a million and a half dollars worth of silver came out of that glory hole in the Patagonias.

You brush shoulders with the ghost of another famous 19th century Arizonan not far from Mowry, only in this case his earthly handiwork is still very much in evidence. That would be the San Rafael Ranch, once part of the vast transborder landholdings of a swashbuckling adventurer named William Cornell Greene Colonel Bill Greene, if you will.

The San Rafael is a 22,000-acre spread with a ranch house so prototypical of Western ranch houses that you'd think you saw it in John Wayne's McClintock. And, in fact, you did. It was the location for that movie, and the ranch itself provided the locale for much of the out-of-doors footage of Oklahoma. (Local legend has it that the moviemakers brought in the corn that was as high as an elephant's eye and placed it in front of the cameras, along with peach trees profuse with wax peaches. The wax melted ingloriously in the Arizona sun.)

The San Rafael is still very much a working spread, presided over by Greene's daughter, Florence Sharp, or Bebe, as she is known. The road cuts right through between the barns and the front yard of the ranch house, the latter offering an almost irresistable temptation for the inquisitive wayfarer.

Mrs. Sharp is pleasant but extremely firm. "Oh, I can't talk to you," she says. "They do these stories, and then we get crowds of tourists."

It would be understandable. The ro mance and glamor of the Greene legend are almost a palpable presence around that lovely brown ranch house with its white verandas on three sides.

Bill Greene came out of the East along about the 1880s and punched cattle in North Dakota and Colorado before moving into Arizona Territory. The "Colonel" was a wholly unofficial honorary rank bestowed on him by an anti-rustler vigilante group he organ ized. It stuck for the rest of his life.

He established his ranch down near the border, and it was there that Bill Greene played out his personal melo drama of tragedy and vengeance.

There had been bad feelings between Then, one day, while Greene's small daughter, Eva, was playing in a dry ditch with a friend, a wall of water suddenly came swarming down upon them, and they drowned. Someone had dynamited Greene's irrigation ditch. Greene found Burnett in a gun shop in Tombstone, said, "You blew up that dam and killed my daughter," and shot him to death. Bill Greene was a very popular man and a friend of the sheriff.

The jury said it was self-defense.

Colonel Greene went on to build a cattle empire that spread far into Mex ico, make a jillion dollars out of Cana nea copper, and die, ultimately, when his horse bolted, impaling him on a fence post. The Greene empire inevit ably shrank under the pressures of intra-family litigation and Mexican ex propriation. So it may really be some thing of a miracle that, this late in the day, so tangible a vestige of the Greene legend still remains as that wondrous cattle spread in the San Rafael Valley and that lovely ranch house with the verandas around three sides.

Drive on southwestward from the San Rafael into Lochiel, a hamlet stand ing squarely on the Mexican border, complete with a customshouse. Helen Mills, wife of a retired U.S. Depart ment of Agriculture employee and her self the border inspector, says, "We're 25 miles from nowhere." She says it, though, not with the rancor of someone who resents the isolation but with the quiet pleasure of a person who enjoys her privacy. "It's not really isolated," she adds. "It just takes a little while to get to town."

West of the customshouse you en counter the Marcos de Niza Monument, erected in 1939 to mark the 400th anni versary of the passage of the Jesuit explorer into Arizona-"The First Euro pean West of the Rockies." The White cement monument, topped with its in evitable cross, has a neglected, woebe gone look about it, as though, by not really taking care of it, we were ack nowledging a certain historical doubt: Did de Niza really come this way, up the Santa Cruz and along the San Rafael Valley, or did he as most think travel up the San Pedro to the east?

Then through the mining ghost towns of Duquesne (population: 0) and Wash ington Camp (population: 20), so close together that there's the saying in those parts: "When Duquesne's tail was stepped on, Washington barked." And from there up over a gentle ridge toward Nogales, with a last retrospective look backward across this lovely "Big Val ley" country toward the blue-green Patagonias and a recollection of some thing a little disturbing that someone said at Washington Camp: "I wish they'd pave this road. Then more peo ple would come here."

I respectfully disagree. Pave that road and the world would descend on this quiet bit of Arizona, trampling the grasslands, littering the forest, disturb ing the ghosts. Leave it be, this silvery loop through the Patagonias. Those who truly know how to savor the beauty of our borderland back country will come anyway, and will be the richer for their effort.

Padre Kino and the Mission Frontier A Retrospective

by Dianne Ebertt Beeaff and Charles W. Polzer, S.J.

Beneath the ramada of Tumacacori Mission, you watch an old Papago woman, round-faced and pleasant, weave a maize basket the color of sunbleached ivory. With brown and leathered hands she curls a flattened strand of yucca leaf around a coil of bear grass, pale as light, and draws it close.

Across the border at Cocóspera, a fledgling swallow darts from a crack in the mission's crumbling facade. Swooping to where the north wall stood worn and fading, dissolving like so much salt, it disappears in an upper hollow, leaving behind a thinning spray of dust that sifts downward like sunlight.

Farther south, the fine old church of Magdalena stirs itself and breaks the evening stillness with a call to mass. And with others you gather, celebrants in the plaza heat, animated and eager.By chance, these three distinct images of the mission frontier are not so far removed from each other by time or distance. They lie along the same course Tumacacori at the base of the Tucson Corridor, 18 miles north of Nogales, Magdalena 78 miles farther south along Mexico's Carretera Internacional, and Cocóspera, set between the two, up against the Sierra de Papigochi Mountains, on the road to Cananea.

You begin your trek of discovery at San José del Tumacacori, the wellknown, restored Franciscan mission which lies in the rich and splendid valley of the Santa Cruz River, 48 miles south of Tucson on U.S. 89. The mountain backdrop for mission San José del Tumacacori is the newly scarred promontory known for three centuries as San Cayetano. The meandering Santa Cruz River, once better known as the Santa María, has watered several neighboring mission sites. But only San José stands firmly set against simultaneous progress and decline. Thanks to the National Park Service which accepted the gift of land and maintained the mission ruin, we now have some visible idea of our past.

San José, even as we see it today, was never finished as a major church building. The Mexican War of Independence intervened to stop construction. Then Mexican acts of secularization affected both operation and ownership of mission lands. Unwittingly, Tumacacori fell into the hands of exploiters who used the ample compound to process silver ore and stable their animals. When English miners and investors and Norteamericano territorialists arrived, the unfinished and half-ravaged mission served as firm evidence of the greedy acts of the missionary priests. Although their interpretation of history was nearly 200 percent wrong, their explanations have persisted, and people continue to misconstrue the past in Southern Arizona.

Before shifting to the San José site, the old mission of San Cayetano del Tumacacori stood across the river on the northeast flanks of the mountain. But Apache attacks and Pima rebelliousness made a move closer to the Presidio of Tubac to the north more desirable if not necessary. And today the site sits alongside Interstate 19, still cloaked in mystery and misunderstanding.

If only the cars would stop so people could see Tumacacori, maybe the misunderstandings would vanish