Ghost Trail to Lochiel

GHOST TRAIL

In 1882, a correspondent for the Tombstone Epitaph filed this melancholy report from the declining silver camp at Harshaw: "Of 200 buildings, four-fifths are unoccupied and almost valueless for any purpose whatever, windows smashed and doors standing open. One of the largest buildings in town . . . was sold, lot and all, a few days ago for the paltry sum of $350. The hills, adjacent to the town, have been denuded . . . of the beautiful trees by which they were adorned, and the birds that were wont to sing to us . . . have departed." Just two years earlier, the town that David Tecumseh Harshaw founded boasted seven saloons, two general stores, two

TO LOCHIEL

butcher shops, a livery stable, and two boardinghouses, as well as its own newspaper, the Arizona Bullion.

By the end of 1882, Harshaw was nearly a ghost town. Today only three of its century-old houses still stand. Like the other mining towns down the road in the oakand poplar-covered hills of the Patagonia Mountains, Harshaw suffered the boom-and-bust fate of other communities where the vein of minerals played out or natural disasters prevailed over human industry.

Today a visitor can drive from the hamlet of Patagonia, some 70 miles southeast of Tucson, to the ghosts of Harshaw, Mowry, Washington Camp, Duquesne, and Lochiel through a landscape that's as quiet as a butterfly. Although ranchers and some retirees have settled deep in these hills, most of the terrain falls within the Coronado National Forest. The stillness is seldom broken by anything more intrusive than the scurry

of wildlife and the euphonious songs of omnipresent birds. Norman Hale, 77, who grew up in Harshaw and still lives there with his wife, Ruth, says there now are probably no more than 80 people living in the secluded hills between Harshaw and the picture-postcard village of Lochiel — and that may be stretching things.

Very little remains, beyond the written accounts of some who lived or passed through the area, to suggest the vibrancy that once characterized these old mining towns. Though at Harshaw, both ends of the boom-and-bust syndrome can be seen in two buildings: a small wood and adobe house and, by comparison, a mansion.

The first, a tin-roofed, windowless, and crumbling structure, sits beside the main road. To reach the second, turn left (east) at the Harshaw sign, and after about 200 yards, you come upon a brick house wrapped in a white wooden porch. The handsome edifice looks like something transported from the English countryside. In the 1880s, it was the home of James Finley, a key executive at the nearby Hermosa Mine, and today it is a well-preserved National Historic Landmark.

The Finley house is the only remaining hint suggesting a time when Harshaw's Hermosa Mine employed 200 men who shipped $1.3 million in bullion during an 18-month period beginning in 1881.

Harshaw's demise was attributed both to a dwindling ore body and a devastating series of thunderstorms that struck in the summer of 1881. The heavy rains plunged down the canyon, decimating livestock and buildings. Soon afterward, a fire swept through part of the community, destroying the St. Charles Hotel, a livery stable, shops, and houses. That winter only 70 residents remained in the community that once was home to 2,000.

Hale says Harshaw revived in 1937 when the American Smelting and Refining Co. (ASARCO) purchased his grandfather's Trench Mine, two miles west of town. During the next two decades, the community was big enough to employ two teachers in the school Hale attended. (The school finally closed around 1963.) ASARCO operated the Trench Mine and the Flux Mine (in Flux Canyon) until 1956.

Mowry, five miles beyond Harshaw, was the oldest of the camps in the area. Sylvester Mowry, a flamboyant Rhode Island native, West Point graduate, newspaper publisher, and a prominent player in territorial politics, bought the rich mine, which had been known as the Patagonia or Corral Viejo, in 1860.

The lode had generated $1.5 million by 1862, but, that year, Mowry was arrested as a Confederate sympathizer and jailed for six months; and his mining venture plunged. Nine years later, when he was only 39 years old, he died in England while trying to raise money to revive the operation.

Joseph P. Allyn of Connecticut, associate justice of Arizona Territory's Supreme Court, visited Mowry while the mine was still in production. He wrote a series of letters for the Hartford Evening Press describing his travels around the frontier towns. (Eventually these were collected by editor John Nicolson in the book, The Arizona of Joseph Pratt Allyn, Letters from a Pioneer Judge, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, 1974.) In 1865 Allyn dispatched a letter about his visit to the Mowry Mine. Here, in part, is his vivid account: "The working shaft is 200 feet deep, out of which the ore is hoisted by means of admirably contrived mule power . . .

We stripped off our coats and vests, took the loose things out of our pockets, and following our friend, each of us armed with a candle, disappeared in the hole to the right of the main shaft.

"Down we went by an incomprehensible zigzag and incline, first right, then left, down a slope, then a flight of rude steps, and sometimes a jump of several feet. At times the shaft or gallery was high enough to walk erect in, then you had to stoop, sometimes to crawl, after which you would emerge into a chamber . . .

"About midway down the works, we strike into a huge cave, trickling with water and gleaming with rare crystallizations; above and below it the mineral deposit continues unbroken. Down again, and you begin to hear the dull reverberations of the strokes of the miners; at last a turn discloses in the distance the tiny flicker of their candles, the flitting to and fro of begrimed figures, and a few steps brings us to where work is being done now."

After his tour of the mine, Allyn went through "a pretty adobe hamlet" nearby, where some 300 of Mowry's miners lived, and was shown the primitive reduction works, where the ore was smelted. "The scene here was a busy and picturesque one," he wrote. "The glow of the flames, the seething metal, the half-naked laborers, the ore going into one furnace and the metal ladled out of another, and the cooling bars; all suggested the busy haunts of men, rather than the isolated little mining camp in the midst of hostile Apaches."

At some distance from the town, Allyn visited Harshaw's cemetery where 17 men, killed by the Apache, were buried. Moved by the scene, he wrote: "These simple burial grounds are the saddest features in these little isolated colonies. Too often they are the only memorial left of the gal-lant men who died here, far away from home, kindred, and the smile of woman; to be placed in the silent grave, no prayer uttered and no tiny flower planted to tell of affectionate remembrances." Today a visitor must search to find any hint of Mowry's cemetery or its adobe structures. The dirt road to the townsite leads to the left off the main dirt road and is marked with a sign. The mine was just off to the left, and the townsite was to the right, roughly a hundred feet from the turnoff. Just beyond the townsite, where you may see remnants of adobe blocks if you're persistent the road forks. What remains of the old Mowry cemetery is on a hill about 100 yards up the left fork. A few headstones still are visible, but most of the graves are covered with weeds and brush.

Five miles above Mowry, the road swings through Washington Camp, the only place along this route in which the population has increased in recent years. Still, with roughly 30 residents, it's not much of a distraction.

Some 20 years after Mowry was already a ghost town, Washington Camp developed into a smelting center. The area had been prospected earlier, but frequent Apache attacks made it a difficult place to work. Around 1889 the Duquesne Mining and Reduction Co. purchased some claims about a mile southwest of Washington Camp and established the town of Duquesne. Ore taken out of the ground at Duquesne was smelted in Washington Camp, and each community eventually had about a thousand residents.

WHEN YOU GO.

To get to these phantom silver-, zinc-, and lead-mining camps in the Patagonia Mountains, take Interstate 10 east from Tucson to the exit for State Route 83. Head south on Route 83 and then State Route 82, following the signs to Patagonia. In Patagonia's commercial center, take Columbia Road southeast into the Patagonia Mountains (the road also is known as Harshaw Road and eventually is marked as Forest Service Road 49). Three miles from Patagonia, the road crosses the national forest boundary. Three miles beyond the boundary marker, the pavement ends at a fork. (Don't worry about the dirt road; it's relatively smooth, and any passenger car can manage it.) The right fork leads to Harshaw, which is eight miles from Patagonia; Mowry, five miles beyond Harshaw, and Washington Camp, five miles farther. At that point the road descends to the tiny settlement of Lochiel on the Mexican border, and the forest opens to reveal a panoramic view of the San Rafael Valley.

As people used to say that when Duquesne's tail was stepped on, it was Washington that barked!"

As you drive down from Washington Camp, the road turns as red as the bark of the manzanita bushes that cling to the hills between the oaks and occasional ju-nipers. In a few miles, the road empties into the sleepy community of Lochiel at the southwestern edge of the San Rafael Valley, flat up against the Mexican border. About a dozen people live at Lochiel, which once was a ranching center and a border crossing. There's still ranching in the area, but most of the houses are occu-pied only part of the year.

The entrance to the town is unmistakable: it starts at an enormous concrete cross, a monument marking the place where Friar Marcos de Niza may have entered Arizona on April 12, 1539. Historians say the friar's diary is so imprecise no one knows the location for sure, though it like-ly was somewhere in the general vicinity. Still, when you stand at Lochiel and look in any direction, the significance of historical detail hardly seems to matter. The pale yellow grasslands of winter roll away to the north and east gathering against mountain ranges. Standing or moving, there is the feeling that you are part of a watercolor painting.