Ruby of the Atascosas

RUBY THE GHOST THAT CAME BACK

Dorothy Anderson Lindsey normally works the 2 to 11 P.M. shift as medical clerk in the Anaheim, California, jail, but she had made arrangements to leave two hours early on April 16 of last year. At 9 that night, her husband picked her up at the jail, and they began their long drive through the desert to southern Arizona. As they approached Tucson at 5 A.M., a whisper of pink, the first hint of sunrise, tinged the ridgeline of the Rincon Mountains. At that point, Dorothy could think only of sleep, though a place called Ruby lay heavy on her mind.

RUBY

After a few hours of rest at a motel in Tucson, the Lindseys were on the road again, now headed south to the object of their marathon drive: the long-vacant ghost town of Ruby, a dusty cradle in the high desert of the Atascosa Mountains, where the childhood images that Dorothy had car-ried for years could be revisited.

Like hundreds of others who turned up at this remote spot five miles north of the Mexican border on April 17, 1993, Dorothy had a lump in her throat as she came through the gate that has kept most sane people out of Ruby for rough-ly 30 years.

Until that day, Ruby was regarded by many as one of the most mysterious and per-ilous of Arizona's ghost towns at least it seemed perilous because of the sign on its padlocked gate. The warning has changed over the years, but it was never subtle. Most recently it read: No Trespassing Survivors Will Be Prosecuted. The predecessor to that one said: No Trespassing Women and Children Will Be Winged, Men Will Be Gut Shot, Survivors Will Be Prosecuted.

In short it was easy to get the impression that a half-crazed prospector was sitting in the ruins of the old mining camp with a loaded rifle and an itchy finger. It's true that a caretaker was on the property, and visitors were discouraged because the place was rapidly being destroyed by vandals, but the signs were pretty much intended as a joke, according to Jim Daugherty, whose father, Louis, a onetime owner of the town, had installed at least one of them.

In 1974, when Dorothy made her first trip back to Ruby with her teenage children, she didn't know the sign was a joke. She had hoped to show her children where she attended school in the 1940s, but she never went beyond the forbidding sign. The family left with only her memories to fill out the picture of a childhood in a remote mining town near the Mexican border. In the spring of 1993, she was finally able to revisit the remains of that childhood

when the owners of Ruby staged a reunion

for those who had once lived there. Dorothy, who had heard the news third

hand, didn't realize she was going to a reunion-

reunion when she left her home in California.

"I thought it was a grand opening of

some sort," she said, "and something inside

of me told me if I didn't go I'd regret it beBecause it would be a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

I had gone to the sixth, seventh, and eighth

grades at Ruby. I was in the last class to

graduate from that little school before they closed it. I was dying to see Jesse and Natalia [Ortiz]. Jesse was my first boyfriend, and Natalia was my brother's first girlfriend of course there wasn't much choice in those years because we were the only two families in the area at the time."

Dorothy's father, Tom Anderson, owned

the Oro Blanco Mine, five miles southwest of

Ruby. She and her brother, Allen, would

cover the distance between their father's gold

mine and the Ruby schoolhouse on donkeys.

"There were a lot of wild donkeys down there at that time. Daddy caught a beautiful pinto and broke him for me, and I rode him to school every day. There was no mining "going on at Ruby in those days," Dorothy recalled, "but state law said you had to keep the school open as long as there were nine students. The Ortiz family that's Natalia and Jesse's parents were the caretakers at Ruby, and they had 12 chil-

Children, so we had a school until Natalia and I

graduated in 1948. Then there weren't enough school-age kids left to keep it open."

In winter it was a cold business riding a donkey 10 miles round-trip through a rugged canyon where the chilly air hugged the low spots in the washes. Some days she and Allen were so bitterly chilled on their way to school, located at an altitude of 4,200 feet, that they'd turn around and go home.

"In those days, new rifles used to be shipped to stores wrapped in sheepskin. Mama used to go to Porter's in Tucson to buy those sheepskins, and she'd cut them up and sew vests for me and my brother. We'd wear a mackinaw over the vest, and sometimes it'd still be too cold."

These memories of cold weather melted away rapidly in the warmth of renewed acquaintances at the April reunion. Approximately 400 persons showed up, including several who had been born in the little town at the base of Montana Peak. Dorothy and Natalia found each other in the crowd and cried. "I have looked for you for so manyyears," Natalia said.

A few days later, Dorothy was still choked up over the experience.

"A lot of my emotional life was tied up in Ruby," she said. "As you get older, you realize what an important part of your life

those years were. When I got home to

California, I was so thankful I had gone back to Ruby."

Places like Ruby are scattered throughout

the Arizona landscape, and if there is one

R U B Y

characteristic common to all of them, it is the bond that persists among the people who lived in them. Years after places like Ruby had been mined out or abandoned, people will talk about the town like members of one family flipping pages in an old photo album. The pictures of Ruby in its heyday are vastly different from what they would be today, and photos taken five years from now will likely show an even more remarkable change. In 1961, long after all mining had ceased at Ruby, Louis Daugherty, once a photographer for the Minneapolis Star, joined with four friends to purchase the town. Daugherty and his buddies had an interest in the outdoors and in local history. They used Ruby as their private playground, a retreat where they could relax and fish for bass (there are two ponds on Ruby's 300 acres) at a relatively short distance from their homes in Tucson, some 70 miles away. The children who inherited the property from their parents eventually formed The Ruby Mines Corp., which is now planning to restore the old mining town and turn it into a collection of museums and a center for ecological research and cultural interpretation. The plans also call for a golf course, tennis courts, a swimming pool, and other recreational facilities. That, at least, is the dream of Ned Daugherty, another of Louis' sons. Ned is an architect whose San Diego company specializes in designing facilities at "ecologically critical sites" throughout the world. He hopes to transform Ruby into a model of what can be done with a property where there is a delicate balance between plants and animals. Such dreams may boggle the minds of people who grew up in Ruby when it was a hardscrabble mining town, and terms like ecology were not yet part of anyone's vocabulary. However, the town's existence has always been a roller-coaster ride among risky ventures.

Ruby started life around 1873 as the Montana Mine and for many years was called Montana Camp. It wasn't named Ruby until July 1, 1912, when a post office was established. The post office was in the general store, owned by Julius S. and Lily B. Andrews from 1895 to 1913. Lily's maiden name was Ruby. Her husband named the post office for her, and a few years later they retired and left the area.

(RIGHT) Another remnant from the past, the old assay office, shows the result of years of neglect, something the current town owners hope to remedy with some ambitious plans.

In those days, Ruby was a scattering of tents, adobe homes, and crude shacks of scrap and canvas. Many of the settlers worked the Montana Mine, and others explored various glory holes throughout the area. Lead, zinc, silver, and gold were found in the mountains that flanked the border between Arizona and Mexico, but the difficulty of getting the ore to the marketplace mules had to haul it to the railroad line 32 miles to the east at Nogales kept Ruby from becoming a major mining opération. Nevertheless, there were intermittent pe-riods including, ironically, the Great Depression when Ruby was a thriving mine and community. During the 1930s, the town had a population of between 1,000 and 3,000 (the reports vary, and it isn't clear that anyone actually counted). A 1938 pho-tograph shows numerous adobe homes and attractive structures, including a nine-bed clinic, bachelor quarters, a boardinghouse,

RUBY

general store, schoolhouse, and barbershop. Ruby also had a Sunday school, Boy Scout troop, pool hall, its own baseball team, and a jail. Today about 20 dilapidated structures, including the three-room schoolhouse and the tiny shack adjacent where the teacher lived, are all that remain.

Fortunately people's memories are sometimes more durable than adobe houses, which tend to dry and crumble when unat-tended, and with those memories come stories. The Ruby stories are often those of people with large families living in a harsh landscape with little or no income and practically nothing in the way of entertain-ment. As a result, some of the stories are chronicles of unorthodox behavior.

For example, a man at Ruby could feed his family by hunting for deer or javelinas (wild boars), as many did. But he also could slip across the line into Mexico, rustle a cow, and take it home to slaughter. It was necessary, of course, to hide the evidence, and around Ruby that was no problem: vacant mine tunnels became the repositories for the hides and entrails of stolen beef.

"There were lots of mines that didn't have any ore, but they could have been mined for rawhide," the late Ramon Rosthenhausler, who was born in Ruby in 1911, told a writer for the Journal of Arizona History several years ago.

Ruby's miners also turned some of the mine tunnels into what might be called multiple-use structures. Ramon's younger brother, Sam, of Tucson, said some men lived in the abandoned tunnels, where the air was always cool, while other tunnels were used as gambling halls.

"There was one drift [tunnel] about 100 feet long where these guys set up tables for poker and blackjack," Sam recalled. "There was usually a lawman at the entrance because there was not supposed to be any alcohol. But about every 50 feet in these drifts there'd be a raise, a kind of a ventilation shaft going straight up, and my brother Ramon he was a kind of bootlegger he'd get some mescal and tequila from across the line, and then he'd lower the bottle of booze down through the ventilation hole to these guys who were gambling. They'd pass the bottle around. He had somebody down there collecting the money for the shots, and this guy out in front never could understand why all these men would come out smelling like liquor."

Ruby's last stand as a mining town began in 1926 when the Eagle Picher Co. acquired the Montana Mine and several other claims in the Oro Blanco Mining District. The company built a 400-ton concentrator and several dams to impound water for their reduction works, and later it laid a four-inch pipeline across 15 miles of scrub-covered hills to obtain water from the Santa Cruz Valley.

In April, 1926, the Nogales Chamber of Commerce, impressed by all these signs of prosperity, brought a motorcade along the crude road that linked Nogales and Ruby. Soon afterward the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors appropriated $5,000 for improvements, but the road remains unpaved and unpredictably rough today. Eagle Picher discontinued its mining operation at Ruby in 1941 after extracting roughly $10 million in ore. The post office was closed May 31, 1941, and although there were small and sporadic mining operations in the years that followed, the town at the foot of Montana Peak was pretty much left to the lizards and birds after World War II.

However, as the town of Ruby slept, it was living a separate life in the memories of former residents, who had carried its images with them to other parts of the world.

As Dorothy Lindsey recalled, "When I walked through the gate at Ruby, all I had was a name tag, and after a while, I was talking to someone and laughing, and, suddenly, a friend I hadn't seen since the eighth grade came up behind me. She had recognized my laugh. How often do you get a connection like that? That's why I'll never regret going back to Ruby."