Legends of the Lost

LEGENDS OF THE LOST Lord Duppa's Lost Silver Strike May Still Be Hidden in the Bradshaws

A blast of wind carried my map into the brush not far below. I should have left it there instead of thrashing through the gauntlet of manzanita and scrub oak. The stuff was too flimsy to climb over but too stout to walk through easily. I plunged in and returned half an hour later poked, slapped, punched, scratched, and bruised. Never has 30 feet taken so long or been so excruciating. And for all the good that map did me, I should have let the wind keep it. But then I wouldn't have met the ghost of one of Arizona's most interesting characters, a charming English drifter named Bryan Philip Darrell Duppa, who camped on the riverbank that became known as Phoenix, now Arizona's capital, and, perhaps, found a vast ledge of silver.

In fact, Duppa named the fledgling town for the mythic Egyptian phoenix bird which rose from its own ashes to fly again and live in splendor. Duppa did have a way with fancy words. Somewhere along the way he even promoted himself to the lofty position of "Lord."

Duppa was the kind who could do that. He could recite from the classics and wear continental clothes but still survive in the wild and woolly West. He ran a shanty store, which he overrated as a restaurant and hotel. He redid his name from deUphaugh to Duppa with no hint at a pun on "dupe." He sold himself as an English gentleman of honored lineage, when he was really a scallywag son whose gentrified family paid him to stay anywhere but home. He was born October 9, 1832, in (pick one) England or France.

In England young Duppa was sent to school where he somehow absorbed bits of the old languages and cultures. But being the youngest of 15 children born to a Kent family, he was unlikely to inherit much estate, so he studied without purpose. Along the way, he acquired some habits that embarrassed his prominent family, which included clergy and county officials. So with stern prodding and the promise of a monthly allowance from home, he went as far away as possible New Zealand, where an uncle had acquired land. In 1854 the vexed uncle wrote a letter home about the errant lad and bemoaned, "I am anxious to see what can be made of him.... I fear that he has fallen into careless and desultory habits we must however hope for the best."

Life in New Zealand wasn't luxurious for Duppa. So in 1863 when he heard about new gold claims near Prescott in Arizona Territory, he hurried right over.

He tumbled into Prescott with the founding wave. The town lay south of the cavalry's Fort Whipple and didn't even make up its own name until May, 1864. Its raucous folk were his kind of people; like him they were forgetting their pasts and building their futures. He relished the adventure. He rubbed elbows with tycoon William D. Bradshaw, himself, battled Apache Indians, turned a few cards, and - fortuitously, as it would turn out even worked for a while doing something in mines.

But he wanted more money in his pocket not just callouses on his hands, so in 1868 he ambled down to the valley of the Salt River. There was no real town then, just a patchwork of farms and Hayden's flour mill. To anyone who would listen, Duppa proclaimed that this valley rivaled the Vale of Tempe, that Olympian valley praised by Horace and Ovid for its lush crops and bountiful beauty. Today Tempe is Arizona's sixth-largest city.

Duppa homesteaded 160 acres in what now is downtown Phoenix, but he soon grew restless and never really lived on the place. He drifted back and forth from Phoenix to Prescott many times. More than once he was attacked by Indians, and it is said that after one skirmish on the banks of the Agua Fria River, he decided to run no more. There he opened a stage-coach station, where passengers could catch a meal and drivers could replace tired horses.

It was a ramshackle affair, a cottonwood frame covered with cactus wood, canvas, and gunnysacks. Planks of unfinished pine served as the one table. Weary travelers preferred to sleep outside, but when bad weather or marauding Indians threatened, they crowded inside on the dirt floor.

When Army Capt. John G. Bourke recorded the scene in 1871, he complained of "sand-laden wind, no bread," and "furniture too simple and meagre" for even a monk. It did, however, have plenty of hot tea and fiery whiskey. The station site later was named Dewey. As proprietor of such a way station, Duppa undoubtedly heard every rumor and tale that any traveler or dreamer plunked down on the counter. William D. Bradshaw had first found ore deposits in 1863, and other mines sprang up like chuckholes in a muddy road.

Too, Duppa knew the story of Edmond Peck, who came across some heavy rock while hunting deer. He didn't get the deer, but the rock assayed rich with silver and produced more than $1 million in ore before 1878. On one of his trips back to Phoenix, Duppa detoured through Prescott and took the primitive wagon road over the tops of the Bradshaw Mountains, a surly granite range that rises to nearly 8,000 feet. The trail connected settlements such as Palace Station and Goodwin, and the Crown King gold mine. Whether by chance or intention, Duppa made a shortcut to the Agua Fria down a steep canyon. Maybe his map blew away in the wind, too, and he just kept crashing downward through the underbrush and skidding on loose rocks as I had. The steep slopes of the Bradshaws are cloaked by impenetrable mats of manzanita, scrub oak, and mountain mahogany. Higher up, pine needles and loose stones are like grease underfoot. Few enticing ridges peek out of the tangled forest, but somewhere on that descent Duppa found a ledge of his own, a subtle exposure of rich native silver that anyone with lesser mining experience would have missed. Making the discovery was one of the few things he had ever done on his own. Duppa wrote home to England and gloated that he had finally found his own fortune . . . but keep the remittance coming, thank you, so he could develop the prospect. That letter was the only record of his find; he didn't dare tell any of his acquaintances in Arizona, and there's no evidence that he ever developed the strike or even filed an official claim. He friends was one Jacob Waltz, fabled to us nowadays as the Dutchman, proprietor of a secret gold mine in the infamous Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix. Waltz may have invented the story of his lost lode to cover his theft of ore from other miners' claims. Skeptics would accuse Duppa, too, of inventing his story, perhaps just to impress his family. But we must remember that Duppa's Bradshaws were rich in silver strikes; the first maps even labeled them the Silver Range. One find, the Silver Belt Mine, revealed native silver worked by prehistoric miners using stone hammers. Others the Thunderbolt, Tip Top, Stonewall Jackson, Tiger, and Howard were all very profitable silver works that would have been famous far and wide if they hadn't been overshadowed by gold-bearing neighbors such as the Crown King and Oro Belle. Tired of dodging arrows and listening to the wind blow through the walls at the Agua Fria station, Duppa spent his last years retired in Phoenix, where he died of pneumonia on January 29, 1892. Among the items left in his will were a gold watch, uncashable New Zealand mining stock, a sword, and a set of pistols but no map or title to his lode in the Bradshaws. He also left us the names of two grand cities, Tempe and Phoenix, and the dream of lost silver. In the subsequent century, many silver digs digs in the Bradshaws made money. Was one of them Duppa's lost ledge? If not, Lord Duppa's silver strike is still there for the finding. When the snow melts in the high country, I think I'll head back up there. But this time when the wind blows my map away, I'll gladly chase it in hopes of tumbling over the fabulous strike Lord Duppa lost and left for us to find. M