LEGENDS OF THE LOST

By Recklessly Kicking an Old Bean Pot, George Sears Lost a Considerable Fortune

What we know about George Sears is that he had the fever, the great gold burn. It led him into desert all men should fear. Desert that by its every aspect conveys hostility to human life. But his affliction overwhelmed even the hottest sun and the coldest dawn. What we don't know is what Sears looked like or the incidents of his life. But let the imagination work: See a man of few mortal attachments, married once long ago but never again. Two friends. One in the assayer's office and another with a made-up name sitting behind a lace curtain in a tired shack at the end of a lane. A filthy wide-brimmed fedora, a whiskered face, grim and unsmiling. Eyes, narrow and wet, which see beyond you in conversation that is always clipped, distracted by a consuming desire for the only things in this realm sure to deliver him a thrill: whiskey and gold.

In this Sonoran Desert, no harder ground exists than that near the Mexican border around Ajo and Gunsight, east of the Growler Mountains. Tohono O'odham country. Still, savage, and nearly empty of human concentration. This was the land George Sears worked, and for good reason.

"This area is known for the New Cornelia Copper Mine, but a lot of people don't realize that back in the 1800s, there was a tremendous amount of gold here, too," says Bob Hightower, director of the Ajo Historical Museum.

The first man to dig at the hills around Ajo was Peter Brady. The gold portion of his initial ore shipment, made about 1854, assayed at an astounding 25 ounces per ton. "That's just about pure gold," says Hightower.

Those two words pure gold were surely parked on the lips of George Sears, whose story began one starlit night. He'd set camp at the end of a low ridge below the granite peak west of of Ajo and was hiking back to camp after collecting mesquite branches for his fire. He was hungry and wanted to cook a bean supper.

But Sears tripped and tumbled to the ground. His wood flew in every direction, and the night was treated to a symphony of cuss words that probably made the bats and ground squirrels blush. As he rubbed his bloody knee, Sears inspected the ground to see what had felled him.

It was a bean pot, rusted, flaking with age. He raised a boot, kicked the old pot as hard as he could, and listened to it clatter off to silence.

The incident seemed un-memorable, another in a series of minor happenings that af-flict all miners and are soon forgotten. As this one was until some years later when Sears, who lived with his ears perked for some whisper of treasure, overheard a tale.

No one can say the manner in which the legend came to Sears. He undoubtedly had his listening posts, maybe in the saloons or at the counter of the mercantile. Or perhaps it was in the workroom of his lady friend that these delicious facts were whispered to him amid the quiet of midnight and the last flickers of a burning candle. The story had its birth in the