Page:Mexico (1829) Volumes 1 and 2.djvu/494

 m MEXICO. than forty-four millions, making a total of one hundred mil- lions of dollars during a period of eighty-six years. The district was gradually abandoned during the last years of the last century, on account of the incursions of the savage Indian tribes; but in 1791, it possessed a population of 6,000 inhabitants, with seventy-three Haciendas for reducing metals, and one hundred and eighty smelting furnaces. All these are now in ruins, and the produce, during the last thirty years, has been little or nothing ; the whole receipts of the Provincial Treasury of Chihuahua having only amounted to 10,769,096 dollars from 1791 to 1825 ; but the possibility of restoring the mines to what they were, is, in the opinion of the natives, undoubted.* From BatopTlas, and Guarisamey, I have been unable to obtain returns as exact as those from Santa Eulalia ; a great part of the wealth derived from the first, by the Marquis of Bustamante, having been sent out of the country unregis- tered, during the Revolution, by the ports of Mazatlan and Guaymas. But it is upon record, at Durango, that Zam- brano, the proprietor of all the principal mines of Gtiarisamey and San DTmas, paid, as the King's fifth, upon the silver raised from the mines, between the period of their discovery, (in 1783,) and I8O7, when he died, eleven millions of dollars. These immense riches were derived principally from five great mines. La Candelaria, (at San Dimas,) San Juan Nepomu- ceno, Cinco Senores, La Abra, and Tapia ; from the first of which, (La Candelaria,) I possess regular returns for five years, which prove the annual profits never to have been less than 124,000 dollars, while in some years they amounted to which, during so long a period, was the source of the prosperity of the State ; for with so many virgin districts in every direction around them, it can never be advisable for Foreign Capitalists to attempt the regene- ration of Santa Eulalia.
 * In this they are probably misled by their attachment to a place,