Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/128

 picture of Arizona as it was before the arrival of General Crook, and not to enter into unnecessary details, in which undue reference must necessarily be had to my own experiences.

But I do wish to say that we were for a number of weeks accompanied by Governor Safford, at the head of a contingent of Mexican volunteers, who did very good service in the mountains on the international boundary, the Huachuca, and others. We made camp one night within rifle-shot of what has since been the flourishing, and is now the decayed, mining town of Tombstone. On still another evening, one of our Mexican guides—old Victor Ruiz, one of the best men that ever lived on the border—said that he was anxious to ascertain whether or not his grandfather's memory was at fault in the description given of an abandoned silver mine, which Ruiz was certain could not be very far from where we were sitting. Naturally enough, we all volunteered to go with him in his search, and in less than ten minutes we had reached the spot where, under a mass of earth and stone, was hidden the shaft of which our guide had spoken.

The stories that have always circulated in Arizona about the fabulous wealth of her mineral leads as known to the Spaniards have been of such a character as to turn the brain of the most conservative. The Plancha de la Plata, where a lump of virgin silver weighing over two thousand pounds was exhumed; the "Thorn Mine," or the "Lost Cabin Mine," in the Tonto Basin; the "Salero," where the padre in charge, wishing to entertain his bishop in proper style, and finding that he had no salt-cellars ready, ordered certain of the Indians to dig out enough ore to make a solid silver basin, which was placed in all its crudity before the superior—all these were ringing in our ears, and made our task of moving the rocks and débris a very light one.

Disappointment attended our discovery; the assays of the ore forwarded to San Francisco were not such as to stimulate the work of development; the rock was not worth more than seventeen dollars a ton, which in those years would not half pay the cost of reduction of silver.

We were among the very first to come upon the rich ledges of copper which have since furnished the mainstay to the prosperity of the town of Clifton, on the border of New Mexico, and we knocked off pieces of pure metal, and brought them back to