It is not known generally that the area embraced now within the limits of Santa Cruz County, Arizona, was the seat of the earliest mining known on the Pacific Slope of the United States; but such is an historic fact. Without doubt the first and earliest mining in these regions was done by the Jesuits who founded a chain of missions in the Valley of the Santa Cruz River and farther south in Mexico. According to the history of that time, and the records of the mission, now preserved in Spain, the friars at Tumacacori discovered and wrought rich silver mines in the Santa Rita Mountains, to the northeast, and in the Atascosa Mountains, on the southwest. The Salero mines and other properties in the Santa Ritas are known to have been operated by the friars, and in places vestiges of their workings are found yet today. In recent years a party from California having a plat or map with a written description of the location, said to have come from the archives of the old mission, has been searching in the Atascosa Mountains for an abandoned mine that the record they have tells of having been exploited by the friars. Those operations are established to have been inaugurated very shortly after completion of the Mission church and cloister at Tumacacori in 1688.
So there is presented the record of the first mining done on the Pacific Slope of the United States.But the Jesuit priests and missionaries were not the only miners among the successors of the conquistadores. In all parts of its American possessions the Spanish crown encouraged mining, offering every facility and giving military protection. Here, as elsewhere, hundreds of adventurous Spaniards prospected the hills and mountains, exploiting valuable mines paying readily to the treasury of the sovereign one fifth and to the coffers of the church another fifth of their gross product. As their labor was very cheap, giving the Indians a bare subsistence, with which the latter were content, and their processes were crude and primitive, yet inexpensive, those heavy exactions were not really burdensome. Modern mining with high-priced labor and expensive machinery could not stand a tax of 40 per cent upon production. In 1856, Tubac, on the Santa Cruz River, without doubt one of the oldest settlements in North America, assumed renewed importance and became quite a center of population. A number of companies operating mines in the mountains on either side made the place their headquarters.
Among those operating at that time was Charles D. Poston, who became afterward the first Delegate in Congress, after Arizona was created a Territory, in 1864 (cut off from New Mexico), who was managing a property in the Atascosa Mountains, now known as the Cerro Colorado Mine, which is in Pima County. The Salaro Mines, worked in 1688 by the friars at the Tumacacori Mission, were taken up by a Cincinnati corporation, at its head John W. Wrightson, who had been business manager of the Cincinnati Enquirer. In 1861 Wrightson was killed by Apaches, as were Grosvenor and Hopkins, his superintendent and geologist, respectively, and operations were abandoned. The properties are in the Santa Rita Mountains, and have been worked until of late years. They are valuable yet, but the owners have died, and their estates have given no attention.
Contemporaneous with Poston and Wrightson was Sylvester W. Mowry, an army officer, who took up a group of mines in the Patagonia Mountains and established the Mowry Mining Camp. Lieutenant Mowry erected a reduction plant and produced a great deal of lead-silver bullion, which he transported by wagon to Guaymas, the seaport of the adjacent State of^Sonora, in Mexico, and shipped by water to Swansea, Wales. During the Civil War Mowry was accused of treason to the United States and his property was confiscated. In later years the property passed to others, and it has been workd with good returns. It has been idle now a number of years, the later owners having become involved in litigation. The mines at Duquesne and Washington Camp were worked also at about the same time as the Mowry, preceding the Civil War; and it is believed that some of the ledges in that vicinity were exploited by Mexicans previous to the time of the Gadsden Purchase. Upon the west side of the Atascosa Mountains, in the extreme end of the county, adjacent to the Mexican border, lies the Oro Blanco region. Tradition has it that good gold placers were worked there in antigua days, but there is nothing authentic. In the Greaterville region, on the northeast slope of the Santa Rita Mountains, there are also gold placers and quartz ledges bearing gold, but mostly that mineral country lies across the line in Pima County.
THE MINING DISTRICTS
Most notable are the Nogales and Patagonia Districts, abutting upon the
international boundary, the latter covering the south end of the Patagonia
Mountains; Palmetto District, on the west slope of those mountains,
extending to the Rio Sonoita; Harshaw District, embracing the north end of
the Patagonias; Red Rock District, extending from the Harshaw northeasterly
to the Canelo Hills; Wrightson District, on the east side of the Santa Rita Mountains, extending to the
Sonoita River, which flows there in a southerly direction; Tyndall District,
on the west side of the same mountains, extending from the Sonoita northward
into Pima County, including the Grosvenor Hills in its southern area; parts
of Old Baldy and Greaterville Districts, which are in Pima County; San
Cayetano District, covering the mountains of the same name; Pajarito
District, at the south end of the Atascosa Mountains, Sopori District at the
north end, and Oro Blanco District, on the western slope of the same range.
GEOLOGY
Within the area of the county there are presented in great variety both
igneous and sedimentary
sedimentary rocks. In age they are said by geologists to range from
pre-Cambrian to Recent, with
igneous rocks being predominant in the area. The sedimentary rocks
have been folded extensively, upturned, faulted, fissured, metamorphosed,
intruded by igneous masses and dykes of granular rocks, becoming important
ore-bearing foundations. The most abundant of the intrusive rocks are
granite,
quartz monzonite, granite porphyry and
rhyolite, although there are found many more varieties, such as
aplite, quartz latite, syenite, etc. These intrusive rocks occur in the
mining districts, and with many of them are associated fissure vein that
seem related with them in origin. Such fissure veins are numerous and widely
distributed, being particularly plentiful along the west slope of the
Santa Rita Mountains and in the Patagonia
Mountains. They range from one to twenty feet in width, averaging about six
feet.
The fissure veins cited, and metamorphic-contact or replacement deposits are the magma or gangue containing gold, silver, lead, copper, zinc, tungsten ore, molybdenum and other metals that are the cause and foundation of a mining industry which within this area has produced a great deal of wealth, and is destined to make Santa Cruz County one of the most important metal producing regions in Arizona. To a great extent early development of the vein system presented a production of lead and silver ore, with slight percentages and traces of copper, which increased gradually as depth was attained ; and in nearly all the mineral ledges or deposits in which development has reached any depth they have become distinctively copper bearing. in fact, microscopic examination of lead-silver ores from the surface deposits has demonstrated that originally they carried much more copper, and that they have been altered by percolation of surface waters seeking the depths dissolving and carrying the copper with them to the water level (metasomotism). The lead-silver mines at Duquesne, Washington Camp, Mowry, World's Fair, etc., in the Patagonia Mountains; and at Alto, Mansfield and other camps in the Santa Ritas, all give evidence of the metasomatic action noted. Where the veins and ledges predominate in copper from their very croppings it is plain that the metasomatism noted elsewhere has not occurred. Even in gold bearing sections, such as Oro Blanco, there are presented instances of metasomatic action notably the Austerlitz Mine, which has produced gold and silver abundantly, but in the deeper workings has commenced producing copper ore.
In recent years there has been presented in the Patagonia Mountains a gratifying development of Copper bearing porphyry. Great masses of porphyritic rocks carrying finely comminuted particles of copper (chalcocite and chalcopyrite) disseminated evenly through the magma, giving low per centages of the metal, yet wrought easily and profitably when handled upon a great scale, as at Bingham, Utah, and Ray, Arizona, dependable for production of vast quantities of the red metal, returning large dividends upon a heavy capitalization. One of the great copper deposits mentioned is the noted "Red Hill," at the north end of the Patagonia Mountains, overlooking the town of Patagonia; the other is about a dozen miles south, upon the axis of the same range, not far from Duquesne and Mowry, but upon the west side of the summit. The first is a great mass a mountain of low-grade rhyolitic porphyry, carrying 1 per cent to 3 per cent copper, a proposition for working with steam shovels, railway trains, great concentrating mills and colossal smelting furnaces. The other, under development by the Red Mountain Copper Company, is overlaid by a thick shell of non-mineral rock of the same general texture and quality, which prevents the steam shovel, but the ore body may be handled by the caving process.
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