"Chasin' the Gold"

The old prospector laid on his death bed. He clutched a nugget of gold in his right hand and an old, yellowed, rolled up newspaper in the other hand. His weathered white hat, stained with years of sweat and dust, was perched over his head nearly covering his drooping eyes. His worn snake-skin boots pointed to Heaven.

His partner watches him lay still for hours. The old man didn’t move his feet or his arms, except when his face grimaced. The sounds of a piano in the distant echoed from the new Congress Hotel down the street sounding like a haunting requiem for the dead.

His labored breathing becomes shallower. He hacks and coughs. He clenches both of his fists intensely. The newspaper crinkles a little bit and he lets go. His eyes slowly open, looks at his partner one last time, then looks at his right hand. He gives a slight wince. His eyes roll back and close.

All those years digging through dirt and tunnels– just to grasp that one last nugget from that lost mine in the Santa Catarinas– are now gone. As his partner watches him leave this earth, with his last gasp of 71 years, he knew this was the end of an era and a legend was about to fade away.

They had partnered decades ago in search of this fabled mine, and now, what’s left are the memories his partner can leave behind. The old man didn’t die with the secret of this treasure, even though he lost the map somewhere in those mountains long ago.

A cold mid-December breeze blows across the desert through the open window of the tiny hotel room. The curtains quiver and the lantern flickers. A chill goes through the partner’s body and he shivers. He stands up, tips his hat to the crusty ole’ prospector and pulls out a black leather pouch with the last of their nuggets. He unravels the prospectors’ clammy hand, and adds the nugget to the cache. One day, someone will pry it out of his dead hands. He then takes the old newspaper roll from the other clenched hand, walks out the hotel room door and signals Rector Dixon to do his deed.

As the grieving partner stepped outside of the Windsor Hotel and starts to wander down Congress Street, it strikes him how much Tucson has changed over thirty years– more than a generation ago.

They both arrived here on a 1,000-mile, shaky, Overland stage coach ride from the west coast with a map and a dream in January 1880. It was during a turning point in Tucson’s history and it led to their biggest discovery of the Iron Door Mine. The Southern Pacific Railroad was to make its first stop in this tiny hamlet of Mexicans and Americans in March, so the stage ride was unfortunate, weathering, and bumpy. The new iron horse would bring a flood of hungry prospectors and wide-eyed businessmen and change the face of this isolated town forever.

The partner didn’t recognize this dusty town anymore. Congress Street is wider and paved. There are now gasoline automobiles instead of horses, streetlights instead of lanterns, electricity, running water and sidewalks. The 24-hour saloons and gambling halls are now replaced by moving picture theaters, automobile garages, Chinese restaurants, and offices.

The Church Plaza where the annual San Augustine Fiesta was held next to the cathedral is now the San Augustine Garage with room for 20 cars. Camp Street is now called Broadway and is being widened for more vehicles. The old hotels and crooked alley will all be swept away for progress. It will “cut the heart out of Tucson.” All new storefronts look more like San Francisco than the long row of dusty adobe and stick buildings along Congress Street in 1880. All of his old friends and their businesses are gone.

At that time, Tucson only had a dozen saloons strung along Congress Street and the sleepy population of seven thousand was about to explode. No one realized how much of Tucson’s reigning businesses would become displaced by modern progress and competition. Back then, a stranger couldn’t tell a storefront from a dwelling– they all looked the same– one long row down both sides of Congress Street. Many places had no signs. You didn’t know if you are walking into a dingy saloon, a lawyer’s office, or someone standing in their bedroom in their underwear. Who knew?

It was a truly an enterprising time back then. Someone with guts and fortitude, who can survive the occasional Apache Indian attacks as they dig for minerals in the mountains that ring the dusty streets of Tucson, had the grit to withstand anything.

The looming Santa Catarina’s to the north still provided a river of gold – the Cañada del Oro (“The Canyon of Gold). Gold veins ran through slabs of quartz dripping from the deep mountain valleys and several mining enterprises were hauling precious metals out on burros. Some of the locals will tell you that– and more. Lots of silver and some copper abound the northern backside by the Oracle mining camps. Albert Weldon, who staked the Oracle claim, found some great potential close to ground. The Santa Rita Mountains to the west have been mined, liked the Catarina’s, for centuries to reap its silver deposits. The Spanish homesteaders in the 1700s dug the first mines. Some have been rediscovered by Tucson’s elite, scattered in the crevasses and valleys. The nearby San Xavier mine has been worked on for hundreds of years and still spits out rich copper deposits.

In the 1880s, in order to get to the Catarina mountains north of Tucson was a long, hard journey. Follow the trails along the Santa Cruz River towards the Cañada del Oro riverbed. That’s what brought the old prospector and his partner out here. After the end of the California Gold Rush, they heard there’s gold in the hills just north of Tucson. Thousands of other displaced prospectors, and Tucson’s prominent businessmen, have been digging up the mountains north of Tucson for decades. Gold and silver is still being harvested from large quartz veins right out in the open. It fed the bowels of Tucson. The prospector and his partner got to gather a few scoops.

Back then, Congress Hall saloonkeeper, Charlie Brown, had a large collection of minerals he found in the region. He kept the display in a big glass cabinet in back of his bar to show off how he spent his weekends with some of his friends including, the Goldbergs, the Drachmans, Mayor Bob Leatherwood, and the Zeckendorfs. Ol’ Doc Hitchock also kept a medicinal cabinet with his “rich and rare specimens of gold ore,” which he said came from the Iron Door Mine.

Those Tucson businessmen were the among the second generation of local pioneers and the last of their kind. They saw an opportunity in the barren desert and built their businesses to cater to a growing population of Americans looking for a better way of life in the West. The old prospector and his partner knew something most of them didn’t know– the location of one lost Spanish mine– the Iron Door Mine. They had a map and knew the legend.

The prospector would sit for hours in the far corner at the Congress Hall repeating his story to whoever would listen, word for word, how he found the lost Iron Door Mine deep in the Canyon of Gold. His partner usually sat quietly nearby hoping his wouldn’t say something he shouldn’t. They would be fettered with cheap beer from claim jumpers eager to steal their cache. But, prospector would always would say with a wink and smile as he jiggled his pocket, “or maybe, I’m just a liar standing next to a hole in the ground.”

The Congress Hall Saloon is gone now and replaced by a second-hand store. Hand & Foster’s saloon across the street is now a Chinese restaurant. The bereaved partner followed the music down the street to the newly opened Congress Hotel for a special event. It was too noisy, so he sat down on the edge of the curb, pulled out his worn meerschaum pipe, stuffed it with cheap tobacco and unrolled the old yellowed newspaper.

He read once again and remembered…

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