I have said that Wickenburg was a small place half-way between Phoenix and Prescott, but that is not quite right. Wickenburg was situated between Prescott and the valley of the Salt River, in the fertile midst of which the foundation stones of the future capital of Arizona had yet to be laid. To be sure, there were a few shacks on the site, and a few ranchers in the valley, but the city of Phoenix had yet to blossom forth from the wilderness. I shall find occasion later to speak of the birth of Phoenix, however.

When I arrived in Wickenburg from Tucson—and the journey was no mean affair, involving, as it did, a ride over desert and mountains, both of which were crowded with hostile Apaches—I went to work as stage driver for the company that operated stages out of Wickenburg to Ehrenberg, Prescott and other places, including Florence which was just then beginning to be a town.

Stage driving in Arizona in the pioneer days was a dangerous, difficult, and consequently high-priced job. The Indians were responsible for this in the main, although white highwaymen became somewhat numerous later on. Sometimes there would be a raid, the driver would be killed, and the stage would not depart again for some days, the company being unable to find a man to take the reins. The stages were large and unwieldy, but strongly built. They had to be big enough to hold off raiders should they attack. Every stage usually carried, besides the driver, two company men who went heavily armed and belted around with numerous cartridges. One sat beside the driver on the box-seat. In the case of the longer stage trips two or three men guarded the mail. Very few women traveled in those days—in fact, there were not many white women in the Territory and those who did travel usually carried some masculine protector with them. A man had to be a good driver to drive a stage, too, for the heavy brakes were not easily manipulated and there were some very bad stretches of road.

Apropos of what I have just said about stage drivers being slain, and the difficulty sometimes experienced in getting men to take their places, I remember that on certain occasions I would take the place of the mail driver from Tucson to Apache Pass, north of where Douglas now is—the said mail driver having been killed—get fifty dollars for the trip and blow it all in before I started for fear I might not otherwise get a chance to spend it.

The stage I drove for this Wickenburg company was one that ran regular trips out of Wickenburg. Several trips passed without much occurring worthy of note; and then on one trip I fell off the box, injuring my ankle. When I arrived back in Wickenburg I was told by Manager Pierson of the company that I would be relieved from driving the stage because my foot was not strong enough to work the heavy brakes, and would be given instead the buckboard to drive to Florence and back on post-office business.

The next trip the stage made out of Wickenburg, therefore, I remained behind. A few miles from town the stage was held up by an overwhelming force of Apaches, the driver and all save two of the passengers massacred, and the contents looted. A woman named Moll Shepherd, going back East with a large sum of money in her possession, and a man named Kruger, escaped the Indians, hid in the hills and were the only two who survived to tell the story of what has gone down into history as the famous "Wickenburg Stage Massacre." I shudder now to think how nearly I might have been on the box on that fatal trip.

I was not entirely to escape the Apaches, however. On the first return trip from Florence to Wickenburg with the buckboard, while I was congratulating myself and thanking my lucky stars for the accident to my ankle, Apaches "jumped" the buckboard and gave me and my one passenger, Charlie Block of Wickenburg, a severe tussle for it. We beat them off in the end, owing to superior marksmanship, and arrived in Wickenburg unhurt. Block was part owner of the Barnett and Block store in Wickenburg and was a well-known man in that section.

After this incident I determined to quit driving stages and buckboards and, casting about for some new line of endeavor, went for the first time into the restaurant business for myself. The town needed an establishment of the kind I put up, and as I had always been a good cook I cleaned up handsomely, especially as it was while I was running the restaurant that Miner started his notorious stampede, when thousands of gold-mad men followed a will-o'-the-wisp trail to fabulously rich diggings which turned out to be entirely mythical.

It was astonishing how little was required in those days to start a stampede. A stranger might come in town with a "poke" of gold dust. He would naturally be asked where he had made the strike. As a matter of fact, he probably had washed a dozen different streams to get the poke-full, but under the influence of liquor he might reply: "Oh, over on the San Carlos," or the San Pedro, or some other stream. It did not require that he should state how rich the streak was, or whether it had panned out. All that was necessary to start a mad rush in the direction he had designated was the sight of his gold and the magic word "streak." Many were the trails that led to death or bitter disappointment, in Arizona's early days.

Most of the old prospectors did not see the results of their own "strikes" nor share in the profits from them after their first "poke" had been obtained. There was old John Waring, for instance, who found gold on a tributary of the Colorado and blew into Arizona City, got drunk and told of his find:

"Gold—Gold.... Lots 'v it!" he informed them, drunkenly, incoherently, and woke up the next morning to find that half the town had disappeared in the direction of his claim. He rushed to the registry office to register his claim, which he had foolishly forgotten to do the night before. He found it already registered. Some unscrupulous rascal had filched his secret, even to the exact location of his claim, from the aged miner and had got ahead of him in registering it. No claim is really legal until it is registered, although in the mining camps of the old days it was a formality often dispensed with, since claim jumpers met a prompt and drastic punishment.

In many other instances the big mining men gobbled up the smaller ones, especially at a later period, when most of the big mines were grouped under a few large managements, with consequent great advantage over their smaller competitors.

Indeed, there is comparatively little incentive now for a prospector to set out in Arizona, because if he chances to stumble on a really rich prospect, and attempts to work it himself, he is likely to be so browbeaten that he is finally forced to sell out to some large concern. There are only a few smelters in or near the State and these are controlled by large mining companies. Very well; we will suppose a hypothetical case:

A, being a prospector, finds a copper mine. He says to himself: "Here's a good property; it ought to make me rich. I won't sell it, I'll hold on to it and work it myself."

So far, so good.

A starts in to work his mine. He digs therefrom considerable rich ore. And now a problem presents itself.

He has no concentrator, no smelter of his own. He cannot afford to build one; therefore it is perfectly obvious that he cannot crush his own ore. He must, then, send it elsewhere to be smelted, and to do this must sell his ore to the smelter.

In the meantime a certain big mining company has investigated A's find and has seen that it is rich. The company desires the property, as it desires all other rich properties. It offers to buy the mine for a sum far below its actual value. Naturally, the finder refuses.

But he must smelt his ore. And to smelt it he finds he is compelled to sell it to a smelter that is controlled by the mining company whose offer he has refused. He sends his ore to the smelter. Back comes the quotation for his product, at a price ridiculously low. "That's what we'll give you," says the company, through its proxy the smelter, "take it or leave it," or words to that effect.Now, what can A do? Nothing at all. He must either sell his ore at an actual loss or sell his mine to the company. Naturally, he does the latter, and at a figure he finds considerably lower than the first offer. The large concern has him where it wanted him and it snuffs out his dreams of wealth and prosperity effectively.

These observations are disinterested. I have never, curiously enough, heeded the insistent call of the diggings; I have never "washed a pan," and my name has never appeared on the share-list of a mine. And this, too, has been in spite of the fact that often I have been directly in the paths of the various excitements. I have been always wise enough to see that the men who made rapid fortunes in gold were not the men who stampeded head-over-heels to the diggings, but the men who stayed behind and opened up some kind of business which the gold-seekers would patronize. These were the reapers of the harvest, and there was little risk in their game, although the stakes were high.

I have said that I never owned a mining share. Well, I never did; but once I came close to owning a part share in what is now the richest copper mine on earth—a mine that, with the Anaconda in Montana, almost determines the price of raw copper. I will tell you the tale.

Along in the middle seventies—I think it was '74, I was partner with a man named George Stevens at Eureka Springs, west of Fort Thomas in the Apache country, a trading station for freighters. We were owners of the trading station, which was some distance south of where the copper cities of Globe and Miami are now situated. We made very good money at the station and Stevens and I decided to have some repairs and additions built to the store. We looked around for a mason and finally hired one named George Warren, a competent man whose only fault was a fondness for the cup that cheers.

Warren was also a prospector of some note and had made several rich strikes. It was known that, while he had never found a bonanza, wherever he announced "pay dirt" there "pay dirt" invariably was to be found. In other words, he had a reputation for reliability that was valuable to him and of which he was intensely vain. He was a man with "hunches," and hunches curiously enough, that almost always made good.

These hunches were more or less frequent with Warren. They usually came when he was broke for, like all prospectors, Warren found it highly inconvenient ever to be the possessor of a large sum of money for any length of time. He had been known to say to a friend: "I've got a hunch!" disappear, and in a week or two, return with a liberal amount of dust. Between hunches he worked at his trade.

When he had completed his work on the store at Eureka Springs for myself and Stevens, Warren drew me aside one night and, very confidentially, informed me that he had a hunch. "You're welcome to it, George," I said, and, something calling me away at that moment, I did not hear of him again until I returned from New Fort Grant, whither I had gone with a load of hay for which we had a valuable contract with the government. Then Stevens informed me that Warren had told him of his hunch, had asked for a grub-stake, and, on being given one, had departed in a southerly direction with the information that he expected to make a find over in the Dos Cabezas direction.

He was gone several weeks, and then one day Stevens said to me, quietly:

"John, Warren's back."

"Yes?" I answered. "Did he make a strike?"

"He found a copper mine," said Stevens.

"Oh, only copper!" I laughed. "That hunch system of his must have got tarnished by this time, then!"

You see, copper at that time was worth next to nothing. There was no big smelter in the Territory and it was almost impossible to sell the ore. So it was natural enough that neither myself nor Stevens should feel particularly jubilant over Warren's strike. One day I thought to ask Warren whether he had christened his mine yet, as was the custom.

"I'm going to call it the 'Copper Queen,'" he said.

I laughed at him for the name, but admitted it a good one. That mine today, reader, is one of the greatest copper properties in the world. It is worth about a billion dollars. The syndicate that owns it owns as well a good slice of Arizona.

"Syndicate?" I hear you ask. "Why, what about Warren, the man who found the mine, and Stevens, the man who grub-staked him?"

Ah! What about them! George Stevens bet his share of the mine against $75 at a horse race one day, and lost; and George Warren, the man with the infallible hunch, died years back in squalid misery, driven there by drink and the memory of many empty discoveries. The syndicate that obtained the mine from Warren gave him a pension amply sufficient for his needs, I believe. It is but fair to state that had the mine been retained by Warren the probabilities are it would never have been developed, for Warren, like other old prospectors, was a genius at finding pay-streaks, but a failure when it came to exploiting them.

That, reader, is the true story of the discovery of the Copper Queen, the mine that has made a dozen fortunes and two cities—Bisbee and Douglas. If I had gone in with Stevens in grub-staking poor Warren would I, too, I wonder, have sold my share for some foolish trifle or recklessly gambled it away? I wonder!... Probably, I should.