ts feet, be a large town. It is in the
very heart of the richest mining zone in the world, if the assayers are
to be believed. Some of the mining properties, now nearly all
temporarily closed down, are world-famous--I quote for example the Three
R., the World's Fair, the Flux, the Santa Cruz, the Hardshell, the
Harshaw, the Hermosa, the Montezuma, the Mansfield and the Mowry.

This last, nine miles from Patagonia, was a producer long before the
Civil War. Lead and silver mined at the Mowry were transported to
Galveston to be made into bullets for the war--imagine being hit with a
silver bullet! In 1857 Sylvester Mowry, owner of the Mowry mine and one
of the earliest pioneers of Arizona, was chosen delegate to Congress by
petition of the people, but was not admitted to his seat. Mowry was
subsequently banished from Arizona by Commander Carleton and his mine
confiscated for reasons which were never quite clear.

* * * * *

My purpose in writing these memoirs is two-fold: First, I desired that
my children should have a record which could be referred to by them
after I am gone; and, secondly, that the State of Arizona, my adopted
home, should be the richer for the possession of the facts I have at my
disposal.

I want the reader to understand that even though the process of
evolution has taken a life-time, I cannot cease wondering at the
marvelous development of the Territory and, later, State of Arizona.
When I glance back over the vista of years and see the old, and then
open my eyes to survey the new, it is almost as though a Verne or a
Haggard sketch had come to life.

Who, in an uneventful stop-over at Geronimo, Graham county, would
believe that these same old Indians who sit so peacefully mouthing their
cigarros at the trading store were the terrible Apaches of former
days--the same avenging demons who murdered emigrants, fought the
modernly-equipped soldier with bow and arrow, robbed and looted right
and left and finally were forced to give in to their greatest enemy,
Civilization. And who shall begin to conjecture the thoughts that now
and again pass through the brains of these old Apache relics, living now
so quietly on the bounty of a none-too-generous government? What dreams
of settlement massacres, of stage robberies, of desperate fights, they
may conjure up until the wheezy arrival of the Arizona Eastern
locomotive disperses their visions with the blast of sordid actuality!