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They started up the smelter and got out quite a lot of copper, then shipped it out of the country and followed along with it, owing everybody, including myself. Stratton
Special to the Crier
After 134 years, a group of historic claims in the Old Hat district up the north slope of the Santa Catalinas (up Mt. Lemmon Rd.) is about to make its way into existence as a “real” mine, with profitable ore. Oracle Mining Corp. (http://oracleminingcorp.com/), a Vancouver, Canada-based company with “a focus on uncovering overlooked and undervalued projects,” has, for the last couple of years, been developing a group of historical mining claims at the site previously known as the “Apace Camp” or “Control” mine. In 2014, the newly-named Oracle Ridge Mine on Mt. Lemmon Rd. above Oracle and San Manuel, will become a working mine, sending its ore down Black Hills Road and Reddington Rd. to San Manuel, where it will be picked up by the buyers and processors of the ore (still to be announced.)
Following the intervening successes of first the Mammoth mines and then the San Manuel Mine, this will be a historical reversal: Those mines have “petered out” while the new mine comes to life in the area where many had prospected and claimed, only to prove mostly unprofitable mines. Most who staked claims or even improved their claims and qualified for patents, sold out cheaply or gave up and turned to ranching in this Old Hat district.
Stratton misses his chance
That gave Stratton hope, but when he tried to sell his Comanche claims, Dr. Kane said the company had enough for the present. Needing to survive and his ranch not really profitable, Stratton bonded his claims for $600 on a six-month option to purchase for $32,000 to Joseph W. Young through Edward Reilly :”who had sold the Copper Queen” claims in Tombstone. Stratton reports that “No sooner had I done this than the directors of the San Catarina [sic] came out to inspect the Comanche, and offered me $20,000 in cash for my claims. That was the price they had given for the Apache claims of Hyatt and Dumphy. They made their offer one snowy afternoon at Apache Camp. I told them that I would let them know my decision as soon as possible. I rushed home, caught up a horse from off the range, and at five o’clock the next morning was pounding at Reilly’s door in Tucson. I begged him to release his option, but he said, ‘No,no, Stratton. Sit tight, and it will be but a short time before we’ll all be rich.’
“The six hundred dollars was all I ever got out of that deal.
“Fortunately I was able to get work with the San Catarina [sic] people, and this tided me over that period of discouragement.”
Apache Camp booms and busts
Stratton reports that: “At Apache Camp the company built a twenty-ton smelter at once — without waiting to develop the mine. They also put up a large hotel, several company buildings,and a tram from the mine to the smelter.”
They also hired Stratton to build a road to the mine from the San Pedro River. That is a story in itself from Stratton, as he felt that others were cutting in and building the road in the wrong place. He was paid $6,000 eventually to build it.
Nevertheless, Stratton’s opinion of the whole operation was, as usual, sardonic. He proclaimed: “The people in charge of the San Catarina operation did not understand mining. They put in their roads, built their smelter, constructed houses, sank a shaft of one hundred and fifty feet, ran an eighty-foot tunnel, and collected some of the surface ores and put them through the smelter. Then they found themselves out of money and shut down within six months from the time they opened up. They had taken out about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of copper bullion, but had spent about ten times that amount in the process. In [May] 1882 I was put in charge of the mine as caretaker. The following year they offered the property for sale at $125,000 dollars. There were no ready buyers.”
Stratton had been appointed to the caretaker job by Robert H. Paul, the sheriff of Pima County, “as L. Zeckendorf & Company had a lien on the property. Louie Zeckendorf had come toTucson from Albuquerque in 1868 with his brother and had opened a store on Main Street, Tucson. By 1880 his nephew, Albert Steinfeld, was the manager of Louie’s interests, which included mining, ranching, and farming as well as merchandising. Steinfeld bought out the Zeckendorf interests in 1904.” [Many remember the Steinfeld store in downtown Tucson which can now be found virtually at http://bit.ly/HNiP4J]
Meanwhile, his job as caretaker brought the Stratton family out of the dugout to almost grand living: “At Apache Camp my family and I occupied the kitchen and three rooms of the big boarding house, and used the dining room as a woodshed and storehouse. We always had plenty of game. Bear and mountain lion were numerous thereabouts, a few sheep worked their way over from the Window-in-the-Rock [Ventana] ridge on the south side of the mountains and turkeys could be gotten at any time. The turkeys roosted so thick in the low branching pines around what was later known as Soldier Camp that we called it Turkey Roost. We could go there almost any night and pick off a fine large bird. In the summer at Apache Camp it was cool and delightful, and we had many visitors from Tucson who would come up for several weeks at a time. But in the winter it was cold and snowy, and we were practically shut in.”
Stratton and Leatherwood take over the mine, are cheated, claim it again
The Company made “two or three desperate attempts” to sell the mines and tried to raise money to do the assessment work. But they failed in both. On the 1st of January, 1883, their right to the claims expired, and Stratton relocated them in partnership with Bob Leatherwood and James W. Buell.
Leatherwood, who had a stage line based in Tucson had developed the 3C Ranch, staked some claims and patented some mines and was an entrepreneur and politician in Tucson. Stratton says like Leatherwood, Buell was a southerner who went from Alabama to Colorado for his health, and then to Arizona for the same reason in 1878. He was a mining lawyer and had served as the local attorney for the San Catarina [sic] people. I guess he was one of the first to know for sure that the company had not made good. The three of us went in together, but within two years, Buell died. Leatherwood and I thereupon brought his widow in with us, but Mrs. Buell proved to be an unsatisfactory partner as she interfered with our making a sale by objecting to the terms. When Leatherwood and I relocated in 1887, we left her out.”
In the meantime, in 1885 and 1886 a working bond had been worked out with three men who proved very unreliable. Stratton: “They started up the smelter and got out quite a lot of copper, then shipped it out of the country and followed along with it, owing everybody, including myself.” I should have received about four thousand dollars from them for beef, money advanced, and royalties
At that time mines were not held for debt, so Leatherwood and I got the property back. In 1890-91 we, together with Finley Geesaman, bonded our mines to George Metz, an English mining expert who had back of him a man named George Condon. They started up quite a camp on Geesaman’s property, calling it Condon Camp, and did considerable work. Leatherwood and I had bonded our claims for thirty-five thousand dollars, but we got only the first payment of $666.66 each. Then Mr. Condon died, and his mine closed down.” It turns out, as was later to be found, that the best prospects were on the Geesaman property.
Stratton and Leatherwood, absentee, fight over claim
In 1895, Stratton and his family moved to Florence and Leatherwood was quite active in Tucson; However, the two kept relocating their claims every two years until 1898. That year “Leatherwood agreed to do the assessment on our five claims. I knew I was to pay half the cost, but Leatherwood got Stephen D. Ramsdale and Ira A. Haight to do the work for two hundred and fifty dollars and then charged me the full amount. Ira did not have better sense than to tell me about this, and it made me pretty angry. I had always attended to the assessment before that without asking Leatherwood to share the cost. I jumped him about this and told him we could not be partners any longer. ‘By cracky,’ he said, ‘you have not enough money to buy me out, and I know that I have not enough money to buy you out.’
“I told him that I could not continue to be his partner—under any circumstance — and that if he would go make out a deed I would sell him my share of the mine for a dollar and just make him a present of the whole thing! Well, he took me up on it. In about half an hour he came out of the office of William M. Lovell, the district attorney of Pima county, with a deed which I signed. And that is how Bob Leatherwood got the Apache claims. Immediately I located claims to the north and south of the Apache group. In the years that followed, both Leatherwood and I took in many different partners — anyone who would put up to do the assessment work on the claims.”
Meanwhile, Leatherwood, much as Stratton had earlier, moved to the mine site to retire from his public life, inviting guests and enjoying the surroundings as Stratton had done earlier.
Be sure to check out next month’s Crier for more on the history of the Oracle Ridge Mine.
Born at the beginning of the just pre-baby-boom year of 1943, Evaline May Jones was a Kansan until she left, in1968, to teach at a community college campus in Centerville, IA. She grew up on a farm near Frankfort, finished a BA and MA in English education at Kansas State University and taught for a year at Washington, KS, High School and at Catholic high school in Manhattan, KS, the latter while finishing her MA. While in Iowa, she taught English and related courses (journalism, theater, photography). She also earned a Specialist degree in community college education at the University of Iowa (Iowa City) and had journalism courses at Iowa State (Ames). When arthritis in her spine became a real problem, she was advised to take a job in the Southwest, so when the first full-tiime English position at Aravaipa Campus, CAC, opened up, she applied. Although she had to convince them that she REALLY wanted to work at a campus literally on the edge of a wilderness area, she got the job. She began work at Aravaipa in the fall of 1975, moved from Kearney to Oracle in 1976 and has been in Oracle since. In Oracle, she began work with the Oracle Historical Society, was a founding member and President twice. Local history became her most-loved hobby, although she did not forget drama. She produced a play called Deadwood Dick, which became the first play for a theater troupe now known as SPATs: San Pedro Actors Troupe. It was a course taught under the auspices of CAC, but the group preferred to go ahead on their own - and are still going strong on their own. Meanwhile she married Abraham Auerbach in December 1980, in the historic Union Church, holding the reception in the Acadia Ranch Museum. She made sure they returned from their honeymoon in time to celebrate the centennial of the American Flag post office building and the installation of the history plaque (Dec. 28, 1980) They produced David in late 1982 and she took sabbatical to return to Iowa to complete a PhD (in instructional design) from May 1983 through summer of 1984. While back in Iowa City, with baby and husband in tow, she began to have more problems with the arthritis, Once back to Oracle, she was a little better, but eventually had three operations on the spine. She had to retire in 1995 on disability. Nevertheless, she continued to work at volunteer jobs: as a docent at Biosphere 2 (on her electric scooter), at the Oracle Library, at the Oracle Community Center, as a medicare counselor for the Pinal-Gila Council on Senior Citizens, and finally, back to the Oracle Historical Society. More recently she served at the Tri-Community Visitors’ Center and the Copper Corridor group, serving the Oracle through Superior area. Now, she is busy helping the Oracle Dark Skies Committee to nominate the Oracle State Park as a designated International Dark Skies Park. She has also taught some courses through CAC on local history, leading local and out-of-town people to see some of the historic places in and around Oracle. She started a small business selling books about local history which has expanded to be “Evaline’s Local Books, Oracle, etc.” Lately she has given talks on Oracle History and led groups on tours, such as a two-day tour for the Arizona Historical Society docents, coming up soon for the Arizona Historical Society Docent Council. She has written articles about history and done some reviews for local newspapers. David was off to China to work for a while and then to Boston, working in financial analysis at Boston Scientific. In March of 2011, Abe, whom she had been caring for at home for about four years as he became less able, had to enter a care home. In January of 2014, loyal and very supportive to the end - Abe passed away at Grace Manor in Oracle. Evaline plans to keep exploring history, Oracles and her own ancestry. She will continue to write and plans to travel as her own health improves.
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