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: