It was dangerous to tarry long in one spot, the guide reminded us. The orderly brought Copp and Toby, and we pursued our way through the laughing, blooming valley. Nuts, grapes, and hops grew wild here; and peaches, Cecilio said, grew near the Santa Rita mines, but they had been planted there by the former inhabitants and employés of the mines. The mines originally belonged to a Spanish lady, to whose ancestors seven leagues of the country surrounding them had been granted by the Spanish Government, long before the territory belonged to Uncle Sam. Her representatives had worked the mines with a force of some two hundred men, till the Indians had overpowered them, and destroyed the works. The immense piles of copper-ore, on either side of the road, told us that we were nearing Santa Rita, at last; and there, just at the point of the San José Range, lay a large, strongly-built adobe fort. Buildings of different sizes and kinds lay clustered around this, which appeared to be furnace and fastness at once. Placing sentinels, we commenced exploring above ground; under-ground I refused to venture, in my cowardice. We found works of considerable magnitude; I counted twelve bellows, in a kind of hall, that must have been sixty feet high, but the rafters and beams overhead had rotted, and the weight of the mud, with which all roofs are covered in this country, had borne down the roof, and half covered an enormous wheel, some forty feet in diameter. Everything about this wheel that was not wood, was copper; not a vestige of iron, steel, or stone, was to be seen around here: it was copper, wood, and adobe. But copper was everywhere—copper-ore, so rich that the veins running through it could be scraped out with a penknife; copper just smelted; copper beaten into fantastic shapes, as though the workmen, in their despair, had meant to use these as weapons against the Indians, when attacked here, years ago. For the same band, with the white leader, had attacked these works; and Cecilio showed us the dents the Indian arrows had made in the little wooden door the men had succeeded in closing, when first attacked. But the families of these men had lived in the buildings outside the fort; and to rescue wife and children from death, and worse than death, they had abandoned their place of safety in the fort, and, with the superintendent leading them, they had fought the savages bravely, but had been defeated and slaughtered, at last. Leaving nine men with me, the lieutenant, guide, and three men descended into the shaft, went some five hundred yards, and, on their return, reported that everything looked as though deserted only yesterday.
Having confidence in old Cecilio, we now took the trail we had missed the other day, as this would enable us to visit the San José gold mine on our way back to camp. We could ride only "Indian file," but soon came to a mountain composed entirely of white flint. Sand and earth, carried here by the wind, and bearing grass and flowers, could be scraped aside anywhere, discovering underneath the same semi-transparent rock. Again we took the narrow trail, which brought us to what appeared to be the entrance to a cave, in the side of a hill; a wooden cross was fastened over it, and a road, built entirely by hand, led to the half-consumed remains of a number of buildings, on the banks of a creek. The guide and lieutenant entered the mine alone, leaving the men for my protection, but soon returned, as fallen earth blocked up the passage near the entrance.
"But oh, señora, the gold taken from this mine was something wonderful," the guide said, enthusiastically; "and there is still a whole 'cow-skin' full of it, buried in one of these holes"—pointing to different shafts we were passing on our way to the burnt cottages. "When the Indians came here the white men tried to take it with them, but were so closely pursued that they threw it into one of these places, intending to come back for it; but all they could do, later, was to bury their people decently, and the gold is still there—left for some stranger to find."
The eyes of the soldiers—gathered around the graves we had dismounted to see—glittered at the old guide's tale; but the sight of these lonely, forgotten graves could awaken but one thought in my breast: How long would it be before another group might bend over our graves and say, "I wonder who lies buried here!"