[1] The mine is often referred to as the “Nigger Ben Mine.” I have not been able to learn why, but I have a guess. In the early seventies a half-breed negro-Mexican named Ben Hodges, but known as “Nigger Ben,” went up the trail to Kansas with a herd of Texas cattle. “Nigger Ben” remained in the vicinity of Dodge City and became a notorious, almost legendary, fraud. He claimed to possess a Spanish grant to lands on the Rio Grande on which were located wonderfully rich mines. It would be very much in the manner of legend to blend “Nigger Ben’s mine” with another mine on the Rio Grande claimed by another negro. For an account of “Nigger Ben,” see Wright, Robert M., Dodge City the Cowboy Capital, Wichita, Kansas, 1913, pp. 273–280. [↑]
[2] Raht, Carl, The Romance of Davis Mountains, El Paso, 1919, pp. 331–334. [↑]
MYSTERIOUS GOLD MINE OF THE GUADALUPE MOUNTAINS
By Marvin Hunter[1]
Twenty years ago, an old Mexican, of Tularosa, who had been captured by the Mescalero Apaches when five years old, related [[68]]that his captors took him along on a hunting trip to Guadalupe Mountains and that while there he saw them gathering nuggets of gold in a gulch.
A Mescalero Apache informed the late G. W. Wood, of El Paso, for whom he worked in the Jarilla mines, that if he sought gold, he should go to the mountains called “Smoky” over the line in Texas, where … his people used to go and gather gold.
Another story is that of John Kilgore, a Texan and a man of undoubted veracity, who said that an old Mexican once told him that he was captured by the Indians when he was about fourteen years old. One day, the Indian who kept him in his wigwam in the Guadalupes called him to his side, blindfolded him, and led him into the fastness of the mountains, telling him to sit down on a flat rock and wait for his return, which he did. The Indian went away and in a short time returned with a buckskin sack filled with gold. This he handed to the Mexican boy, gave him a pony, and told him to go back to his people. The Mexican said he afterward tried to locate the place shown him but could never do so.
Green Ussery, a rich cattleman of West Texas, was walking along a gulch near the Chico Ranch in the Guadalupes when he saw Lee Church, a friend who was with him, pick up a gold nugget from the ground, worth $20.