Something that bothers me is Sublett's gold doesn't seem to have caused a gold rush as such a find would seem to warrent. Look at what happened with the Adams story. Was it just too late in the game to cause the excitement? Obviously a lot of people noticed so maybe local history notes something I am missing?
When did Sublett first find gold? Some accounts say while he was working for the railroad, while the one below says 1875, 6 years before Gould's rail line. Was Sublett working for the Huntington line? By 1881 when Gould's line recieved a greenlight the Apaches were about done. Perhaps that is why Sublett had little trouble with them. But did he really find gold in 1875 and just returned with the railroad after the hostiles had been decimated?
The one mine from the time that is mentioned produced silver and copper. Could Sublett have used the Hazel mine as his mine for visitors? Or did he find the lost spanish mine mentioned by Lew Wallace and Geronimo? Or was the wealth the spanish mentioned in the Guadelupes a cache brought from another region? hmmm
The area must have been well explored for mineral deposits since many other minerals and such have been mined since.
If there were nuggets and dust there should be assay reports somewhere. That's what keeps bothering me. None of the usual lost mine parameters seem to have happened aside from the 3 others who visited but couldn't refind the mine. That's what keeps me thinking cache. But if he only showed up with coin wouldn't the stories reflect that? What a conundrum
I still think the dates have to be the key to part of the mystery, so if there is any interest I will work on a timeline next.
below are some excerpts from the Texas Historical Association with some interesting points for the area.
<quote>
The earliest sign of human occupation in the area, found in the Guadalupes, is a 12,000-year-old Folsom point. Later, hunter-gatherers probably inhabited the mountains only during the summer; they also left artifacts, as well as pictographs. The most famous indigenous inhabitants of the mountains,
the Apaches, arrived about 600 years ago. They harvested agave, yucca, and sotol when meat was unavailable, and their agave-roasting pits are still visible in the Guadalupes.
The area that was to become Culberson County was
largely untouched by Spanish exploration, due to its forbidding topography. In 1583, however, Antonio de Espejo became the first European to see the Mescalero Apaches, on the prairie just east of the Guadalupe Mountains.
A prospector named Thomas Owen or Owens reportedly discovered the
Hazel Mine in 1856, but the Mescaleros and the Civil War forced him to abandon the area for twenty-five years.
In May 1870 another detachment of troops left Fort Quitman under Maj. Albert Morrow. At Pine Springs in the Guadalupes,
Morrow's men rendezvoused with reinforcements from Fort Davis, pressed up McKittrick Canyon in search of the Indians, and got lost. They did manage to discover and destroy one rancher?a of seventy-five lodges, which the Apaches had abandoned.
By this time a ranching boom had begun in the Trans-Pecos, and the demand for rangeland for longhorn cattle sealed the fate of the Apaches. Thanks to Victorio's tactical brilliance, they managed to elude the military for another ten years, but the federal cavalry and the Texas Rangersqv had the advantage. Victorio himself was finally killed in Mexico in 1880, and in
January 1881 a company of rangers under George W. Baylor ambushed the last surviving band of Apache raiders in Bass Canyon in the Sierra Diablo Mountains; it was the last big Indian fight in Texas.
In 1881 the long-awaited railroad link to the West finally became a reality, although not without its share of controversy. Under Jay Gould, who had bought the line a year before, the Texas and Pacific Railway was building westward from Fort Worth to El Paso. Meanwhile Collis P. Huntington's rival Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway was building eastward from El Paso in order to complete its own link to central and eastern Texas. For a time no one was sure which road would prevail, but in November 1881 Gould and Huntington reached an agreement by which the Texas and Pacific would stop at Sierra Blanca, in Hudspeth County, and the two lines would share the track from Sierra Blanca to El Paso.
Extraction of minerals has long been important in Culberson County, although rumors of fabulously wealthy gold mines in the Guadalupes seem to be mere wishful thinking.
Around 1875 an old prospector named Ben Sublett strode into a saloon and casually tossed a buckskin pouch full of gold nuggets onto the bar, hinting broadly that he had discovered them in the Guadalupes. All efforts to get him to reveal the exact location of his find were unsuccessful; he took his secret to the grave in 1892, leaving his son to search in vain for the mine.
Gen. Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur and governor of New Mexico from 1878 to 1881, said he found references in the
Spanish archives in Santa Fe to rich gold deposits in the Guadalupes, but the exact location had been lost. The Apache chief Geronimo also claimed that the Spanish had mined the area, and that the Guadalupes contained the richest mines in North America. More recent opinion holds such claims unlikely.
Other minerals have been less elusive. Between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century the Hazel Mine
yielded about a million pounds of copper and more than two million ounces of silver. In the 1940s acidic sulfur earth was
produced at Rustler Springs for use as a fertilizer and soil conditioner, and the Apache Mountains were the site of the largest barite deposit in Texas, which was mined from open pits during the 1960s. A mica quarry operated in the early 1980s in the Van Horn Mountains to mine mica schist for oilfield use, but the sustained production of sheet mica had not been achieved. Culberson County was also producing copper, bedded gypsum from surface mines, brucitic marble, molybdenum, crushed hyolite, silver, Frasch sulfur, and talc in the 1980s. (note no gold)
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