Coffee: Business as Usual

with Daryl F. Mallett

The coffeehouses had a habit of metamorphosing into professional or business institutions. The coffeehouse became an ambiguous site for production and reproduction of civil society and of business professionals such as stockbroking, insurance, and banking, and for a brief time both discursive exchange networks overlapped in the same channels.

--P. Stallybrass & A. White, The Politics & Poetics of Transgression, 1986, p. 99-100.

The above statement reveals more about British business than we were really aware of. Many businesses, indeed, came out of the coffeehouse.

The English Stock Exchange started in one, having originally met at Jonathan's Coffee-House in "Change Alley," it moved to a room in Sweetings Alley, which subsequently became known as Stock Exchange Coffeehouse.

It was to Garraway's Coffee-House that the Sun Fire office, one of the earliest insurance companies, transferred to in 1711.

Lloyd's of London began as a coffeehouse for shipping owners and traders some time around 1688 and gradually moved into marine insurance over the next few decades.

The Phoenix Assurance Company was established following meetings at the Langbourne Ward Coffeehouse . And it is still going on today.

Avatar Travel Agency was started at See's Coffee House just this year. Watch the Riverside coffeehouses and see what else develops from them.

At See's Coffee House (located in the Canyon Crest Towne Centre here in Riverside), I ran into Riverside writers Harry W. Lawton and Arthur Loy Holcomb, and writer/actor Clint Zehner. Harry is working on a new poetry collection, and has over 80 pages written already (much of it done at See's). Art is busy with several projects (also mostly written at See's). Clint recently appeared in an episode of The Torkelsons and in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

Kay Englehart's work is currently on display. She does very lifelike portrait art, which catches the eye with its photographic quality. She can be reached at 714/672-3442 for commissions.

Also, I apologize to Lydia See...it was not Colombian Antigua...it was Guatemalan Antigua. Whatever it is, it's delicious!

Another Riverside coffeehouse, Lorraine's, is located at 3787 7th Street (at Market). Normally they are open every day from 7 a.m. - 10 p.m. However, while their remodeling takes place, they will only be open every day from 7 a.m. - 3 p.m. They offer a wide variety of breakfasts, covering everything from Eggs Benedict to waffles to toast and bacon. During the Riverside Film Festival, they were open at 6 p.m. for dinner. Every other Thursday, the Riverside Storytellers Guild will appear at 8 p.m. for stories and fun. Check it out.

Also, for more coffeehouse history, see:

The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200-1830, by P. Clark. London: Longman, 1983, which includes A Dissertation upon Drunkeness (originally 1727) reprinted in part.

If you're doing something at a coffeehouse and want to let me know, drop me a line c/o The Riverside Review Magazine, or catch me at See's.

(Originally published in The Riverside Review Magazine, Vol. 1:7, June 1992.)

Tiger, Arizona (Part III)

When driving on AZ-77 between Tucson and Globe/Miami, or on AZ-177 between Superior and Winkelman, it may seem like the middle of nowhere. But there actually are a number of towns located in the area, and the history of the northern San Pedro Valley area, including the Black Hills, where the remnant of Tiger is located, cannot be told without also talking about other towns in the area.

In the years before the Civil War, settlement of the area by Americans began. However, most of the early settlements were not permanent, and were apparently abandoned by 1854. Plus there was always the danger of Apache raids. When people did settle down, they often traveled back and forth between towns or to Phoenix and Tucson for jobs. Families scattered across the Copper Basin like ripples on a pond.

Although it was rugged living, there was a lot going on in the Basin during those years. The 23 known ghost towns in Pinal County, as well as a handful of “populated areas” barely hanging on, attest to this.

Southwest Corner

Vekol

Between Phoenix & Casa Grande

Camp Rivers

Maricopa Wells

Between Eloy & Tucson

Sasco

Stage Station Homestead

Near Florence

Adamsville

Martinez Canyon

Near Phoenix

Goldfield

South of Mammoth

American Flag

Tiger

Between Mammoth & Winkelman

Alma

Cochran

Copper Creek

Between Winkelman & Superior

Barcelona

Kelvin*

Queen

Ray

Ray Junction

Riverside*

Sonora

Troy

North of Superior

Silver King

Between Phoenix & Superior

Denoon

Pinal

Reymert

*Still people living here.

 

The Copper Basin Chamber of Commerce website has this brief history:

Before large scale mining operations began in the Copper Basin area, many pioneers and colorful characters passed this way. The ghost towns of Troy, Cochran, and Butte were host to a multitude of fortune seekers trying to tap into the mineral wealth of the region. Now, all that is left of Butte, are the coke ovens once used to smelt ore. Built in 1850 by Welsh miners, the cost of mining, smelting and hauling the ore exceeded its worth; so, the ovens as well as the surrounding towns were gradually abandoned.

Between Kearny and Ray Mine, the small settlements of Kelvin and Riverside were once bustling little towns. A Butterfield Overland stage stop was established in 1879 at Riverside along the Globe-Florence route. It was there in 1889 that the Apache Kid escaped from lawmen transporting prisoners to Casa Grande to be placed on a train destined for the territorial prison at Yuma. Riverside is also the site of the last stagecoach robbery in America, which occurred in 1899 when a young diminutive woman named Pearl Hart and her associate, Joe Boot, held up the Globe-Florence stage. Miss Hart served some time in the Yuma Territorial Prison for that ordeal, then used her notoriety to launch an unsuccessful stage career.

Kearny was founded in 1958, and is named for Brevet Major General Stephen Watts Kearny. General Kearny led 100 dragoons through this area on his way to California in 1846. The official log of this trip kept by Lieutenant William H. Emery records, under the date of November 7, they traveled down the Gila and camped that night at the junction of the Gila River and a creek that Lieutenant Emery named Mineral Creek, because of its rich mineral content. It is on this creek that the (ASARCO, Inc.) Ray Mine is now located. It displaced the towns of Ray, Sonora, and Barcelona, three small copper mining communities that were once "boom towns". They were engulfed by the mine after Kennecott Copper Corporation converted from underground mining to open pit mining operations in 1948. Most residents of the communities moved to Kearny, which Kennecott built to relocate the miners and their families.

Of Ray, Arizona, nothing that was not moved to the new town of Kearny remains, not even the dirt, as the copper mine has taken even that.

But there was activity in the area early on. 

On August 31, 1857, the San Antonio & San Diego Mail Line, operated by James E. Birch (1827-1857) delivered the first mail from Texas to San Diego on a road that ran through the San Pedro Valley, with posts at what are now Benson and Winkelman.

 

Early advertisement for the SA&SD. 

(Courtesy of California Dept. of Parks & Recreation.)

There are records of a mine in operation near the confluence of the San Pedro River and Aravaipa Creek in 1860 and the August 15, 1934 issue of the University of Arizona Bulletin, an issue subtitled “Arizona Lode Gold Mines and Gold Mining,” states that “prospecting was done in the Mammoth vicinity prior to the Civil War.”

Barnes & Granger’s Arizona Place Names (Falconer Publishing Co., 1983) states that “Frank Schultz located the first mine in the Mammoth district and, as early as December 27, 1872, the Mammoth Mine was being worked by E. M. Pearce, C. O. Brown and members of Tully Ochoa Company [sic].” (Tully, Ochoa & Co. was a premier freight transportation company in the southwestern U.S. prior to railroads being laid through the area.)

Pinal County was created out of parts of Maricopa County and Pima County on February 1, 1875.

According to Bureau of Land Management (BLM) records, the earliest mining claim recorded at Tiger was the Hackney claim, filed by Charles Dyke and T. C. Weed, on July 14, 1879. The claim was on a quartz vein that has come to be called the Collins vein.

It is commonly accepted that Austrian prospector Frank Schultz, Sr. (1839-1918) located the Mars claim and the Mammoth claim on what he referred to as a “mammoth lode gold vein” in 1882 (either on February 8 or April 21). The vein has ever since been called the Mammoth vein, and the first mine developed on it was the Mammoth Mine. Schultz is also credited with giving the mining district its name, the Old Hat District.

Schultz took on a partner, a prominent Tucson-based businessman named Joseph Goldtree (1844-1897), who immigrated from Germany and became an American citizen the same day in 1870 as another Tucson heavyweight, Samuel Drachman. The two erected a small, unsuccessful “cannonball” mill on the San Pedro River.

When the mill proved a failure, Schultz had a Nevada company come in to develop the mine under the direction of Merril P. Freeman (1844-1919), who arrived in Tucson in 1880 and served as postmaster in 1884 and president of Consolidated National Bank for 15 years. The company sank a shaft on the vein, but then lost the “pay streak.” Meanwhile, the Hackney claim was being developed by an open cut on the vein. The first recorded production of gold from the district was in 1881.

In 1884, Schultz sold the Mammoth Mine to a Michigan lumberman named George N. Fletcher, who put the management of it under the direction of a Captain Johnson.

Johnson’s crew sunk a shaft down to a depth of 300 feet and found the Mammoth vein; construction was begun on a mill on the San Pedro River, three miles away, where water was available. Most methods of ore processing require large amounts of water and, at that time, it was more practical to haul the ore to a source of water than to haul water to the mines.

Over the next several years, Fletcher’s employees built a 30-stamp amalgamation mill along the San Pedro River to crush the ore from the mine and liberate the gold. The free gold was then taken up in mercury by a process called amalgamation.

The little town which grew up around Fletcher’s mill came to be known as Mammoth. In 1887, a U.S. Post Office was established there. A school was opened early in the history of the community, while the mill was still under construction. A number of stores and saloons sprang up, including the store of J. N. Dodson, former postmaster of Mesaville. Johnny Dubois operated a saloon in Mammoth for many years.

Ore was hauled the three miles down the hill from the mine in 20-mule team wagons, on a contract with William “Curly” Neal (1849-1936) of Oracle. Many of the miners lived in Mammoth and traveled to and from work on the wagon road. Neal also had a contract to furnish wood and water to the mines.

William "Curly" Neal

(Photograph courtesy of the Oracle Historical Society.)

On July 20, 1885, Charles Dyke and a Mr. Collins located the Raven claim adjacent to Dyke’s Hackney claim on the Collins vein.

On July 8, 1887, Fletcher located two more claims in the vicinity of the Mammoth Mine, the Remnant claim and the Raven claim, which was a millsite claim. During that year, he began negotiations with a British syndicate for the sale of the entire property. In 188, the Mammoth shaft was deepened from 300 to 500 feet in anticipation of the sale.

In 1889, the sale of the Mammoth Mine and Mill was completed; the new company was called Mammoth Gold Mines Limited. Although all newspaper accounts and engineers’ reports at this time referred to the transfer of the Mammoth Mine and Mill as a sale, later reports, dated around 1900, refer to it as a lease.

By this time, a little settlement of miners’ shacks had grown up around the mines. The community was called Schultz, after Frank Schultz. During the year 1889, Schultz opened a store to serve the residents there.

In 1890, Mammoth Gold Mines Ltd. enlarged the mill on the San Pedro River from 30 to 50 stamps. The average value of ore produced that year was $14 per ton; it cost the company $4 per ton to mine and process it. By 1890, the Town of Mammoth had a population of 600 to 700. The school had 70 pupils and one teacher, but the town had six saloons.

The ore which occurred near the surface on the Mammoth vein was “free milling,” which means that simply crushing it with the heavy stamps was sufficient to separate the gold from the enclosing quartz and other minerals. Amalgamation could then complete the recovery. The deeper the miners went on the vein, however, the less ore was free milled. More and more of the gold was being lost in the “tailings,” the waste material left after processing.

On January 1, 1891, Andrew Dannon and J. G. Fraser located the Mohawk claim on the Mammoth vein, southeast of the Mammoth Mine. In 1892, they sold the claim to a group of capitalists from Hartford, Connecticut, who organized the Mohawk Gold Mining Company. Over the next three years, this company sank a shaft and developed the vein down to a depth of 300 feet. They also built a small 10-stamp mill on the property.

Mammoth Gold Mines Limited continued to mine the Mammoth vein. Timber to support the expanding mine openings had to be brought to the mines from the forested slopes of the Santa Catalina Mountains, which was quite a long haul. For this reason, the miners tended to cut corners and did not provide adequate support for many of the open stopes along the Mammoth vein. So much ore was taken from the vein without properly supporting the open ground that, in 1893, a massive cave-in caused Mammoth Gold Mines Limited to cease operations for several years.

Tiger, Arizona (Part I)

Tiger, Arizona, circa 1950s.
(Photograph courtesy of E. Swafford.)

INTRODUCTION

In the 1940s and 1950s, Tiger, Arizona was a bustling community with houses, dormitories and tents housing almost 2,000 people. Now it sits, a silent, empty patch of desert with an abandoned pit mine, old tailings piles and the mine head frame, which barely attest to the fact that a town existed there at all, let alone give due credit to its history. Therefore this book.

Summer 2008 and a random stop for a cold soda at a small convenience store on the southwest corner of Old Nogales Highway and Sahuarita Boulevard in Sahuarita, Arizona is what did it. My wife and I had, only a two years prior, moved to this small town south of Tucson. I struck up a conversation with the sales clerk about local history. She handed me a copy of Green Valley, Arizona, by a local writer named Philip Goorian. I bought it, went home and read the whole book. A few days later, I tracked Philip down and spent several hours over some awesome Mexican food discussing the local area and historical happenings. He referred me to his editor at Arcadia Publishing, which led to me researching, writing and publishing Falcon Field (2009), a history of Mesa, Arizona’s municipal airport.
 
Founded in 1939 by Jimmy Stewart and other Hollywood luminaries, thousands of World War II British Royal Air Force pilots learned to fly at six training schools in the United States. Falcon Field was the fourth of these schools (British Flying Training School #4). Meeting some of the pilots, trainers and crew from Falcon Field soon led to meeting members of prominent historical families, which led to poring over hundreds of vintage photographs and reading biographies, newspaper articles and diaries.

This fed the history bug I’d always had, and soon thereafter I began researching a second book for Arcadia and obtained a job as a part-time reporter at Copper Area News Publishers (CANP), which publishes four newspapers in Pinal County, Arizona, located just east of the Phoenix area and just north of the Tucson area.

Before long, editors Michael and Jennifer Carnes had turned me loose in the county and I was digging into the local history of towns long-gone, like Ray, Sonora, Barcelona, Christmas, Kelvin and Tiger. Growing up in Orange County, California, surrounded by an ocean-to-desert cityscape or, as I have always referred to it, “The Greater Los Angeles-San Diego-Riverside Metropolitan Area,” the concept of a “ghost town” was just that…a concept. Now here was the reality. Meeting people who were born in towns that no longer existed was a new and alien thing to me.

With a lot of help from a lot of people, I was fortunate enough to be able to write a series of articles on Tiger, Arizona, for the CANP newspapers. The backbone of the research came from a history written by Kim K. Howell for Magma Metals Company (now part of BHP Billiton). Other information was compiled from written sources, including Arizona Bureau of Mines Bulletin (especially issues No. 5, 137 and 156); newspaper clippings, letters and reports in the files of the Arizona Department of Geology and Mineral Technology at the Arizona Department of Mineral Resources; patent survey records of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management; material in the University of Arizona Special Collections Department, including the 1927-29 manuscript, The History of Mining in Arizona, by J. B. Tenney; U.S. Bureau of Mines Bulletin (especially issue No. 111); U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper (No. 471); articles in The Minerologist, The Mineralogical Record, Mining and Scientific Press, Paydirt, Magma Copper Company Update, The San Manuel Miner, The Oracle Historian, Mining and Engineering World and A.I.M.E. Transactions; and an unpublished field trip presentation by William Panczner and Robert L. Hockett.

In the 1990s, local historian Farlow C. Davis built upon Howell’s work, putting together an expanded history of Tiger which, with permission from both BHP Billiton and Farlow Davis, I was able, in turn, to build upon.

* * * * *

GEOLOGICAL HISTORY

Tiger, Arizona has long been famous among mineral collectors around the world. The first scholarly descriptions of mineral specimens from Tiger, then called Schultz, were in 1886 in a German journal and, in 1887, in an American journal. Dealer advertisements for the sale of Tiger minerals go back as far as 1897, and every major museum in the world boasts at least one specimen from Tiger.

The geological history of Tiger, Arizona began almost 1.5 billion years ago, when the Oracle Granite crystallized deep beneath the surface of the earth. This granite, which makes up most of the bedrock in the Tiger area, is classified by geologists as a porphyritic quartz, a red or gray-and-white speckled rock formation rising above the scrub and grass.

Much later, geologically speaking, between 69 and 67 million years ago, the Oracle Granite was intruded by a similar kind of rock, called monzonite or granodiorite. All of these rocks were exposed at the Earth’s surface sometime between 30 and 28 million years ago. They provided grains and pebbles and boulders which were incorporated into a conglomerate rock, referred to by geologists as a cloudburst formation.

Some time after the cloudburst formation was cemented into hard, brittle rock, it and the granite beneath were broken repeatedly by movements of the Earth’s crust. The breaks in the rocks were all more or less parallel to each other; they tended to be west-northwestward and were steeply inclined toward the southwest.

Molten, liquid rock squeezed upward along these fissures; it cooled and crystallized about 22 million years ago to form a hard, fine-grained kind of rock called rhyolite. Some of the liquid rhyolite may have exploded out onto the surface of the earth to form part of the abundant volcanic rocks in the area.

The forces which sheared and fractured these rocks continued after the rhyolite had crystallized into solid rock, and the rhyolite and surrounding Oracle Granite were shattered and crushed repeatedly. During the several million years that this cracking and grinding was taking place, hot mineral water was circulating through the cracks and open spaces in the rocks. This hot water carried dissolved silica and sulfur and many different metals.

Gradually, in response to changing chemical and physical conditions, minerals crystallized from the hot solution, replacing fragments of rock and filling open spaces around them. These minerals included quartz, some in the form of purple amethyst, gold and the sulfides of such metals as iron, copper, lead, silver and zinc. The Tiger veins had been born.

As the temperature of the circulating hot water began to cool, and it mixed more and more with cooler ground water, it began to dissolve oxygen and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The chemical composition of this water was such that it reacted with the sulfide minerals and produced new oxygen- and sulfate- and carbonate-bearing minerals of iron, copper, lead and zinc. Gold and silver were left behind. This process, called oxidation, took place within the recently formed vein down to a depth of at least 900 feet.

At the surface of the earth during this time, and for millions of years afterward, the exposed rocks were being worn down by weather and running water to form another conglomerate, which geologists call the Gila Formation. The Gila Formation, which is several million years old, is not cemented together as tightly as older rocks, but it is rigid enough to break. And it did break, along with all of the other rocks in the Tiger area, when the Earth’s crust began to move again about a million years ago.

The primary result of this movement was a huge zone of cracks known as the Mammoth Fault. The Mammoth Fault trends north-northwest and is steeply inclined to the northeast, opposite to the dip of the vein. Because of this geometry, and the 700 to 1,200 feet of displacement across the fault, the original vein was broken into two segments.

The lower part moved relatively upward and westward, forming what has come to be known as the Collins vein; the upper part, which moved relatively downward and eastward, was sliced up by smaller faults into numerous slivers. It has come to be called the Mammoth vein. Most of the other veins named by miners in the Tiger area, such as the Mohawk and the New Year, are really parts of the Mammoth vein. One branch of the Mammoth Fault itself had enough ore minerals along it that it was called the Dream vein by early miners.

After the vein was broken and separated by the Mammoth Fault, mineral water again circulated through the cracks, this time introducing molybdenum and vanadium to the minerals already present in the veins, and causing more oxidation. The Mammoth vein is oxidized for its entire depth. The Collins vein is oxidized down to about 700 feet below the present surface of the ground; it is partly oxidized from that point down to about 900 feet. Below the 900-foot level, only unoxidized sulfide minerals remain.

As a result of their extremely complex chemical and physical history, the veins at Tiger have yielded some of the rarest and most beautiful mineral specimens in the world. Almost 100 different mineral species and elements have been identified there, including acanthite, amethyst, andularia, alamosite, allophone, amesite, anglesite, antigorite, apatite, atacamite, aurichalcite, azurite, baryte, beaverite, bideauxite, biotite, boleite, bornite, brochantite, bromian chlorargyrite, calcite, caledonite, cerussite, chalcanthite, chalcocite, chalcopyrite, chalcotrichite, chlorargyrite, connellite, copper, cuprian descloizite, descloizite, devilline, diaboleite, dioptase, djurleite, epidote, fluorine, fluorite, fluorspar, fornacite, fraipontite, galena, goethite, gold, hematite, hemimorphite, heulandite, hisingerite, hollandite, hydrocerussite, iodargyrite, iranite, lead, leadhillite, limonite, linarite, macquartite, magnetite, malachite, mammothite, matlockite, melanotekite, microcline, mimetite, minium, mixite, molybdenum, mottramite, munakataite, murdochite, muscovite, palygorskite, paralaurionite, paratacamite, phosgenite, phosphohedyphane, pinalite, plancheite, plumbonacrite, plumbotsumite, pseudoboleite, pyrite, pyrolusite, pyromorphite, quartz, queitite, ramsdellite, rosasite, sericite, shattuckite, silver, smithsonite, specularite, sphalerite, stilbite, stolzite, sulphur, surite, tenorite, tetrahedrite, tourmaline, tsumebite, tungsten, tungstenoan wulfenite, vanadinite, vanadium, wherryite, willemite, wulfenite, wurtzite and zinc…just to name a few.

Yedlinite, named for the late Leo Neal Yedlin (1908-1977), a rock collector from New Haven, Connecticut, who discovered the mineral, is only known to be found at Tiger, Arizona.

(Photograph courtesy of Van King.)

Leo Neal Yedlin, circa 1960.

(Photograph courtesy of Van King.)